A little reading tip: if you’re in branding/advertising and work on projects aimed at the Asian market (like I do sometimes), don’t miss the blog of Ray Ally, executive director at Landor Beijing. Entertaining and clever analysis on how brands are communicating, and should be communicating, in China.

Here it is. Enjoy your read.

A quick detour from my little deconstructing-the-idea-of-brand-authenticity series, to a somewhat related subject. I read something rather fascinating the other day. It’s got nothing to do with how brand authenticity is constructed, but rather how intimately people associate the idea of something that’s fake with immoral behaviour. And how much our thoughts, feelings and actions are determined by our environment. (Which is in itself is supporting the case against the concept of simple, straightforward authentic identity, but anyway.)

In “The Counterfeit Self: The Deceptive Costs of Faking It”, (Psychological Science 21(5) 712–720), Gino et al. tell us this: if you give someone a pair of sunglasses and tell them they’re fake Chloe, they will both cheat more in tests, and start judging other people’s behaviour as more deceptive, than if you tell them they’re wearing authentic brand ones. (Of course, they’re all the same, real Chloe glasses.) This is true even if you just randomly assign glasses to people, so it’s got nothing to do with the possibly shady personality of the counterfeit enthusiast.

The determining factor in this, they say, is that people’s own sense of authenticity in the sense of opposed-to-self-alienation is diminished by the (supposed) wearing of fake items. The “Fake Chloe” crowd agree more with statements such as “Right now, I don’t know how I really feel inside”, “Right now, I feel out of touch with the ‘real me’” and “Right now, I feel alienated from myself” than the “Real Chloe”-wearers. (Thankfully, I have no idea how it feels like to be “alienated from myself”. Is this because I’m so wonderfully authentic – well I don’t wear any counterfeit accessories, so I’m making it rather easy for myself – , or because I’ve always lived so completely detached from the Real Me that I wouldn’t know when it was missing? Like a dog with docked tail, happily wagging and wiggling away.)

This idea not something totally new, it rhymes very well with for example this: even the non-religious become more helpful after reading a story from the Bible. But it would be interesting to see if the same phenomenon occurred with brands people think are morally authentic vs inauthentic – would you cheat less after drinking Innocent juice? Or even just craft authentic – surrounded by the furniture made by small Danish ateliers now run by a third generation member of a family of skilled craftsmen etc etc you so desire from the pages of Monocle magazine, would you be a better person than in your current Ikea Hell (for it is Hell, let’s be honest)? Should you splash out, for the sake of Humanity in general?

And in that case, would this truthfulness/anti-self alienation effect actually be a reason for making brands that people deem to be authentic? Utopian in a quite roundabout way, but still. Anyway: don’t you just love people. Such weird creatures.

They’ve been around for a while now, those Desirée Dolron-shot ads for Louis Vuitton, showing the craftsmen and -women at their work. Vermeer-inspired, beautifully executed, and quite ludicrous.

Put aside the sexual connotations of these ads. Even though you don’t have to be that much of a semiotician to find “The young woman and the tiny folds”, illustrated with a girl working on a red handbag – a handbag! A vaginal symbol if there has even been one, according to Freud – with, well, tiny folds, rather obvious. Anyway.

The brand strategy here is quite transparent. Jumping on the luxury-should-be-about-craftsmanship bandwagon, Louis Vuitton tries to associate its brand with old-fashioned, artisan production. The result is, however, a bit like an upscale version of the claim of “using recipes we create at the kitchen table” on the frozen microwave lunch I had today. Why? Is it because, as Business Week points out, most Louis Vuitton products aren’t handmade? Not necessarily. Not that many people have the privilege of visiting a Louis Vuitton factory, and anyway, authenticity isn’t the same as truth.

In “The organizational construction of authenticity: An examination of contemporary food and dining in the U.S.” (don’t you just love academic titles?), authors Glenn Carroll and Dennis Ray Wheaton divide authenticity into four types; moral authenticity (Whole Foods), idiosyncratic authenticity (Dogfish Head brewery), type authenticity (that Italian restaurant where the owner’s mother sits at a table, and is overweight) and craft authenticity. Rather self-explanatory, craft authenticity is authenticity based on the artistry and mastery of the people making the product, and a refusal of industrial mass production. In everything from food to furniture to luxury bags, craft authenticity has been an extremely influential concept over the last years. In fact nowadays I feel rather embarrassed serving guests any food stuff about which I cannot tell a story involving several generations of artisan producers, techniques abandoned by the rest of the food industry before the 1950s, a mythic element of the secret-sauce kind, and a ridiculously long production time.

