From the outside: Saffron Consultants

Saffron Consultants is a brand consultancy founded in 2001, with 50-plus employees scattered across offices in London, New York, Madrid, and Mumbai. A client once said, “They’re the perfect combination of charm and brutality.”[1] It was this reputation for candor, and the firm’s design experience, that led us to believe it would be a robust test case for the Get Fired hypothesis.”

Wally Olins is the firm’s Chairman and Co-founder, and few names in branding are held in the same regard. He co-founded the venerable Wolff Olins [2] in 1965 and has overseen hundreds of brand creations and reinventions over five decades. Given his experience, he is uniquely positioned to advise how to realize new, expansive ideas.

For Saffron, the question is not as much about whether they might Get Fired for being too radical – after all, they are often hired to think in unconventional ways. Rather, it’s a question about whether a client has the ability to realize a radical idea and the organizational change that may follow it.

Why is it easier for some organizations to thrive on creativity and change, while others flounder at every attempt? “When you fail to innovate, it’s not because people don’t intellectually recognize the requirement to innovate, but it is because they cannot bring themselves to do the things that are required to make the changes.”

Mr. Olins offers GM as an example of a company that failed to make this leap for decades. “GM talked for 20 years at least about wanting to change. They did not do a thing really to change. Only when they were absolutely at rock bottom, when it was all over for them, did they change.”

To contrast, Olins cites Nokia and Stanford University as organizations that have sustained levels of creativity in their ranks: “They are among the 25 to 35 percent that really innovate very powerfully and very successfully, and once they have that in their bloodstream they don’t stop. But getting it into the bloodstream is difficult.” He cites strong competition, new management, and desperation as primary drivers that can goose new creativity in such organizations.

Mr. Olins offers Orange, the mobile phone concern, as one of the most radical new approaches of the 1990s. When Hutchison Whampoa – Orange’s parent company – decided to establish a mobile network, there was very little to differentiate it from the three substantial competitors already in the market. At a time when mobile phones were seen an elite accessory for the few, the Wolff Olins team suggested the name “Orange” as a way to democratize mobility and enable people from all walks of life to identify with the offer.[3]

The recommendation was very controversial. However, through diligent research and creative exploration the Wolff Olins team helped the client realize the new brand would humanize the offer. He explains that upon their ultimate acceptance of the name, “the company just seized it and drove it and pushed it and made it work remarkably successfully. And with great imagination and zeal and great courage.” The result: the company attracted 7 million people to its service in the first five years. It was a perfect example of how an extreme idea, that initially appeared out-of-bounds, was ultimately proven given the right energy and innovation process.

Saffron is hired to create big, bold brand and design changes for all sorts of companies and countries, and they have done this quite successfully. Olins offered the following ingredients for how the firm maintains a semi-permanent, sustained creativity in the organization:

Share ideas all of the time. “Nobody pays enough attention to communication. Nobody does. I try to, but I know I don’t. And most people don’t. It’s a very, very hard thing to do.” Effective communication is one of the most difficult, and most overlooked, challenges in many organizations. To foster good organizational communication, Olins recommends actively circulating new ideas, avoiding organizational silos, and being transparent about your beliefs.

Follow your instinct. “I’m quite often asked in this business, ‘How did you develop ideas around branding?’ I think you can post-rationalize some things, but a lot of it is instinct.” To make the best of your instincts, be honest with yourself about who you are and what you know. The greater your understanding of an idea, its opportunities and its risks, the more effectively you will be able to use your instinct.

Use the carrot as well as the stick. “You have to be very persuasive and offer carrots, but you also have to say, ‘If you don’t innovate, look what will happen to you.’ ” Everyone has fears and desires. Delivering your ideas with an eye to all the possibilities—negative as well as positive, moderate as well as severe—helps provide a balanced view of the possible impacts of your idea.

Make friends. “People who get the idea and run with it make it go further than you can make it go because not only do they understand what you’ve been saying, but they also understand the organization.” Relationships are central to success on an individual or an organizational level. The more friends you make, the greater your chances of having significant impact.

