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.

This girl I’m sure you’re familiar with: the Health-Happiness-Energy Woman. Dressed in white, she goes down to the beach, stretches out her arms, and JUMPS. She does this to express her joy of living, and, not infrequently, her love for algae smoothies. An odd creature if you would meet her in real life, but so common in the brochures, ads, websites, posters that surround you that you don’t even notice her. A stock image cliché.

All communication is based on some sort of shared references. Designers communicate with a visual language that’s meant to be understood by the recipient, often instantly. It’s no wonder then, that many marketing communication images are constant repeats, Plato-esque variations of the same ideal images – especially when representing abstract concepts: fun, health, stress.

The low cost of images from the gigantic stock image banks, and probably in turn the working conditions of stock image photographers (creating images for maximum usability for popular keywords instead of a defined brief, at low fees), mean that these cheesy concept images are everywhere. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, communicating through simple symbols – woman biting apple for healthy, grey-haired man with sweater over shoulders stroking a golden retriever for post-retirement healthy. It does get the point across instantly to broad target groups, even if those images are equally instantly forgotten. If you’re trying to differentiate your brand against competitors, obviously they’re very counter-productive …

… but easy as they are to mock, these stock image clones are also a reminder of how easily visual clichés are reproduced, and difficult the balance is between communicating well within the reference world of your audience and being dispensible, derivative, boring. There are a myriad of similar repeating images/visual elements in the sexier, slicker high-end part of the design world, that can be just as damaging to your brand.

The fascinating thing about stock images: you only really start to notice the Health-Happiness-Energy Woman when she’s taken out of context and multiplied, like in this post. Different models, different beaches, different oceans – the same jump. And you only really see the strangeness of her ways when you look at a picture that strays too much from your mind’s ideal image. Like this one, above: too heavily bent forward, she looks bound for the humiliation of landing face down in the sand. Now, she’s almost a little disturbing, her open mouth possibly letting out not a joyful shout but a mad scream. Another angle, colouring, pose might have instead tweaked even this quite hopeless image subject from cliché to readable-but-attention-grabbing. But instead, most photographers settle for slight variations of the exact same image.

Another thing, how can they all jump so HIGH?

No, planned brand communication cannot be replaced by “delivering a great product or service that will get your customers talking (online)”, like I’ve heard said more than once in recent years. Not that you shouldn’t. You should deliver a spectacular product, if you can. But there’s something far too simple about this concept.

The fundamental flaw, as I see it, is a naive conceptualisation of what makes a “great product”. I’d say everybody would agree that the quality of the product is intrinsically linked to human experience. That is, at least when talking about products in this context (as objects on a market, as opposed to objects in a test setting or similar), it’s the user’s experience and opinion of the product that matters. A great product is one which the user thinks is a great product.

But there are literally hundreds of studies made on consumers over the course of the last, say, fifty years that tell you that people’s appraisal of a product is a highly subjective thing – a wonderfully complex concept filled with cultural bias, preconceptions, situational factors … All very typical for the complicated creature that is the human being. Consumers who drink beer with visible brands see those beers tasting very differently and prefer beers with their favorite brand label, whereas unbranded beers are judged as tasting similar to each other (Allison&Uhl:1964). Your enjoyment of a certain wine increases when you think it’s more expensive, even when you’re actually being served the same wine over and over. And so on.

When claiming that a “great product is the new marketing”, one seems to assume that suddenly, humans experience a product through a radically less complex process: a very non-human objective appraisal of product qualities, that will be shared equally objectively to information-hungry potential new consumers. But surely, it’s been a while since anyone could seriously have such a schematic concept of human behaviour. Even the Homo Economicus died some time ago, after years of illness.

This is not to say that people’s true conception of the quality of a product can be easily subverted by branding. It’s to say that there is no “true conception” based only on the physical product, and therefore, communication plays an integral part in the experience of the product. Together with other aspects (like, obviously, intrinsic product qualities), it helps create very real enjoyment. All very complicated business, and very human. That’s what makes it so interesting.

For the holidays, I’ve collected a couple of articles that designers (and design interested non-designers) should read, from recent weeks when like me you’ve been too busy with before-Christmas deadlines.

Slaves of the Feed – This is not the realtime we’ve been looking for
Thomas Petersen, founder and partner of Danish digital creative agency Hello discusses our digital life and ponders possible ways to solve the problem of information overload with design.

Re-thinking Interaction Design
Johnny Kolko claims interaction design should move away from talking both branding and user experience. I don’t agree with everything Kolko writes, specifically I find he’s muddling macro and micro perspectives on the role of interaction design (there’s both a critique of UX and branding as ways of maximizing profits, and a critique of using design for that purpose in the first place, and neither are fully explored), but there are some interesting points made about design’s role in culture.