Projecting any kind of authenticity requires three things, according to Carroll and Wheaton: a visibly projected identity claim, credibility of the claim, and an identity that’s perceived as reflecting the meaning of authenticity in question. It’s obviously the second ingredient that’s the weak link here. The marketing claim is hard to verify, and it’s not particularly consistent with the brand’s general image.

If there is one luxury brand that has totally done away with every connection to Old World quality, instead choosing an aggressive brand exposure strategy that has got it associated with your little sister’s most annoying friends, well, it’s Louis Vuitton. In fact, a typical Louis Vuitton quote goes like this: “Showing off her Louis Vuitton collection (she had the sunglasses, belt, wallet, and garment bag!), Heidi Montag looked cute in a sleeveless beige top and light khaki trousers …” (from celebrity-gossip.net). The demureness of the 17th century-esque seamstress does not rhyme with the brashness of the stereotypical consumer.

The point of Carroll and Wheaton’s article is that authenticity is projected more credibly when it is organisationally constructed. A feature of the organisation – highly visible, costly to change and implicitly permanent, should radiate the symbolic meaning of authenticity that the company wants to project. But modern production is a pre-requisite for keeping Louis Vuitton’s operating margins well above the industry average. Would making a more reality-based campaign on the small part of the company’s production that’s actually made in an artisan way (custom-made products made in an atelier in Paris) do? Perhaps. Or maybe Louis Vuitton should simply rethink their strategy.

Brand consultancies come in all shapes and sizes, not to mention actual work output – from the very conceptual, intangible work of agencies that are basically management consultants with a brand focus, there’s a long way to the hands-on graphic design-based approach of others. But the basic approach of many of these agencies is that a brand is an intangible asset, that can be shaped and controlled with the help of the tangible means of communication: visual identity, advertising, and lately, social media. More extensive brand models place ”the product” as an integral part of the brand, as opposed to the brand being something that adds to it. Still, traditional brand building focus has been on communicating and persuading. I would argue, that as branding practice has evolved to include an ever larger perspective – much brand theory today is more concerned with organisational culture and abstract value propositions than with the humble design work once associated with it – it would be wise to include the repertoire of service design in its tool box.

Why service design? Basically, service design is all about creating great user experiences. This is quite different than the creation of a product, which is something that still needs the magic of human interaction to be meaningful (a great user experience can very well include the interaction with a product, but that’s another matter). The experience is what moves people, what they seek and what they remember. And the experience is a powerful thing: a strong, positive experience can create a lasting bond to the entity that provided it. Contrary to much market communication, it has value in itself to the user, it does not need to be associated with a marketable product/service in an artificial way. Instead, the service experience is the embodiment of the brand. Additionally, with its insistence on building value for the user, service design seems like the more modern way of building brands in a world where the mass marketing concepts of target groups of consumers being served story telling and randomly attached values seem increasingly out of touch with reality.

But is it that simple, really? No. Focusing on the design of services can mean a too narrow conceptualisation of how people see value and how they make sense of the world. In its most basic form, service design can seem almost obsessed by just simplifying daily life with a nifty service. But if too single-mindedly concerned with the sheer practicalities of a good service, there is a danger of forgetting the emotional aspect of human life. There’s a danger of falling into a service variety of the frankly quite naïve “cut the marketing bullshit, make a good product” rhetoric I ranted about a while ago (here).

This is the power of traditional branding: with its symbolism and metaphors, it talks to the powerful emotional, expressive part of the human brain. The part that dreams, imagines, plays. The part that makes the experience of getting a coffee in a small coffee shop in a tiny Italian village a memorable experience of excellence, even though the same coffee served in a high street chain would taste unremarkable. It seems to me that the real power of service design as a way to build brands lies where its user value focus is combined with a creative way of thinking about what a good user experience is. A way that accounts for both our longing for being told the myth of the Hero’s journey, and for being able to buy our train tickets with the help of an iPhone app.