But how can organizations who haven’t hired a creative agency like Saffron push the boundaries of design and business? We went to Steelcase, a company that has a consistent record of bringing new ideas to market from the inside, to find out what makes it successful.

NEXT: Part 3 – From the Inside: Steelcase

In the latest issue of Design Management Review, I co-authored an article with John Stone on building innovation into organizations. Now, in the first of a four part series I’m posting that article here.

Innovation, anyone? The Tipping Point. Inside the Tornado. The New, New Thing. You’ve probably read one of these books, or heard that you should. You’re not alone. Over the past 10 years, nearly everyone has boarded the innovation plane—at least in theory.

With all this talk about increasing value for customers and shareholders through innovation, why aren’t there more companies actually doing it, like Apple, or Google, or Virgin? The problem is not a lack of revolutionary ideas—it’s an inability to pick, package, and ship the revolution.

When a big idea strikes, people have serious difficulties making it happen. You can read all the curb-jumping, paradigm-shifting, out-of-the-box innovation books you can order, but it won’t make any difference until you take on the true challenge: bringing that new idea to market.

Why are big, valuable ideas so often hard to realize? In part, because they’re perceived as risky. That’s not surprising, considering that generations of business leaders have been taught to strive for predictability and reliability. Today, most businesses are built for stability, not innovation.

Let’s be clear: Reliability and predictability are good for business. They can generate value, profit, and professional success. But when they alone become the drumbeat for an organization, they can stifle the next big business idea. Would-be innovators who see opportunity for new, unproven ideas may not pursue them for fear of their corporate reputations, their advancement potential, and even the loss of their jobs.

We believe that ideas normally considered out of bounds are more likely to succeed if they are paired with a deliberative process that exposes their true risks and rewards. We call it the Get Fired hypothesis. This method adds credibility to an innovator’s idea while mitigating risk for those that decide what to pursue.

Why call it “Get Fired”? It’s the metaphoric benchmark for what it may take to convince an organization to support an unproven concept that could potentially fail. No one is advocating that anyone actually lose his or her employment—rather, it’s a way to prepare yourself to say and do those things you thought too outlandish before.

There are companies that time and again successfully explore and implement risky ideas—ideas that might otherwise put managers and executives at risk. How do those companies “de-risk” unproven concepts, mitigate the anxiety of failure, and ultimately create the biggest possible value?

Design is a core value for many companies that succeed in realizing radical ideas. Consequently, to test our Get Fired hypothesis we went to two organizations known for their design prowess—Saffron Consultants and Steelcase—to understand how they consistently generate valuable new ideas and successfully take them to market.

NEXT: Part 2 – Case study of Saffron Consultants.

Does the brand define the customer experience, or is the customer experience the brand? Your work may involve both, but you probably attack problems with a bias for one or the other.

Earlier this year I asked Josh Levine of Great Monday to simply describe the relationship between brand and experience, and I like what he said.

I went back and dug deeper with Josh to clear up the differences between how he described it and and the way I often see the relationships between brand and experience being practiced. What emerged was this illustrated question and answer, attempting to untangle brand and customer experience in just 9 minutes:

Untangling brand and customer experience, in 10 minutes or less from Brandon Schauer on Vimeo.

Originally published in Design Management Review, December 2009

These days when CEOs and corporate marketers talk about “investing in brand,” they’re probably referring to typical visible touch-points like products, advertising, or identity. Those are important tools in a corporate marketer’s arsenal, but what most don’t realize is that brand stretches its arms around much more than the stuff you can see. For a company to succeed in today’s tough business climate, executives, managers, and their agencies need to consider the bigger picture: one that includes invisible branding.

The list of factors that affect a company’s brand is as long as Wharton’s wait list, but which will get you the most bang for your buck? For my money, it’s the invisible ones that pack more punch. “Invisible branding” refers to stakeholder touch-points that have little or no visual presence in the market, but still delivers what the brand promises. These are things like CEO vision, employee training, pricing strategy, sales-force communications, and customer relationships. Each of these items is an essential part of a company’s brand, but because they’re not visible, business leaders don’t consider them in the context of brand—or, worse, they overlook them entirely, assuming that a touch-point with minimal visual presence has minimal impact. To the contrary: A focus on these invisible factors can deliver huge value to stakeholders and, ultimately, a company’s own bottom line—for years.

