The Apple iMac in 1999.Juan Carlos Ulate
Bruce Philp is one of Canada's leading brand strategists. His success in helping companies create and establish compelling brands can seen in work done for ING Direct, Grocery Gateway and Expedia.
Mr. Philp, chief executive officer with Toronto-based GWP Brand Engineering, takes a different approach to brand building by making sure it is an integral part of a company's high-level strategy. In fact, he believes that a chief executive officer should be the company's chief brand manager because a brand is now nurtured by a variety of variables rather than communications, marketing and advertising.
Mr. Philp laid out his philosophical approach to strategic brand building in his book, The Orange Code: How ING Direct Succeeded by Being a Rebel With a Cause .
In it, he shows how ING Direct, which is well known for its orange logo and quirky television ads, became one of the world's most successful virtual banks with a branding plan that included business strategy, corporate culture and the customer experience.
In a recent interview, Mr. Philp talked about how design is enjoying a renaissance and rejuvenated interest as companies recognize that differentiation is becoming more important in a world in which the shelf life of products and services is becoming shorter and shorter.
This is an edited/condensed version of their conversation.
Everyone talks about Apple and the impact it has had on design. Has Apple, in fact, thrust design into the spotlight?
What they have done is more profound than trying to understand the way that people see design. Apple uses design to create social signals that are important, and the example I would reach for is the original iMac. We live in a time when it's not very sexy to talk about history. Anything more than five years old is history, and we forget how this stuff unfolded - but it matters.
In the case of the iMac, personal computers up until that time were essentially industrial products. They looked like business machines; they had the texture, weight and ambience of a photocopy machine. When the iMac came out, it did more than simply signal to people that you could have a cute computer on your desk. It signalled that the computer was no longer a business machine. Apple was saying to people that the computer was an entertainment appliance, which it really hadn't yet become. But it clearly looked like something you might watch.
This is not without precedent. I worked on a project in 1992 with Rogers Wireless, which was then called Cantel. At that time, cellular phones were used by real estate agents and stockbrokers. The phones were very expensive and they sent a negative social signal. They indicated that you were very powerful and important - or wanted the world to think that you were.
Cantel wanted to sell a product that people would adopt for daily use as a social tool rather than a business tool. We couldn't influence the hardware design but we could influence the way it was packaged. So the cellphone required a name, which was Amigo. It was put in a colourful box with bright graphics on it. It looked toy-like and it was given some reasonable support from a pricing point of view. It was essentially the forefather of the pay-as-you-go phone.
It wasn't a bargain and yet the things flew off the shelves, and that beget Bell's competitive offering, Solo. It created a giant inflexion point in wireless communications. It did it, not because the hardware was revolutionary or even necessarily that the pricing was revolutionary, but because design was used to send a social signal. They were able to do it with packaging and branding; Apple did it with the actual hardware.
Where does design fit into overall corporate strategy and branding?
We no longer live in an era in which brands are made through communications. We no longer teach people what a brand stands for by interrupting a television show and explaining it to them.
In the 1960s, you could reach half the households in North America with a single spot on The Ed Sullivan Show or Gunsmoke ; in the 70s, the best you could do was 25 per cent; in the 90s, the best you could get was 10 per cent, and now Mad Men is a cultural phenomenon with just two million viewers on a good night. What has happened is that brands as narratives have become fractured and scattered all over the place. The challenge now is not how to explain yourself to consumers but how to create yourself so that they recognize the bits and pieces in the world, and can interpret patterns from those bits and pieces and draw conclusions.
Do many senior executives recognize that brand should be a key part of their overall strategic thinking?
I wonder what it will take. The first big explosion in branding happened at the beginning of the 90s when Marlboro Friday occurred. (Philip Morris, the maker of Marlboro cigarettes, announced on Friday, April 2, 1993, that it would be cutting the price of Marlboros to compete with generic cigarette makers. The company's stock tanked 26 per cent following the announcement.) At that point, it became a boardroom subject because people began to understand it as value tied to branding. I hold the view that the CEO is the brand manager because the brand isn't communications any more, it's an experience, and experience is delivered by organizations, not by individuals or departments, so it naturally follows that the boss of the brand has to be the boss of the organization.
How do you start to integrate the importance of design in the executive boardroom?
Most corporate behaviours are adaptive, so as soon as someone figures out there is profit it in, then you will get someone interested in it.
How are other companies beyond Apple embracing design?
Once you get past the obvious categories - fashion and furniture - it is hard to think of too many case studies yet. I think that there are some signs of hope in brands such as [the U.S. big-box store]Target. Strictly speaking, they are not in the design business, but there is a kind of dignity with which they present their offerings, and that comes from a conscientious approach to curating products and presenting them to people.
What impact will design have on the Web? Is that fertile ground for design?
Consumers are very adept at identifying bad design. When they go on a website, they can smell if it's a fly-by-night kind of thing.
After the first user interface, the next challenge lies with the technology guys. They are best-practices driven and they want solutions that are effective and efficient. They don't necessarily want solutions that are well branded.
You can look at half a dozen dot.com startups and see the same family of typography, the same colours, the same navigation routine, the same grid for the home page - that signals to the world that you are in the commodity business.
Great branding on the Web, as anywhere else, exists in some tension between what you're going to provide the consumer - an easy experience or a memorable experience.
What role does design play in social media and social media marketing?
It's pretty minimal at this point. Social media gets treated as a technological phenomena but it's a sociological phenomena. That is the first mistake a lot of companies make when they are dealing with the subject. Social media activity leverages equity in a brand and builds it by engaging people. But it isn't capable of creating that equity, and that includes the design space. I think what social media has done is to present people with the reality that character really drives brands.
Where are we with design at this point - a renaissance, a rediscovery?
I think it's both of those things because we have gone through an extended transformation period in marketing where organizations are less often making things and more often branding them. When you aren't the factory cranking out DVDs players, it becomes very important how DVD players look and what kind of experience you build around it. One of the things companies have to deal with is to differentiate; if you can't do it functionally, you have to do it atmospherically, and that seems inevitable. It seems like a fundamental shift that is not negotiable, and it should produce an increased interest in the power of design.
What role does design play in the environmental or green movement?
When people are more emotionally attached to things they buy, they tend to be more discriminating and tend to make them last longer. The key to sustainability is going to be getting more people to buy better [quality] and do it less often.
A great way to think about it is we buy a cheap toaster and it looks like hell and it breaks, or we get sick of it in five years. If we buy a beautiful toaster that is really well made and we never get tired of looking at it, it might last 10 years. That cuts in half the size of the market for toasters. We might actually pay more for something like that and do less damage to the earth. To me, that is so much about design.