A couple of my most interesting assignments during the last years have been developing brands within food and wine. As a result, I’ve spent quite some time observing brand strategies in this field. It does not take too long, though, to identify varying kinds of authenticity as the big, macro trend almost all food and drink brands have taken into account in some way.

Authenticity, of course, is considered a general holy grail for 21st century brands. No wonder, as we live in a culture that’s more or less obsessed with authenticity; almost anything under constant threat of being labelled fake. (Authenticity is a concept with a polemic sort of built into it; it’s never as visible as when it’s questioned).

It’s also, a term that is often either taken very literally as a “real” business (un)strategy in a genuine backlash against, well, inauthenticity, or discussed in an almost outraged fashion as a cunning way to trick people into paying a premium. Either making a fan portrait of Innocent Drinks, or “calling their bluff” by pointing to them being partly owned by The Coca Cola Company. For someone involved in branding, though, I’d say it’s important to have a more thorough understanding of authenticity. Seeing how this concept so heavily influences the way people make sense of their world, knowing how it’s created and how it’s maintained (hint: it’s rarely a one-person-holding-strings kind of job) is crucial.

In short, social scientists tell us these about authenticity as it pertains to brands:

Authenticity has many meanings. For example, authentic can be interpreted as being moral (“being true to your values”), or historically accurate, or true to a type (like a music genre).

Authenticity is socially constructed. It does not tell you anything about metaphysical realness, but about how it’s perceived. A brand, a product, a place is interpreted as authentic and treated as such: that’s when the value is created. (That does not mean that it’s arbitrary, though!)

Authenticity is not stable, but always changing – what was perceived as terribly inauthentic can become authentic with time. And what was once authentic can suddenly have to meet other demands on authenticity, the bar has been raised, by other brands or by other factors.

Authenticity is not universal, but individual – what is authentic for someone is not to another. Judging authenticity is very connected with being a member of some kind of social context; being working class, or being a goth for that matter. More specifically, the concept of authenticity changes with the amount of cultural capital a person has.

There is some great literature on authenticity, of course. For example, Michael Beverland has written about authenticity in premium wines, and Glenn Carroll and Dennis Wheaton about restaurants – I’ll get around to both of them in later posts, which will explore different kinds of authenticity, and how it’s is crafted and cared for.

Why does “augmented” in Augmented Reality have to equal “filled with more information about the object”? Information is great, but it’s not the only route to elevating your mundane existence, now is it. Actually, If I get to choose a little more widely, I don’t particularly want the reality that surrounds me to contain more information. (And bear in mind that I’m the person in my circle of friends who is by far the most passionate about learning and sharing knowledge. Actually, to the point where I’ve bored many a dinner party with reports on whether the restaurant we’re at uses the tissue brand I’ve worked for, in their restrooms. I should stop doing that. You can tell by the embossing pattern on the hand towel, by the way.) I’m quite happy in that department. I’ve got this:

Screenshots from this video.

What I would like from objects around me, instead of them telling me absolutely everything about themselves at any instant, is for them to be a bit more exciting, interesting, fun even, on a more emotional level. Why not make me feel good about myself, or make me dream little. Well, that’s what good brands do.

Also, right now, I’d like my head to stop hurting. And in fact …

*Or Love.

The market as a conversation: a constantly repeated mantra for 21st century brand communication. You might argue that “the brand is not possible to own nowadays, you can’t totally dictate your brand image anymore” suggests an idealised past that never existed, (change is, as you know, good for consultants) but anyway. But the accompanying idea that brands should be more human, less corporate and engage in personal conversations, though interesting in itself, seems to result in many cases in empty non-conversation, in boredom. “How do you like your coffee?” tweets the software company, and feels it’s now engaging with the human world in human way, by imitating how “real people” speak. Nothing happens.

