Earning the Right to Criticize

On two occasions, I sat in on discussions where brand positioning gurus dissected John Carter‘s box office failure. In both venues (one was a lengthy LinkedIn discussion while the other was a live panel in Manhattan), participants agreed that the movie’s poorly chosen name generally caused its failure. Yet, nobody had the bravery to suggest another name. Not a single branding consultant in either discussion!

Every movie needs a name.

Every brand needs an identity and a voice. Every team needs a uniform. You might not like what’s in place, but for us to have a discussion, we need to evaluate the current design solution against alternatives you provide. Suggesting a viable alternative contributes enough value to the conversation to justify your own participation therein.

Navigating the politics.

In my favorite article he’s written, Michael Beirut explains that designing a better logo, tagline, retail interior, or Flyers jersey usually isn’t the hard part.

Simply having the idea is not enough. Crafting a beautiful solution is not enough. Doing a dramatic presentation is not enough. Convincing all your peers is not enough. Even if you’ve done all that, you still have to go through the hard work of selling it to the client. And like any business situation of any complexity whatsoever, that process may be smothered in politics, handicapped with exigencies, and beset with factors that have nothing to do with design excellence. You know, real life. Creating a beautiful design turns out to be just the first step in a long and perilous process with no guarantee of success.

Still, designers grow from participating in the kinds of discussions that go deeper than “I don’t like it.” Beirut doesn’t try to dissuade designers from judging work either, so long as they ask the right questions. “What was the purpose? What was the process? Whose ends were being served? How should we judge success?” But after all the eager critics have expounded on why the name John Carter caused a terrific box office failure, the movie still needs a name.

The Sweet Spot: When Retail Design is Modern but not Minimalist

Milan bakery interior by Daniela Colli

If I link particular emotions to a desert—warmth, vast open landscapes, solitude, quiet and stillness—the Milan bakery will coax the same feelings out of me, albeit to a lesser degree. These feelings partially displace ones of tight space and clutter I’d feel at an ordinary bakery.

Compared to this Milan bakery’s interior, a minimalist interior is a little cheaper and a lot less challenging* to design. A minimalist bakery would be clean, spare, and maybe even elegant. But because it doesn’t reference anything other than itself, it can’t contend with a modern-theatrical interior’s power to rouse emotions.

Are good feelings sufficient ROI?

Riddle me this: how might the bakery’s costly interior change consumer behavior? Ideally, this retail environment should (1) draw consumers into the shop, (2) hold them in the shop longer, (3) emotionally connect consumers to the shop, and (4) prompt them to tell others about the shop.

I recently posted that in a case like this, a shop’s decor gives consumers a positive first impression, but their good feelings diminish incrementally with each visit. Same-store repeat sales suffer. The solution is to integrate fun policies, games, or gimmicks into the bakery experience. These also allow fans to tell stories that will get passed on. For instance, the bakery might feature muffins from a different city each month. It’s silly, but consumers are more likely (and more able) to spread news of the Muffin-of-the-Month world showcase than the desert-like decor. Improving the product will yield better returns than improving the packaging (in this case, the interior design).

Bonus points to the shop that springs for both.

_________
*Not that ease of design matters, but in the marketplace, something that looks “designed” trumps something that does not!
_________

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More modern-theatrical design:

Thomas Heatherwick – Longchamps Soho

Karina Wikiac – Szklarnia (restaurant/exhibit)

Home of interior designer Roderick Shade

Could I Interest You in a Less Modern Brand?

To call modern design a plague would be overdramatic. It’s not that. Modern design is a tool available to branding execs. However, too many of them use this tool improperly. They default to minimalist design when they shouldn’t; they needlessly crowd into that niche when it doesn’t serve their brands.

Some creative directors embrace modern design because they love the style. On packaging, websites or showroom interiors, the style is clean, pure, loud, and luxurious when a talented craftsman holds the reins.

Michael Kors bags by Baron & Baron

Other creative directors and chief brand officers perceive an obligation to create minimalist visual identities. These are the execs frightened of being left behind in the race to be most contemporary; and these are the designers who halfheartedly go along with Bauhaus-chasing clients. They build their designs around a generic typeface rather than a smart concept, and their mantra is “Make it look expensive.”

Both visionary and charlatan Modernists can churn out high-impact, albeit charmless packaging that cuts through the clutter. Competitive minimalism has a place in New York’s mediascape because an empty square stands out amidst the unbearable torrent of imagery crashing against consumers. I presume, unfairly, that Michael Kors’ corporate offices are staffed with those hand-chosen for their lack of imagination. Yet, credit the outside designer Fabien Baron with keeping the Proxima Nova logotype in the corner, thus protecting that beloved empty square. It’s far from his best work, but glossy beige against white does help the brand look expensive.

At Apple and Louis Vuitton, designers balance emotional impact, art, and modernity.

The Michael Kors visual identity is good, not great. I want to briefly contrast it with Apple’s. We often regard Apple as one of the cleanest, sparest, most modern brands (web designers always hear “Can you make the site look like Apple’s?”). Both Kors and Apple gravitate to the same color scheme, but their design philosophies come from different sides of the tracks.