A rep to protect

Brand means many things to many people. Yet, at the same time, it means very little, because the term has been abused and overused. If eyes start to glaze over (yours or your co-workers’) with the mention of the b-word, talk about your company’s reputation instead. Swapping “reputation” for “brand” is powerful not only because it’s a spot-on synonym, but also because it cuts the jargon. Everyone understands why a company would want a great reputation.

Now that we’ve re-framed, here’s the big question: What influences your company’s reputation? And the answer is: Everything—not just the visible stuff but the invisible, too. From business model to checkout, everything a company does affects its reputation, its brand.

Business strategy as brand, brand as business strategy

Some CEOs leave brand to the marketing department, some hire CMOs, but if we’re consistent with our definition of invisible branding, that is non-visible touch-points that affect the reputation of the business, then every strategic decision is a brand decision and every brand decision, strategic. If this is true (and it is), then the CEO must get involved with brand from the start. Here’s a great example I like to share with my clients:

A few years after online shoe retailer Zappos.com got its start, CEO Tony Hsieh made a difficult decision, one most business consultants would have advised against. He stopped drop shipping—the practice of taking an order, but then having the supplier ship it directly to the customer. With this one decision, Hsieh knowingly gave up 25 percent of Zappos’ sales. However, this strategic choice helped put into place one of the major building blocks that has helped Zappos reach the success they’re now seeing 10 years on—by over-delivering on their brand promise.

From the beginning, Zappos had done a huge amount of business via drop shipping, Operationally, this decision has a huge upside: no inventory, no time wasted on getting the product in and categorized. There’s also no space wasted on storage, and no one has to go find the product and ship it out again. There’s also a downside: no control over a critical touch-point—the arrival of the shoes to the customer. But for Zappos, that was a deal-breaker.

People would call to complain that their shipment was late or, in some cases, completely lost. A Zappos customer care rep would have to spend time to chase down the order, correct the mistake, and make it up to the customer with discounts. For a company that claimed to be “powered by service”, this was definitely not delivering on the brand promise. Hsieh understood that and, knowingly gave up a big chunk of revenue, to make the right decision.  It was a decision that was immediately good for the Zappos brand and, in the long term, great for the company’s profits.

Let’s go to the big invisible branding board and score this decision:

• It improved the customer experience and reputation with stakeholders.
• It positively affected the bottom line, even if not immediately.
• It had nothing to do with a logo or ad campaign.

Yup—definitely invisible branding.

Where else can invisible branding affect the customer experience and improve reputation? Whether sales rep, tech support, or shelf-stocker, for many companies, the highest-touch touch-point is the employee.

Branson promises, Joe delivers

Richard Branson and Trader Joe are both world travelers. They’re both successful business owners, innovation devotees, and, most would say, savvy branders. But which guy sees the whole picture, even the stuff you can’t?

Ever since Virgin America launched in 2007, I’ve been itching to try the new San Francisco-based airline. I had heard about the disco-style purple cabin lights and seen the sexy billboards, but when I finally got the chance to fly Virgin, all the investment in this well-managed brand went out the cabin door. What massive failure undid a multi-million-dollar brand launch? It came down to four little words. When my wife asked one of the attendants how much time was left in the flight, she got, instead of a friendly reply, an exasperated “Look at your watch.”

Who knows why the attendant responded this way—and I can empathize, I’ve certainly had my bad days—but all the money poured into the design of the interiors, a national ad campaign, even the great outfits (and they are fab) was undermined by one bad interaction. I’ve flown Virgin America since without trouble, but the incident underscores the impact one interaction can have. The choices employees make, including the way they treat their customers, affect one of the most important brand touch-points a company can have.

