For alle dere som ikke klarer legge vekk strømmen av inspirasjon og kunnskap, selv om det er ferie og idyll, her er en liten sommerhilsen fra oss i SDG og SDG Diary.

The creative fifty er en samling med 50 av de kildene vi bruker mest i vår hverdag, hvor vi har lagt linken til de ulike nettstedene på bildene i dokumentet.

Vi håper det skaper glede, nytte og god fart inn mot høsthalvåret – draumenes halvår som det heter. :)

SDG_Creative_A3.

Find the presentation below or at slideshare.net/helgetenno.

I’ve included the part of the script describing the three areas of retail I’ve concentrated on; product, in-store and business opportunities:

Product opportunities
The product is not just a “brand” living on a shelf or being consumed by a member of the public. It is a character, which within the framework of a strong identity changes its characteristics to fit different roles through the stages of its own lifecycle; from the initial idea, the spark, to its realization (design), its distribution, shelf life, shared product experience and recycling (sustainability). Digital amplifies the characteristics, and helps the identity adapt at each stage.

In-store opportunities
The retail outlet is the most important arena for public choice. It is intense in its range of decisions, and numbing in its range of (similar) products. Inside this arena there are limited opportunities within frameworks. Frameworks put in place by the non-digital, non-organic world of cardboard and floor space. Digital transcends the limitations of the shop infrastructure, serving communication through personal devices controlled by a digital brain in “the cloud”.

In the advertising mindset the retail communication belongs to the “call-to-action” category. But this limits itself both in its expense on resources (financial and labor), scarcity of real estate and limited time span. In the design mindset the goal is rather strength through identity, creating a long lasting top-of-mind preference through establishing an interesting story, sharing values, creating memberships and avoiding the retail rock concerts of advertising.

Business opportunities
There are new business opportunities to be explored and discovered through the extension of digital and organic platforms. From engaging the crowds to taking the store to the world – not limiting access to it by physical destination. In categories where products follow patterns and become remarkably similar, it is digital and organic platforms that not only invite customers to explore and discover new, unique experiences. But also develop more layered identities, establishing thicker product relationships, and unwrap new business opportunities.
—

A special thanks to PSFK which as with a stroke of coincidence launched their brilliant PSFK Future of Retail Report just last week, adding a whole section to my presentation – I’ve been extensively referencing the source.

PSFK Future of Retail Report

During a short talk with Ji Lee at Gulltaggen 2010, he presented a hierarchy where advertising is at the top, then marketing, brand and at the bottom design. I’d never thought of placing these four fields into such a structure, but loved the concept, and it made sense to position them in relation to each other in this way.

Trying to design this idea, I ended up drawing a pyramid and started adding context to each stage…

Advertising
At the top of the pyramid, advertising can be at least three things:

1. Positioning (Al Ries, Jack Trout),
2. Creating an anticipation of the experience outside the experience itself.
3. Direct sales

Advertising is a great tool for selling anything from low interest products to aiding in creating or changing the perception of a brand. Advertising is tangible, but swift and constantly changing. Its stories and messages are focused on getting people to perform an action. Advertising is designed from briefs defined by guidelines, strategies and goals further down the pyramid; it’s top level communication.

Marketing
Marketing is the process of promoting and selling goods and services. It’s executed through individual actions, but fundamentally it’s the overall strategic program, defining, coordinating and executing on all levels of the organization. Marketing is the sum of day to day activities putting products to market and activating people through promotion and sales. Marketing is designed to achieve company goals and is constrained/directed by brand and design.

Brand
There are as many definitions of what a brand is as there are brand experts, from Neumeier’s “gut feeling”, to Yakob’s “The collective perception”. One thing is for certain; brand value exists in the mind of people engaging with it – not the company itself. But still, there needs to be guidance and direction to this value. The brand strategy defines how the company should achieve the right set of values. Branding aims at creating an advantage in a market place filled with identical products, as Helen Fischer quotes George Bernard Shaw: “Love is overestimating the difference between one woman and another”. The brand direction defines a framework and guides the rest of the company’s promotional and sales activities, but it is not fundamental, it is not the core company idea.

Design
The fundamental idea behind the company comes from its design. From identifying how to offer value in a specific situation, to designing the product (or service), how it creates value, its unique, identifiable identity, its story, form, interaction etc. From the initial value proposition to its tangible product the design defines how it creates value, how it performs, and how it remarks itself in the marketplace.

Design in this context is not just the visualization of an engineered product; it’s the comprehensive identity of the company or product – from the ground up.

–

By looking at the pyramid we can identify the role of each field of communication and how it relates to the other fields. (Advertising is created on the basis of the marketing strategy, which is the consequence of the brand and design platform. The brand is an enforcer of, or supplement to, the design – or lack of design).

It’s also important to note that job title does not define which part of the pyramid you are working on. Great ideas come from great groups of people, not labels. The point is: Understanding the role of the job at hand, and how this job is positioned in the greater complexity of the communications strategy.