Well of course, this kind of conversation is never engaging to anyone in itself. It’s a classic example of communication with a channel maintaining function – the information transmitted is not all that important or exciting or fun, but engaging in the conversation helps for example to establish and maintain relations of various kinds with other people. The same conversation that one finds pointless with a neighbour you normally only greet with a “hello”, feels totally different with your best friend. A very human activity. And face it, yes there are brands you love, but you’re acutely aware that even with the most engaging brand personality, a brand can’t speak and has to go through a human being, who’s the actual recipient of your channel maintaining chats, and for them to be everybody’s best friend on that massive scale just because they work somewhere nice, well. Unfortunately, a brand is not cuddly TV alien ALF, where a voice and a hand that fitted his little furry costume could create the perfect illusion of a family member.

Paul Fusco wants to know how you take your coffee.

Without prior investment in the relationship with another human being, this “conversation” is just the lacklustre reality of a February morning talk with a stranger, or neighbour, or semi-acquaintance, on the tube. Yes, the snow is terrible, yes, you’d think public transport in a Scandinavian capital would cope with it better, no, I normally don’t have to use the subway to get to work, but today I have an early-morning meeting. Cue hopefully not too rude display of we’re-finished-here behaviour, e.g. concentrated texting or Metro reading.

So why is it so many brands don’t instead try the type of interpersonal discussion that doesn’t depend totally on relationships, being the great conversationalist? The great conversationalist is interesting, knowledgeable, entertaining, shows her/his personality – which leads to a favourable view of the person, classic brand equity in fact. This inevitably leads to dinner invitations. Difficult, yes, but nothing in commercial communication is easy. That’s why people like me are (sometimes, very well) paid to spend all day and, frequently, all night creating it.

Brilliant at one-way communication, brilliant at two-way communication. And quite dashing.

And, anyway, the really interesting brand-as-conversation idea surely should evolve around where you and your customers place and replace your brand within the large tapestry of human life. What you might call cultural conversation. It might well be created with the help of one-on-one talks, and it can certainly be helped by following online conversations about your brand. But it’s above all a question of understanding and reacting to what your customers or fans or users need, think and do on a larger scale, and in a deeper way, no matter the medium. What do they dream about, what are their biggest griefs, their biggest prides? How do they use your brand in their life, and can you help them, honour them, challenge them even? Balancing that is being another kind of great conversationalist.

Actually, though useful for many things, there’s nothing intrinsically more engaging with two-way communication. Almost everyone in the whole world has been moved, touched and comforted on a very personal level by the totally closed one-way mass communication of recorded pop music. There’s no reason why your two-way conversations shouldn’t live up to the standards of the exciting, interesting brand personality your other communication channels imply you have going for you.

It’s well-known that the environment a service is executed in is important. The physical environment is rich in cues about the quality and character of the service, cues that consumers look for both before and after buying and that affect their experience of it. With many services (e.g. hotels), the company’s own premises is an integral part of the service, and even when it’s not (e.g. broadband), paying attention to the shop, showroom or similar (the servicescape) can be very rewarding.

During the 00s, there has been a trend for service companies whose products are considered dull, complicated and a necessary evil by consumers (banking, insurance, etc) to look at where consumers do enjoy to go and consume: shops selling designer objects or clothes, coffee shops, and try to emulate the positive experience of visiting these places. The concept is rather simple: by borrowing bits from a service experience that is fun or pleasurable, the service provider deemed less exciting by consumers becomes more enticing. Even though the coffee or the smartly designed umbrella is just a small part of the actual business, the feeling of being in a positively charged, relaxed environment like a café or a shop puts you in a different mindset than at the traditional bank office. Most importantly, if successful, it changes behaviour at the branch. To talk with Mary Jo Bitner, customers exhibit more approach behaviours: coming in, staying, spending money, coming back.

Approach or avoid? A decision based on reactions to the servicescape.

Two Scandinavian examples of this from the last decade: Danish Max Bank rolled out their Max Café concept in 2004, where you can “get a cafè latte, a talk with your bank manager, or see what banking products we can offer”.

Having a coffee at a Max Café. Images from the Danish Design Council.

Similarly, Swedish banking and insurance giant Länsförsäkringar built their Länsförsäkringar Shops (concept start: 2007) around the pleasurable consumption of consumer goods. The servicescape, an elegant and inviting space created by Swedish retail branding firm Bas Brand Identity, is similar to a design store with added space for meetings. The shop sells a selection of items that are related to Länsförsäkringar’s banking/insurance products (e.g. smart shopper with protection from pickpockets) or, not all that related (e.g. hand crocheted iPod cover).

