I am a reluctant brander. Like most User Experience designers, I like to think of myself as a high-minded design thinker – not a marketer. You know the arguments. Designers think about solving real human problems and obsess on the essence of something’s purpose. Marketers define essence as that which gets noticed and remembered. Designers are empathically creative. Marketers are exploitatively creative. Designers seek timeless truths. Marketers are trend-chasers. Designers live in Brooklyn and sell artisanal pickles between freelance gigs. Marketers live in Manhattan and coin phrases like FroYo. Yet it didn’t take me long working in this field to realize that making such distinctions is wrong-headed. If anything, I relate more to the marketer these days. Marketers trend towards the pragmatic. Designers? At their worst: ideologues, aesthetes, navel-gazers. Design and marketing ultimately chase the same goal, “marketplace magic,” so why not think like a good branding brain in order to name and position your digital business? At a minimum you should know a little about the work of Lynn Altman before you set about trying to name your site and write a tagline for it. Her firm, BrandNow, and her book, Brand it Yourself, are excellent starting points for demystifying the creative process behind successful product branding.
The First Key to Success – Counting to One
Like design, branding involves creating an illusion of clarity out of that which is fundamentally indeterminate. Whether you are publishing a blog or building iPhone apps, you are looking for a singular, but simple and strong, idea at the center. Or to put it Altman’s terms, you should learn to count to one. “We don’t buy a shampoo that doubles as a face wash and a hand soap,” she writes. Consumers want to believe, whether it is true or not, that “certain brands and certain products perform best at certain tasks.” Domino’s Pizza built their mega-brand on a single promise – delivery in under 30 minutes. There was no mention of whether the pizza was also delicious. Less successfully, Advil tried to position their product to the marketplace with two core benefits. Fast. Strong. Advil. “Do you remember that campaign?” Altman asks. “Of course you don’t. Neither does anyone else.”
Practicing this sort of reductionism is harder than it sounds. Odds are that your product or website does more than one thing well, or at least that you want it to. For instance, if you think your express passport service is both easy and fast, you will be hard-pressed to give up one of those benefits. You may make the mistake of naming your service ABC Passport Express as a result. “ABC” connotes easiness and guarantees good phone book placement (a valuable business benefit before Google came along in 1997), and “express” sounds fast. Good, right? No, in fact, because you will probably lose out to your more focused competition, RushMyPassport.com, who commits to the single benefit of fast turnaround. Being perceived as having one clear benefit usually wins the battle for the prospect’s mind – which is all that matters.
The name, "ABC Passport Express," simultaneously promises ease and speed of service, not to mention the benefits of being local area specialists as captured in their tagline. The result is generic.
RushMyPassport.com focuses on one core promise, speed of turnaround time, and creates a coordinated impression that this is what they do - get you your passport fast.
The Second Key to Success – Work Fast and Loose (at least at the beginning)
Ok. So now you can count to one, but how do you arrive at the right one? The most sure-fire way is to start with the many. Ideas are cheap, so you should generate lots of them, and you should do it fast. The design firm IDEO, more famous for their brainstorming methods than any other design firm in history, once re-designed that most familiar and time-tested of objects, the supermarket shopping cart, in only 5 days. “Maybe we should acknowledge it’s kind of insane to do an entire project in just a week,” said Peter Skillman of IDEO, as their team proceeded to do exactly that – on national television! The project was done in response to a challenge set forth by the producer’s of ABC’s television news magazine, Nightline, in 1999. One of IDEO’s key premises is to throw lots and lots of ideas out in the early phases – then cull them down to the key ideas later. In The Art of Innovation, Tom Kelley shares the IDEO brainstorming rules which are written on the wall during brainstorming sessions there. Go for Quantity. Encourage Wild Ideas. Be Visual. And always, always – work fast and loose in the early stages, because winning ideas will get refined in the later stages. And, guess what? Winning ideas can come from anywhere, so generate lots of them!
And if we return to the Brandmaker Express method that Altman writes about in her book, we will find an approach for generating names and taglines that is very much in the spirit of IDEO. For each naming challenge, Altman and her team design a set of creative workshop exercises to generate lots and lots of ideas. The workshops are run twice, once with the employees and internal stakeholders at the client company, and once with a team of ‘creative souls’ (an eclectic group of creative professionals who do this as a moonlighting gig.) The workshop games are developed on a custom basis for each product being named, but there are a few favorites which appear over and over. For instance, to generate tagline ideas there is usually an exercise to write an attention-grabbing headline like you might find in a famous publication, but the publication that serves as a setting is varied based on the tone of the product (e.g. NY Daily News for “sensational” headlines, NY Times for straightforward and sophisticated.) Then she might add another exercise to push the creativity further, such as “Now in Three Words,” where the headline has to be compressed to it’s 3-word essence. There are also specific exercises for arriving at names, such as “Word Smash,” which involves taking two English words that fit the concept and shoving them together to make a nonsense word – like Celebrex or MaxiPro. The point with these games is to do lots of them, coming at your naming challenge from several angles. As you are doing the exercises, you should be furiously writing down the things that your brainstormers are saying in response to the challenge.
The Third Key to Success – Synthesize the ideas into a few powerful concepts, then visualize them
My favorite part of working with Altman is when the professional graphic designer she hires comes back with about 20 full-color 10 by 14 print-style ads with names, taglines, and corresponding imagery. This is where the ideas from the brainstorming are synthesized and come to life, and this is also the appropriate time to critique the ideas and vote on them as a group. The book has many insights on how to get to the right 20. For instance, find out the dealbreakers early. Maybe your CEO hates purple so there is no use in developing the purple people eater concept that someone threw out in one of the brainstorming exercises. Concision is essential. You should develop taglines that could tell the story of the site (along with a name and a logo) if everything else on the page was removed. And she provides several known pitfalls that lead to writing bad, consumer alienating taglines. Rampant use of the gerund, e.g. using a verb with no subject and adding “ing” to the end, as in Nokia’s “connecting people,” is a big no-no. Altman calls this kind of tone “self-congratulatory, self-praising, and seriously superior.” She also likes second person taglines, not first person. Telling your customer what you are trying to do in a first person tagline is not the point (e.g. Lucent’s “creating value through true convergence.”) Second person taglines, like “you deserve a break today,” bring the customer into the brand’s narrative.
Lynn Altman uses print-style ads, along the lines of this one for monster.com, to present name and tagline concepts.
So by now, I hope you’re convinced that it’s time to think like a marketer, not a business development person or -god forbid- a designer, when you are naming and positioning websites. Don Norman, in a recent interview in upstart UX magazine, Want, said outright that the distinction between designers and marketers is really very small. They both ask the same question, “How do we make it so that people will enjoy the product?” And if you are wondering who is more creative – marketers of designers? – you should sit in on one of Brand Now’s creatives-only brainstorming sessions and you will realize that we are indeed talking about two sides of the same coin.
Recent Comments