The movement of brands towards associations with sustainable values is an indication of a consumer culture that is elevating itself beyond pure product benefits. Moral high-ground is the new positioning challenge.
We want something to believe in. But how far can we go in our quest to both win consumers and save the planet?
Do people really want to wipe their noble parts with meeting minutes from the last staff update?
“Naturale” believe they will. The Bold font across their package claims that their toilet paper is made from used office paper.
A good reason to buy their product, or is recycled budgets just…. crap?

When faced with a choice between 288 pairs of stockings, I'd rather wear pants

or How to deal with a nation of unhappy and indecisive shoppers

Four times a year we see the supermarket shelves fill up with brand new products. We’ve had increased competition in recent years, and competition seems to multiply choice. Among the new releases we not only see new brands we also find that exciting brands releases more variations of its product.

If some choice is good, then more choice must be better? Well, apparently not. In his book The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less the American psychologist Professor Barry Schwartz argues that we now have so much choice that it can paralyse us. Whether we’re buying a pizza, a cup of coffee, or applying to college, everyday decisions, both big and small, have become increasingly complex due to the overwhelming abundance of choice with which we are presented.

According to Schwarts consumers can be divided into two categories: maximisers and satisficers. Most people are what Schwarz calls maximisers who want the best product at the lowest price. Maximisers are people who seek and accept only the best. Satisficers on the other hand, are people that settle for something that’s good enough, and don’t worry about the possibility there might be something better.

Interestingly, there seem to be a correlation between being a value maximiser and being unhappy. The maximisers are obliged to devote far more time and effort to making decisions, but remain forever fearful that the best is still out there somewhere. In short, the more options we have, the more we struggle to make our minds up and the less happy we feel once we have actually made a decision.

So, what does it mean that we are a nation of (mostly) unhappy and indecisive shoppers? Well, as brand strategists we have to make our brands easy to chose and easy to stick with. Never underestimate the power of a strong brand.

Juryens kommentar:
“Med en solid og gjennomarbeidet informasjonsarkitektur og finesse i applikasjonene er det
lett å navigere seg frem i en myriade av informasjon. Sterk og konsistent design gir en god brukeropplevelse.”

Grafisk nominasjon
Vi fikk også nominasjon for Statoils visuelle identitet i kategorien “Grafisk design,
Identitetsdesign – stor”.

Juryens kommentar:
“En meget gjennomarbeidet profil som på en vellykket og ansvarsfull måte har løst en stor og kompleks oppgave.”

Visuelt 2010: Diogo Valério, kreativ leder for redesignen av Statoil.com, tar imot sølvet.

Team SDG & IUM stiller med et sterkt lag av designhoder og mediekropper i årets Holmenkollstafett.

Vi knyter våre beste sko, og setter for øvrig vår lit til at t-skjortene – spesialdesignet for utpsyking av konkurrenter – skal gjøre sin del av jobben.

Holmenkollstafetten 2010, t-skjorte spesialdesignet av SDG.

Holmenkollstafetten 2010: To IUM-babes og én IUM-hunk med SDG-designede t-skjorter.

Gratulerer, Helge!!
(Også klapper vi oss selv litt på ryggen fordi vi er så stolte av og glade for at vi har herr Tennø
med på SDG-laget.)

For mer om Gulltaggen 2010: www.gulltaggen.no.

In his talk on FMCG, brands and product design, Richard Murray suggests that we are better at creating categories than individual brands.

Is the sameness of unoriginal ideas to be blamed on our processes being too similar? If the analysis to the insight, to the design and form follows the same pattern across consultancies, agencies and brands, then everybody follows a similar pattern in order to discover the great insight that leads to the unique idea. The problem is, there is a lack of unique ideas. We are in a hammer and nail situation: “If we think our only tool is a hammer then every problem looks like a nail”.

Organic platforms isn’t only evidence of this, it might as well be the biggest category driven collection of surfaces we have.

A great deal of organic productions are built on an offspring of a model created back in 2000. A brilliant tool with an unfortunate side effect: everybody follows an identical pattern for development, one that engineers the structure in a one-dimensional approach, before adding identity at the end; as some kind of tag.

There are originally two legs to identity: The first one is the understanding that the visual identity and story of the product helps it differentiate itself in the market and create a place in peoples harts. The second one is the experience created around the product which helps the product become unique, by enhancing its identity through experience.

On organic platforms there is a third leg as well: Identity design is not only used to design experiences, it also identifies existing experiences.

What does this mean: Designing identities, on organic platforms, has expanded it’s traditional form, which to a large extent has been focused on visual identities and story. Designing identities now also demands that we identifying existing experiences and redesign / augment / ad value to them.

The result of the existing generic standardization, is that it has created an overwhelming range of sameness. Different brands offering the same services, content and applications online – following a pattern that not only creates a surge to make sure we are offering whatever everybody else is offering (the artificial standard / benchmark), but worse – having everything created, copyable by the competition.

Adding a different color scheme or logic at the end of a process does not create a unique experience, it merely ads a label to a generic offering. This is the result of a mindset where identity takes a back seat and is added at the end.

A generic brand identity is not an identity, its a category.

Unique and identifiable brands on organic platforms comes from doing the opposite to the standard process: It starts with the identity, and employs it to every strategic and creative decision from the first spark to the finale. Resulting in a unique and identifiable experience, which the competition is unable to copy and standardize in the marketplace.