Inside a Länsförsäkringar Shop. Image from Bas Brand Identity.

Incidentally, the same phenomenon could be seen within art spaces at the same time (the 00s). In my bachelor’s thesis, for example, I discussed how the Modern Museum in Stockholm moved towards the retail shopping and café experience – both in its visual communication and in the increased prominence of its museum shop, as well as the addition of an espresso bar (adding to the Modern Museum/Architecture Museum’s existing two restaurants).

Both the Max Cafés and the Länsförsäkringar Shops are, in my opinion, excellent examples of how using the service environment strategically can transform how customers interact with their service provider. I wonder though, when it comes to borrowing concepts for your less exciting service, what will come next. The idea of shopping and coffee shop visits as the most pleasurable of experiences is of course cultural, and therefore in flux. The attraction with these places is often connected with the idea of turning your space into a meeting place, and this role can change. Perhaps the critique of the excesses of consumer culture will lead to a radical shift in direction for where we want to meet and relax, for example towards connecting with nature? And in turn, will next-generation banking be placed in rooftop gardens? Or, more weatherproof, the bank branch turned into a relaxing orangery? (Or a zoo. Just imagine…)

It’s interesting as well, that these two activities (shopping for pleasure, drinking lattes) are typically seen as female-oriented. Either it’s a conscious targeting, or just the fact that they are easily incorporated into a service business of this kind (the banking pub could be problematic, after all). But maybe there’s an opening for servicescapes of a less gendered kind here. In any case, the more services move completely on-line, the more we’ll see innovative service environments that will offer us enjoyment and pleasure. even when using the provider’s main service doesn’t. Otherwise, what’s the point of having them at all.

I’m a fan of maybe ten brands on Facebook. There’s one or two signs of support for friends’ businesses, some Stockholm clubs and art institutions whose events I want to be in the know about, and a couple of fashion/design magazines. It’s this last category that interests me here, as there is no particular practical reason for becoming a fan, other than getting the basic info of a new issue coming out. Well you don’t exactly have to be Bourdieu to craft a very simple theory of why I associate with certain brands (as a friend once put it: “habitus galore!“), so I won’t bore you with it. (Even though I think the question of type of product is mysteriously absent when the most avid of Brand Conversation Evangelists are preaching. Frankly, if you’re a toilet paper brand, you ARE a little less fascinating to strike up a conversation with than if you’re Acne.)

What fascinates me a bit is this: the very act of Facebook fandom seems to lessen my appetite to actually go out and buy the magazine. Not that I read the magazine on-line instead, that wouldn’t be especially interesting. I just… lose interest a little. I don’t know if it’s just me, but I suspect not – there’s something quite logical about this paradox. You could call it the commercial brand equivalent of “slacktivism”, simply signing up digitally for a cause without any actual change of behaviour or donation. (Purely digital activism is not all bad, of course – here’s a piece for design mind that makes a case for it, but sort of avoids the question of bottom-line contributions.)

There are as you probably know hundreds of models of consumer motivation, but one that seems useful here is Dan Ariely and Michael I Norton’s concept of conceptual and physical consumption. Conceptual consumption, meaning the psychological consumption of ideas and concepts, can occur both together with and independent of physical consumption. Basically, they argue that conceptual consumption is implicated in, and plays a large role in even the most basic consumption acts, such as eating or drinking. Rather than just eat something to survive, human beings add a lot of conceptual layers to the act: “Is this dish fairtrade/eco/healthy?”, “Doesn’t this dish feel a bit 80s?”, “Will my colleagues thinks I’m unmanly if I choose the salad?”. The satisfaction of successful conceptual consumption (feeling good about yourself in a number of ways for choosing the small, expensive, stylish, fairtrade chocolate) often drives behaviour even when it’s in conflict with physical consumption (assuming that you enjoy the taste of the cheap private label stuff more). My thinking is that if the conceptual part of the consumption of a brand’s products is large, it can be replaced by other interactions with the brand, that allow you to get the good bits without effort or having to pay.