In the words of former Apple CD Karl Heiselman, Apple”pastich[es] stuff from the analogue world.” Faux textures (called skeuomorphs) and a translucent-plexi logo give Apple a layer of richness that eludes Michael Kors. Onlookers approach Apple’s brand materials with a web of associations to plexi, to brushed chrome, to beveled edges, and to analogue dashboards. Apple plays with the viewer’s associations to these materials. You can imagine how it would feel to touch the trompe l’oeil icon for iCloud or iOS 6. You can imagine how if would feel cold against your skin, how it would smell. Skeuomorphs can be elegant, and yes, even modern.

Like an iPad, a Louis Vuitton bag is presented as a labor of love, perfected through tinkering, and expertly crafted. The ornamental graphics surrounding the LV brand reinforce this message: she who shops at LV becomes a connoisseur of fine art.

The most boring place in Disney World is the Contemporary Hotel.

You move towards your audience if you design in a way that engages their emotional associations with materials, textures, sound, and imagery. You move away from them if you don’t.

Disney’s Contemporary Hotel in Orlando is wearyingly dull. It’s a plain white shirt compared against the vibrant Grand Floridian, Polynesian Resort, Port Orleans French Quarter, or Coronado Springs. The latter four resorts serve visitors sounds, smells, colors and textures that they’ll remember. They engage visitors emotionally.

Disney’s Saratoga Springs vs. Disney’s Contemporary Resort

Disney built the Contemporary Resort as a hub for professional conventions and as a space for overflow from the other resorts. Like the Michael Kors graphics, the resort’s design is a timid solution to a problem, but nothing more. No Disney magic here.

Minimalism fails when brands subtract art from design in the pursuit of purity.

I’ve criticized the competitively minimalist brands for being too artless, not for being too modern. As we saw from Louis Vuitton and Apple, a brand benefits from dialing down its adherence to 100-year-old Bauhaus values. Only by relinquishing minimalism can Louis Vuitton look artfully hand-crafted (ahem, expensive). Only by relinquishing minimalism can a brand elicit an emotional reaction from an audience.

You might remember a Cooper Hewitt study that asked non-designers to vote on whether they preferred popular logos before or after their redesigns in the modern style. Michael Bierut writes about the study:

I was surprised by how often the civilians got it “wrong,” voting enthusiastically for the cartoony old version of the Comedy Central logo, the needlessly fussy and insecure pre-redesign Starbucks, the dated Clarissa Explains It All-era Nickelodeon splat.

Again and again, commoners hated the logos that designers admired, and loved the logos that designers snippily derided. Beirut concluded that (1) audiences favor complicated or even busy visual identities over modernized ones, and (2) they prefer literal imagery over that which is cunningly implied.

People like actual splats on their Nickelodeon logos, not metaphoric splats, actual drawings of Saturn on their SciFi logos, not metaphoric alternate alien spellings. And they react with suspicion, if not outright contempt, when designers refer to the mystical characteristics of colors and shapes, to meanings that are open to interpretation or that will emerge only upon examination.

Nickelodeon’s fans largely prefer the old visual identity to the modernized one.

The old Nickelodeon splat aligns with the spirit of the brand while the modern logotype doesn’t. Likewise, the cliched Saturn symbol really is true to the SciFi brand and its audience, all of whom would find Disney’s Tomorrowland more inspiring than the Contemporary Resort. Are branding execs really this out of touch with consumers?

In all likelihood, Michael Kors wants to appeal to the minority that voted for the modernized logotypes. The company may grasp the tastes of its audience to an extent that Starbucks, Nickelodeon, SciFi, and Comedy Central demonstrably do not. Yet, Michael Kors seems to occupy a needlessly overcrowded niche—that is to say, supply overwhelms demand for those Baron & Baron brands. And the empty square on the shopping bag doesn’t stand out from the background so well as it used to.

Why Microsoft and Pentagram don’t fit together

Theoretically, the most important reason to change a logo—Karl Heiselman would argue the only reason—is to announce a new direction that a company will take. Pay no mind to whether the peanut gallery likes it.

Last year, Paula Scher of Pentagram led Microsoft’s redesign. She cast Microsoft as the anti-Apple, and her clever marketing ploy aimed to make the skeuomorphiles at Apple look old-fashioned and tasteless in their turtlenecks. Microsoft now owns flat design, while Apple owns…faux-glass round-cornered squares. And as a result, a flat vs. skeuomorphic debate has roused the UI and UX communities. Some lead designers at Apple have even sided with the Microsoft aesthetic.

However, the new Microsoft and new Windows have been the biggest flops we’ve seen in a very long time. Vista’s failure was slight by comparison.

One way to explain Microsoft’s failure is by pointing out the extent to which the company wandered off-brand and misread its loyal users.  The hail-mary rebranding effort feels like when McCain selected Palin as a running mate. But Palin didn’t convert dems, and Windows 8 didn’t convert Mac users.