Let’s take a walk over to Trader Joe’s, the quirky supermarket famous for its inexpensive, innovative private-label products and wry attitude. While I do love their five-seed almond bars (if you haven’t tried them, you must) it’s the “crew” (their term for employees) that keeps me coming back.

I was surprised how friendly Trader Joe’s employees were when I started shopping there a few years ago, but my experience there is so consistent I know I can look forward to it. They’re not only willingly helpful (which is rare in itself), they’re also genuinely fun. A few months back I knocked a couple of apples to the floor. A crew member looked over and mock-threatened me—with a big smile, she said, “You’d better not do that again.” I quickly mock-apologized: “I’m sorry—it’ll never happen again.” That was fun and would never have happened at a run-of-the-mill grocer like Safeway. If TJ’s loses a few bruised Fujis I know it’s not a big deal to them. They’re human and so am I and they’re cool with that. It sounds inane, but it makes such a difference.

How does Trader Joe’s deliver such an amazing shopping experience and earn tremendous customer loyalty in a low-interest category like groceries? The company clearly understands the importance of the invisible, building a culture that encourages levity and helpfulness in its employees. Creating a great shopping experience requires great employees, and Trader Joe’s has done this with more than just an excellent training program, although that’s definitely part of it.

Everything from knowing what kind of person will thrive at the company to earnestly supporting their employees “to assure their health and well-being” adds to the mix. Medical and dental insurance? Company-paid retirement plan? Free Trader Joe’s shirts? On their site they go :  ”We top it all off with the potential for upward mobility and a rare chance to—and we know this may be a foreign concept to you—look forward to going to work!” Sounds like fun to me.

What about the TJ’s logo you ask? It is ugly, but as long as the crew makes my shopping fun, I’ll keep coming back for my almond seed bars

Treating your customers well may be obvious, but how to make it happen isn’t. From the lack of even satisfactory employee interactions out there, I’ll go ahead and say it’s probably one of the biggest invisible branding challenges a company will face.

Is anyone else doing well on the invisible branding scoreboard? It might not be obvious to them, but there is a whole category of companies that have caught on to the importance of invisible branding—if not by choice, then by necessity.

The digital brand

As more companies deliver their principal value through the Web, old business assumptions are disappearing faster than you can say “venture capital.” Business operations and brand management in separate buildings? Not anymore. What is offered (meaning the “invisible” business strategies, owned by the execs) and how it’s offered (meaning the “visible” brand strategies, managed by corporate marketing) not only come out of the same place, but also have to work together to get the job done right. Those separate functions aren’t separate any longer; the visible and invisible elements are intermingled. In effect a site is the marketing, sales funnel, product, and after-market support—all at once, all the time. To ensure a great brand reputation, each “department” must know intimately what the other is doing and cooperate with it. Compartmentalizing is so 1994.

This fusing of brand and business strategy, resulting in visible and invisible tactics, has forced digital businesses to come to quick terms with their reputation now that it’s directly affected by one primary touch-point. Those deep in the digital swamps refer to the whole concoction as “user experience,” and that confluence of elements makes the importance of invisible branding even more apparent. Looking for a role model? Keep an eye on Google; they seem to get it right nearly every time.

Early in 2008 Google launched the Android mobile phone operating system. Although many of the technorati proclaimed it would never touch Apple’s iPhone, one major decision is poised to make Android a big contender in the smartphone market—an open platform. Unlike Apple, Google allows anyone to create and upload programs for the entire community to try. This brand decision differentiates it from its main competitor, and by enabling the development of more apps has created greater access to data that supports Google’s mission: to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” In addition to all this, it supports Google’s good-guy image. A great ad campaign could never hope to do all that for a brand.

In trust we trust

Whether it’s a well-thought-out business decision or simply finding the right people to join your ranks, invisible branding is the set of choices a business makes that supports its brand promise through action. Without a conscious focus on the invisible, that promise is just a facade. However, when a company does deliver, it builds what every company wants: trust.

For years, advertising and marketing has been built around promises meant to get you in the door. “Lie big” was the secret to success on Madison Avenue. Now, the effectiveness of those methods is waning as consumers get wise, with access to more information than ever. Customers know full well if a company delivers on its promises before they even touch their Tivos.