Don Norman’s attack on design research, and ensuing debate
If you have missed this somehow, the debate goes on about what actually drives innovation, technology or design – and whether there’s actually any point in ethnographic and similar research into the consumer’s deep, subconscious wishes. Norman’s answer is basically no, as he finds that technology more often than not creates the needs it fills. Design research is only useful for small incremental changes, he claims (compare this to what Roberto Verganti says in Design Driven Innovation, a book I wrote about earlier this year!) Three responses to this claim: Bruce Nussbaum, who disagrees, Adam Richardson, who thinks Norman’s definition of design research is too narrow, and Steve Portigal, who raises some interesting questions around several points in Norman’s piece.

This year, PricewaterhouseCoopers came seventh in the Best Brands of British Origin study. PwC outranked a range of household UK names such as the BBC, Marks and Spencer and Virgin. The strength and visibility of this very typical professional services brand is not unique – all of the large professional services firms invest heavily in their brand and have done for decades. Still, there lingers some skepticism among small firms about the visual identity part of brands, and, in fact, any kind of marketing other than word-of-mouth. The fear I encounter when networking with owners of small-sized professional services firms is more or less this: “I don’t want to come across as a cheesy sales person, so I’d feel uncomfortable with a website, a fancy logotype, marketing material, anything that markets me to clients in an obvious way. My clients come to me from recommendations.”

However, you’re not afraid of branding. You’re afraid of bad branding and marketing.

This is very understandable. There are so many examples of small- to mid-sized firms which market their offering in a way that will make you cringe. Salesy, pushy and cliche-filled material, pestered with stock images of laptop carrying Ken dolls with light blue shirts. Not unlike if Gucci were to start doing the same kind of ads as a discount hardware store. Or getting into consumer telesales. Basically, you can do it the wrong way, and you can do the wrong things for your line of business. You are right to think that both will destroy your business rather than building it.

Part of the problem, I’d say, is that these firms are in the hands of branding and design consultancies that say they’re experts on every kind of business. Some have, doubtlessly, the expertise and sensitivity to “get” both the world of consumer products and the world of professional services. But others simply apply a consumer thinking to a B2B context, and then add a touch of visual conservatism to get a suitably PS look. Also, these firms have not found an agency that thinks professional services are exciting. There still exists an unfortunate view that professional services are “no fun”, in relation to consumer product brands that can be built with humourous ads, colourful packaging design and viral campaigns featuring, say, giant talking rabbits .Instead find someone who’s excited by the prospect of helping you grow your business, and who knows your line of business enough to be able to find room for creativity, in an appropriate context.

Secondly, you are building your brand the right way – a professional reputation is the foundation for the professional services brand. What the visual part of branding will add to that is mainly a form of emotional support for the potential client, who is perhaps the most frightened of any potential client. She’s about to buy something that doesn’t yet exist, is intangible, highly complex, and that she’s unlikely to be able to accurately judge the quality of. She will be unconsciously looking for clues that tell her that recommendations and your own verbal presentation are correct – you are truly professional, and you’re right for her business. Those clues are largely visual, and as a professional services provider with much fewer touchpoints than within consumer products, each clue counts.

Recently, I stayed a couple of nights at an Elite hotel. The Swedish Elite chain consists of twenty or so nice, mid-priced hotels, often charming old inner-city hotels. It’s also got an attractive and suitable, mostly black and white, brand language, done by people who obviously know what they’re doing. But. This is what a night or two at an Elite hotel leaves on the retina (well, a selection).

Not pictured: flags, plates, cups, under-bathroom-glass-paper-towels, laundry bags, pens, notepads, etc, etc.

Elite are of course not unique in this. Many service businesses whose services provide a lot of physical touchpoints – hotels, airlines, etc – put a logotype on everything they see. I understand why, but still wonder: does branding necessarily mean repeating your logotype constantly? It seems to me to be a quite dated way of doing things. Shouldn’t graphic design rather help heighten the brand experience by adding to the positive experience of the service? For example, in this case, by helping to create a welcoming atmosphere and a feeling of (mid-priced…) luxury. (You can get that in a logo, but most likely it’s more easily with other means, especially since there’s a convention of “discreet=exclusive, personal, tasteful”.) Of course there are times when a logo is very helpful on a service artifact. You want to know that the check-in kiosk is from BA if you’re flying BA. But you could still remove 1/2 of these Elite logos and still not be unsure at all of where you’re staying.

Also, the logotype is in many cases a sign of ownership. If it’s not applied with moderation, there’s a risk of the guest feeling like living in someone else’s room. Someone who’s marked all their belongings with “Property of…” before letting you move in. (Well, you shouldn’t steal hotel hangers, obviously, but that’s another issue.)

There’s also the question of standardization. You know you’re in a chain hotel, obviously, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing at all. The standard’s more predictable, etc. But in hotels that have their own atmosphere, overuse of logotypes are unnecessarily intrusive and detracts from the hotel experience. I understand the need to make your mark as a chain, but still.

Here’s a more modern way of letting your brand visually put its mark on your hotel, in a way that heightens the experience of the service. What would happen if a large hotel chain translated this way of thinking to its own brand and clientele?

Dan Roam – The Back of the Napkin presentations

(Use fullscreen…)

David Armano – Thinking Visually

Chris Finlay – Visual Thinking

Kelsey Roger – Visual and Creative Thinking: What We Learned from Peter Pan and Willy Wonka