Paula Scher demonstrated an incomplete understanding of the Windows brand when she asked Microsoft execs, “Your name is Windows. Why are you a flag?” Her question assumes that Microsoft lost touch with the spirit of its brand. She should have been asking why some users choose PCs over Macs.

PCs have always been more middlebrow, more theatrical than Macs. The grassy hills wallpaper is truer to the Microsoft brand than a literal window. (What was she talking about?) Windows isn’t as cool as Apple, but people choose Windows for the same reason they line up for movies by Jerry Bruckheimer and James Cameron.  Windows isn’t sexy for its design, but it’s sexy for its over-the-top theatricality. Microsoft, then, was the Anti-Apple already, and it should have pushed towards the XBox end of its spectrum.

Paula Scher got it wrong. THIS is the heart of the Windows brand.

Non-designers aren’t so giddy about Microsoft’s choice to join the competitive minimalists. They demonstrably prefer a busier aesthetic. “Less is not more,” they say as they marvel at the Game of Thrones logo. These are Windows users.

And so, Pentagram, with its track record of ultraminimalist designs, was the wrong agency to guide Microsoft through this rebranding effort.

If Microsoft wants to ask users to learn a totally novel operating system, they need to make the damn thing fun to learn. Draw us in. Lead us into a brave new world of bells, whistles, and gradients with a blind eye to the designers who would snippily chide you for being a middlebrow brand.

Better

Mens Watch Store Concept: Buoys and Feather Reed Grass

The concept is Buoys. It hasn’t been done before, and it’s perfect for a watch boutique with light foot traffic. The design diverges from the sort of Peter Marino glitz that usually characterizes luxury watch stores.

The water would probably be simulated. Real water would be expensive and would cause frequent maintenance challenges.

How to Open a Bookstore in 2013

Put B&N out of your mind. As the market leader, the company is allowed to be generic. You’re not. You’d be naive not to turn the conventional model on its head. To make money selling books, you better give your shoppers an experience worth telling their friends about.

The Tashen bookstore designed by Philippe Starck is interesting, but you’re unlikely to tell a story about it when you’ve left.

Start Here.
How could you create a store so remarkable that Fodors and Frommers would call it a not-to-be-missed experience? An outrageous and expensive retro sci-fi store design? Probably not good enough, because with each visit, users would experience less joy and enchantment.

Suppose you didn’t break the bank by hiring an A-list designer. Suppose your store closed during the day and stayed open late into the night. That may be a risky business model, but it’s a story worth spreading. Make sure the “We’re Closed Until Dark” signs yell loudly enough to intrigue the daytime window shoppers, and make sure the in-store experience is charged with enough energy to attract folks on their way to the bars or couples who want to get to know each other after dinner and drinks.

No good? Here’s another.

Suppose the store is open during ordinary business hours and the employees squirt you with water pistols as you walk in. If you address your cashier by name, you get a gift card good for 10% off your next purchase. Nobody tells you this, and cashiers don’t wear name tags, but their names are printed on the receipts (along with the rules of the game). The gentleman in line behind you might tell you your cashier’s name, or you might think you’ve beat the system when you find it posted online, and that’s fine. This strategy builds community among shoppers because they must converse with each other and the cashiers.  You have to make a purchase to learn the cashier’s name, make a second purchase to say the name and get the gift card, and make a third to redeem the gift card. Three visits for 10% is pretty modest savings in a bookstore, but it’s worth telling a story about.

No good? Here’s another.

Suppose you open a hybrid bookstore + specialty cheese shop. Customers sample havarti dill and romano while they shop or read, and the gift cards make sophisticated presents. Murals of rural Europe cover the walls.

In all of these imaginary cases, the bookstores create playful, fun experiences for the customers. They bring customers into the store’s world, then set them loose with stories to tell. And that’s a rare achievement for a bookstore or a cheese shop.

Suppose a Hershey Bar’s Texture is as Important as its Wrapper

5 Gum demonstrates that smart packaging and branding can help a mediocre product burn brightly, if only for a short while.  Of course packaging matters, and taste matters, but what about texture?

Imagine biting into a Reese’s PB Cup with smoothed-out ridges.  You’d miss out on a satisfying part of the Reese’s PB Cup experience.  The texture of chocolate, food, and candy is important, and it very often goes overlooked.  Our sensitive tongues crave tactile stimulation, but The Hershey Company doesn’t deliver. The company misses an opportunity when it limits its thinking about candy shape to “how can we mold these chocolate bars to be easily broken into bite-sized pieces?”

5 years from now, textured foods and textured candy will be the new frontier.  Marketers and designers will research which textures best stimulate the tongue (rather than those which look pretty, though the two aren’t mutually exclusive).  New manufacturing processes will spring up around this research.

What an outstanding marketing concept for Hershey to grab and run with.  I hope they do!  I want to live in a world where I can buy chocolate bars with the texture of corn-on-the-cob, course-weave linen, or patent alligator.  This is a million-dollar idea, and Hershey would be wise to get a sizable research team working on it before a savvy boutique candy maker breaks off a chocolate-swirled piece of the the their market share.