Trust is the benefit of a well-executed invisible brand. The degree to which a customer trusts a company, product, or service determines if he or she will engage with them or their competitor. If a company makes a promise through visible touch-points and then delivers on that promise through its actions, the customer by definition, has had a good experience. As more individuals have good experiences with a business, its reputation strengthens, and the company builds trust with its customer community. This trust earns them loyal brand advocates. Without invisible branding you can’t build a good reputation, and without a good reputation you won’t earn trust.

Take the long view

When you think about your company’s trajectory, can you see beyond Q2? To create real and lasting value, plan for 2, 5, and 10 years along with the next three months. While visible branding is great for creating awareness and making promises today, invisible branding is a tool that helps create the future value of a company. The return on your patient investment will pay big dividends in the form of trusting communities and loyal brand advocates long after your latest ad campaign has stopped running.

As humans, the drive to connect with others who share common values is an inevitable force. This behavior is so fundamental, so critical to functioning societies, academics have dedicated their careers to understanding the complex dynamic and ritual of tribal cultures.

Of all the years of academic research spent understanding tribal affiliation, inclusion, identity and shared cohesion, it’s only recently that business has taken notice. That’s not to say commerce based tribes haven’t been around forever—they have—but until now they’ve formed organically, without the considered attempts of brand managers to leverage this platform.

THE HUNGRY TRIBE
Author and entrepreneur, Seth Godin has published extensively on the importance of leadership in forming strong tribal communities and brand guru, Marty Neumeier explains it this way: “Selling is pushing products at people, but brands pull people into tribes.”

Traditional marketing and brand managers have finally started to take note, but it appears to be no more than a latent response to a smarter, more educated consumer who is looking for more. Not more advertising…not more spam…not more widgets…and not more clutter. Consumers today are hungry for more meaning.

DON’T SHOOT THE CUSTOMER
Like firing a shotgun into a flock of geese, many marketers still assume that if they interrupt enough people enough times, at least some of them will pay attention. That may work but only until another product comes along that is better, sleeker or less expensive. When that happens (and it will), to regain the high ground you must launch another costly ad campaign. When companies compete on features, functions or price, they might as well just say it: “We don’t care enough to spend the time to understand what you find meaningful.” This near-term mindset is the status quo for organizations that believe indefensible products, inevitable commoditization and low levels of consumer engagement are the only market reality.

However, organizations that create value for the future customer first create a much more formidable barrier to competition. In this instance we’re talking about a considered effort to create platforms and artifacts that connect communities and facilitate the creation of a tribe. The marketing role needs to be fundamentally re-thought, to create a shift away from thinking like traditional brand managers, into a world where marketers become brand advocates and evangelists.
A BUSINESS IS BORN
What started as a small Summer ritual amongst a tight-knit community of artists on a Northern California beach has slowly grown into a full-fledged pop-up community and multi-million dollar festival. Burning Man now attracts nearly 50,000 people ranging from geeked-out yuppies to middle-aged hippies and every future primitive technophile in between. This diverse group of eclectic revelers share a desire to travel to Black Rock City, CA every August to contribute to the creation of a temporary city for radical self-expression and communal bonding.

This once informal bon-fire on the Beach in San Francisco not only built a social platform that brings people together over a common interest, but created a business platform that generates millions of dollars annually. Today Burning Man charges $200 a head and earned over $10 million in 2008 alone. Burning Man didn’t start as a business, but slow and steady cultivation of this Tribe has certainly made it one.

MORE THAN JUST A CAUSE
Yellow Livestrong bracelets can be seen on everybody from neighborhood kids to pro athletes. Even the President of the United States has worn one. What is it about this $1 dollar rubber band that generates brand awareness and unprecedented amounts of money for cancer research and Nike in such a short period of time?

Livestrong bracelets are more than just a receipt for your dollar. These bracelets have become a way for people to identify themselves as part of the club. They are a low stakes way to tell the world “I support Lance Armstrong in his fight against Cancer, because I too am an athlete who understands the importance of staying active.”