It’s a common observation that the artefact is losing importance, that the enjoyment of physical ownership (the record collection) can be replaced by the access to shared digital files (Spotify) without much grievance. But the Facebook page does not even offer a part of the product, like the streamed Spotify album vs its physical (deluxe edition with book and linen cover) counterpart. It’s just the brand as a sign, without the product. And it’s interesting that when it comes to some brands, for many consumers, that might be what counts. In a world where more and more social life happens digitally, what’s the value of owning a pair of New Hip Brand shoes vs showing that you’re in the loop by being a fan of said brand on a social network?

The more a brand is building its strategy on its magic as some sort of status signifier, the easier it would probably be for the consumption of its products to be replaced by some free, purely symbolic consumption – the conceptual part of consumption is satisfied in any case. It leads to an interesting challenge for luxury and subculture brands: how to balance brand, product and digital presence, to be both in the conversation and in business?

I recently held a short introductory presentation on service design, for a non-designer audience of SME CEOs. Here are the (translated) presentation slides, together with short recaps of my presentation.

In this short talk, I’ll present the field of service design to you – a field that has grown a lot over the recent years, but is still rather unknown for many leaders of small to medium sized companies.

Today, the service sector makes up the biggest part of the economy, up to 75% in Western Europe. This number is a result of a major shift during the last century, as you know: the move from an industrial, product-based economy, to a post-industrial, knowledge- and service-based one.

On top of that, the digital revolution has blurred the boundaries between product, service and communication. It used to be quite simple … you had your product, designed by a product designer and packaged by a packaging design firm – and then you used various kinds of market communication to get it out to your customers. If you worked with services, the process was much the same, even though most likely, nobody consciously designed or packaged your service.

Now, however, there’s increasing confusion about what actually constitutes a product, service or brand communication – it all comes together on the web, in phone apps, etc. Also, even in traditional products, there’s a trend for a larger service component: in a world where getting ahead of the competition becomes harder and harder, it’s a way of obtaining a competitive advantage.

But weirdly enough, even though services are so dominant in the economy, many companies don’t invest at all in the design of them. Even though practically every company that makes products take great care in their design, only a fifth of service companies do the equivalent.

Of course, services are not as straight-forward as design objects as products. They have certain characteristics, that have to be taken into account when designing:

First of all, services are created here and now – in the moment of their consumption. This means that they are harder to control fully with design; utterly, the success of a service is always dependent of the person who executes it. Secondly, a service is both tangible and intangible – a hotel night, for example, is not just the access to the physical room, but also many, intangible, interactions. Design of a service, therefore has to be multi-dimensional, taking all aspects into account. Also, it’s often difficult to measure and detect quality in a service, which makes the customer search for clues: designing visual and behavioural clues of a high quality service is important.

Here, you see the dimensions of a service that can be designed: you can design the procedures and behaviour that make up the service, its physical and visual components – the place where the service is executed, digital interfaces, etc – and how the service is communicated. These dimensions all interact to produce the user’s overall impression of the service.

How is it done, then? Well, very briefly, the process of service design is very much like the design of other things. It starts with a research phase, followed by numerous design proposals that are tested and developed, and, often after several iterations, the design is implemented.

Service design employs a number of methods for research and design, but I don’t have the time to show you more than one. An important part of designing service is producing a service blueprint – a schematic “recipe” for the execution of the service. Service blueprints are a kind of service roadmaps – tangible, visual documents that show us where and how customers and companies interact. They can be employed both in the research phase, when analysing the status quo, and as design tools.

I’ve stressed the importance of tangible elements in a service – they often play a large part in how a customer judges service quality, as the abstractness of services is challenging to people. This is especially true with more complex services like medical or professional services. That’s why paying attention to touchpoints is important. Touchpoint can refer to several things, but here I use it as a term for physical interactions between the user and the service provider. Touchpoints can be divided into interacting with staff, the physical environment of the service, physical components (like a user’s manual or a key), screen interfaces and communication (advertising, brochures).

This was a brief introduction to the field of service design. A field that, it seems, has a huge potential of growth in the coming years. Several factors imply that the need for service design will grow: for example, as I mentioned earlier, the service component in products is increasing in importance. Also, customer expectations are, on the whole, rising – today, customers expect excellence in every service of any significant value, and letting your services develop on an ad hoc basis won’t simply be possible any more if you want to stay in competition. It’s time to start paying close attention to the design of your services.