Lance, in partnership with NIKE, created a platform using these bracelets as a way of connecting people, with the ultimate goal of raising not only cancer awareness, but also money, and lots of it. Whether for profit or non-profit, to succeed in today’s marketplace, organizations need to create tribes—not for the money (though that’ll come), but for a purpose.

SELLING A LIFESTYLE
From the first Beetle, to the most recent GTI, Volkswagen has successfully built and sold great cars, but more impressive is it’s consistent ability to build tribal lifestyles through behavior. A recent viral video sponsored by VW received almost 4 million hits on YouTube in only one week. The video shows people will change their behavior if a truly fun option is available. (In this instance alost everyone choose not to take the escalator when a group of artists turns a steep flight of stairs into a larger-than-life piano.)

The ad has absolutely nothing to do with cars, yet contributes to their ability to sell more of them by accessing an emotional value held vehemently by the VW tribe: fun can make the world better. Volkswagen sells a lifestyle, and their tribe happily sees it’s value.

CONCLUSION
In a world where consumers own the brand, brand managers need to think more like brand advocates. They must take the initiative and become leaders by creating platforms and artifacts for communities to connect with one another, not just managing wordmarks. People are obsessed with connecting to others over shared interests, values and meaningful experiences— these people will find each other with or without your product or service, why not help?

In tough times every CEO takes a hard look at what his or her company could be doing better to weather the storm. Some cut jobs, others stop advertising, and still others try to innovate their way through. Those are all reasonable tactics, but what if they could’ve avoided the crisis in the first place? How do you build an unshakable business foundation from the start?

Every business has a critical, overlooked, underutilized asset—its people. The old employment model says: I pay you money, you do the work, end of story. While money is a key commodity and motivator in our economy, it isn’t the only reason we work. There’s more to it, and Zappos.com CEO Tony Hsieh has built his business around this more-than-sound assumption.

I had the opportunity to spend a few days at  online shoe retailer Zappos.com’s Las Vegas headquarters and saw in person what makes the company setting the gold standard in service tick.

The answer? (SPOILER ALERT! ) Focus on our culture and the rest falls into place.

Culture may be a surprising answer considering all the CEO clatter out there about things like eco-innovation and the triple-bottom line, but after my time at Zappos I’m a believer—culture is the key to sustainable growth in business.

I got a chance to dig a little deeper into zappos’ culture, ask Tony a few questions about how the sales are holding up through the recession, as well as the future now that on-line behemoth Amazon has aquired them. Below is our conversation.

——–

JL: First, how do you define culture?

Tony: It’s a combination of making sure that everyone understands our vision of having the Zappos brand be synonymous with the very best customer service as well as making sure that we hire people that are a fit for our company culture. Our culture is defined by our 10 core values:

1. Deliver WOW Through Service

2. Embrace and Drive Change

3. Create Fun and A Little Weirdness

4. Be Adventurous, Creative, and Open-Minded

5. Pursue Growth and Learning

6. Build Open and Honest Relationships With Communication

7. Build a Positive Team and Family Spirit

8. Do More With Less

9. Be Passionate and Determined

10. Be Humble

JL: Zappos took 7 years to become profitable, and still now only earns 5% profit. One rumor is because you put so much back into the business, and particularly the culture. I agree it’s important for businesses but cultivating a great culture seems expensive悠t doesn’t seem to makes fiscal sense. What kind of return do you see? How do you justify it to your investors?

Tony: Like any other business, we still have financial goals we need to meet in order to keep our shareholders and board of directors happy. Our approach has been to maximize the amount we invest in the customer experience and our company culture while still meeting our financial goals. There are always things we can do to make our customers happier…for example, in theory we could offer same day delivery for every customer. But it wouldn’t make sense from a financial perspective, so we don’t do that.

JL: I’ve got a theory, so tell me if I’m right or not. Because you’ve built such a strong culture, you’ve been able to avoid the worst of the recession. Have you felt a pinch on sales as people migrate to cheaper retailers?

Tony: For our own customers, we’ve noticed many of them migrating to cheaper brands, but they are still purchasing from us. On any given day, about 75% of our orders come from repeat customers.

JL: There’s a phrase thrown around quite a bit at zappos: Focus on our culture and the rest falls into place. When did you realized this was the mantra by which you wanted to run your business?

Tony: We stumbled into it accidentally. In the early days of the company (we were founded in 1999), we were unable to raise funding so we weren’t able to spend a lot of money on expensive marketing campaigns. As a result, we were forced to focus more on our existing customers. What we found was that the more we invested into customer service and the customer experience, the more loyal they were, and the more we grew from word of mouth.

Today, we take most of the money we would have spent on paid marketing or advertising and invest it into the customer experience instead. We realized that the only way we could deliver great customer service was if we had happy employees, and our belief is that culture plays a very big role in the happiness of employees.

JL: For companies out there who want to improve their corporate culture what would you recommend they do first?

Tony: I don’t think the Zappos culture can or should be cloned, but I do think the idea of being transparent and running a business based on core values and a meaningful vision that’s not just about money or profits can work for any organization. It doesn’t really matter what the core values are, as long as the entire organization commits to those core values. The most important thing in any large organization is alignment.

JL: On you’re blog you write “we want the Zappos brand and business to be about…delivering happiness, whether for customers (through customer service) or for employees (through company culture).” I thought you sold shoes揺ow can you make money delivering happiness?

Tony: Every great brand that exists ultimately is about one or more human emotions. There are plenty of companies that sell shoes, but if you ask customers how they feel about those companies as compared to Zappos, you’ll find that customers will feel very differently about those companies vs. Zappos.

JL: Amazon just acquired Zappos a few days ago. They’ve committed to support the Zappos brand and culture (clearly Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is in awe of what you’ve been able to do in regards to providing arguably the gold standard in customer service). Any indication that they’d like you to help them get some zappos magic and improve their culture?

Tony: The deal hasn’t closed yet, so it’s too early to tell.

JL: Aw, that’s a bummer, but fair enough. Thanks for you time, Tony. Good luck and continued success on your mission to bring happiness to your employees and customers.

Getting the answer to these questions will help you choose the right name. But before you can do that, you have to know your options.

The 6 naming styles add context so you can see the full landscape of choices. You can use this tool throughout the naming process: analyze the competition, organize your list, or develop more names in a style you hadn’t considered.

Below are the six styles—learn them and you’ll be on your way to winning the naming game.

DESCRIPTIVE
These names literally describe a brand’s offering. Consider a descriptive name when developing a suite of offerings under one larger brand or company name.

SUGGESTIVE
A name is suggestive if it implies a market position (or positioning attribute). This direction allows for more evocative or emotional opportunities.

METAPHORICAL
A metaphor is language that directly compares seemingly unrelated subjects. In naming, it’s a great way to imbue a car brand, for example, with the attributes of an animal.

NEOLOGICAL
Why not create a new word? Another approach is putting together morphemes—the smallest unit of language that carries meaning.

HISTORICAL
If a brand has equity in its heritage, use it. Consider the name of the founder, or the first product ever launched. This method often has great “legs” and allows for meaning to be unpacked for years.

ARBITRARY
These names have almost nothing to do with the brand’s position in the market, nevertheless, people will make meaning of it by connecting your name with what you do. Arbitrary names are among the most legally defensible.

In April’s Harvard Business Review this article caught my attention: How to Market in a Downturn. The basic premise is resegmenting your customers according to their emotional response to the recession. It’s basically encouraging businesses to deeply reconsider their demographics. 

I’d go further and say it’s a critical moment and that business must reconsider everyone in their brand ecosystem—employees included. The downturn has touched everyone, and no one will be left unchanged when we come out on the other end (whenever that may be). To create a sustainable business, isn’t it time we take into account our entire community, not just the people buying the products?

Thursday, 17 Sep 2009
6:30pm – 8:30pm
Tickets available through the AIGA