In a recent article from FastCompany (http://bit.ly/nnYNwX), author Greg Lindsay talks about innovators losing their ability to innovate as they outsource manufacturing. Almost every technology leader out there send their manufacturing responsibilities overseas. This has had a negative impact on everyone from GM to Apple. These mammoth companies lack the ability to create what they design. Perhaps this is the real reason behind Google’s acquisition of Motorola; to gain control of the entire ecosystem. As Steve Jobs begins to cement his legacy by building the enormous and eco-friendly spaceship headquarters, he made an interesting statement to the Cupertino zoning commission:

“We’ve used our experience making retail buildings all over the world now, and we know how to make the biggest pieces of glass in the world for architectural use. And, we want to make the glass specifically for this building here. We can make it curve all the way around the building… It’s pretty cool.”

This is a rarity in America, where this kind of innovation is beginning to disappear. Unfortunately, Apple may now how to make the biggest piece of glass in the world, but can they make it? If Steve Jobs really wants to create a legacy that will see him mentioned in the same breath as Thomas Edison and Henry Ford, he needs to rethink Apple’s manufacturing policy. The company has purchased a massive piece of land and is building an enormous building on it, but it will only take up 25% of the space. This building will house some of Apple’s staff, but some will remain in Apple’s original office down the street. What Apple needs to do is take real control of their device ecosystem and bring manufacturing home to the US. Fill that new office space or the old one with the most innovative iPlant the world has seen. Supremely efficient, incredibly safe, amazingly advanced and… there’s one more thing: the largest american-employing manufacturing plant to be created since the early 70s.

Bringing the manufacture of Apple’s products to Cupertino will do more than allow the iPhone 5 I’m destined to stand in line for to have a single line of white text (rather than 2): Designed and Made by Apple in California:

Ultimate control over the entire life of Apple products. This has been a goal since the earliest days of the company (http://bit.ly/1b76kn). Apple has already seen companies like Foxconn pushing knockoffs of the iPhone and iPad. The more hands you have on your CAD drawings, the more likely you’ll find one looking to make a side profit.

New areas of innovation. Imagine what Apple will invent or reinvent to build a Apple-quality manufacturing plant. Imagine being able to sell this technology to other US and global manufacturers, the US government, etc.

An excuse to really leverage alternate energy. Currently Apple’s new office will be powered by internal natural gas generators. Imagine the power requirements of a factory. Solar, wind, thermal, etc. will all need to come into play.

New customer base. The new type of manufacturing plant will no doubt pique the interest of other companies who had been outsourcing. In order to compete more patriotically, but still keep costs efficient, they’ll need new ways to manufacture locally. Much like LucasArts took on other film effects jobs between Star Wars movies, Apple could begin manufacturing for Ford, GE, Boeing, IBM.

Giving back. Apple wouldn’t be giving the country a fish, it would be teaching it to fish all over again. This move could kickstart a rebirth in US manufacturing, reinvigorating the US economy, bringing blue-collar jobs back to the middle class. More people with more money means they could buy more Apple products right?

Good will. America needs a hero. Jobs are outsourced, social services are being slashed, salaries are shrinking while workloads increase, there are 5 applicants for every 2 jobs. Politicians have been selling out the American dream since the mid-70s. We need someone who will give us back our pride in American ingenuity and the opportunity to earn a fair wage for a fare days work.

Halo industries would blossom. Their is already an enormous ecosystem of manufacturers, wholesalers, technologists, etc. around Apple products. Now imagine the impact an Apple manufacturing plant would have on machine parts manufacturers, robot designers, and the myriad of businesses that support factories. Now imagine that the only companies chosen to support Apple’s US manufacturing initiative were US companies.

Steve Jobs, if you really want to Think Different an establish a legacy that will be taught on iPad Xs in grade schools across the country, it’s time to start getting the iAssemblyLine rolling once again: http://bit.ly/nWiFSb.

Image courtesy joshcUK.

I‘ve been involved in digital strategy for well over a decade. That ranged, in the early days, from advise on website content to , more recently, social media strategy. Digital strategy is as welcome by new companies wanting to start off on the right foot to companies who’ve spent fortunes in traditional media communications and want to “get into this whole Internet thing”.

What almost all of them think is that a digital strategist is going to translate tech-speak wizardry for them and solve their technology problem. While there is a certain amount of understanding of technology that is required, the main thrust of digital strategy isn’t about the technology itself, but of the people that use it.

Human-Digital Strategy

Social Media has been a big driver of so-called “digital strategy”. For the last 20 years people have been launching websites based on their sales or corporate communications needs. Basically store fronts and brochures. Over the last few years there has been an explosion of different types of sites for entertainment, communication, sharing, learning, teaching, networking, aggregating, creation, etc. all focused on users, many created out of the desire to build something cool rather than against a corporate business goal. There are plenty of  blogs about the upside and the downside of this model but the upshot is that 1.9 billion people are now using these sites. The thing is, the technology is nothing new. Sharing, media, content creation, etc. has been available for as long as the Internet has been open to the public. What has changed is the scale and simplicity of the technology and the consumption.

If no one was sharing photos, blogging, rating products, buying timeshare, distance learning, planning their wedding, etc. there would be no need for a digital strategy. Companies could rely on what they’ve always been good at: broadcasting their message. But, that is SO very 90s. Anyone doing business online has to understand How people are using technology, When they’re using it, Why they’re using it, What they’re using and they need to know Who these people are. This is the job of the Digital Strategist. This requires an understanding of psychology, sociology, basic human behavior, emotion, desires, and of course the latest cool gadgets. Think of Digital Strategists as Behavioral Technologists, Socio-Digital Engineers, Human Factors Planners.

I was recently asked what college classes most significantly  assisted my ability to do my job (I once told a class of sophomore graphic designers that the most important skill they could learn in college was writing). The questioner was surprised when I said “psychology and acting”. Understanding of the “human condition” and both basic and complex human behaviors is key in understanding how to market to real people. Acting classes helped me learn how to get into the head of a character.

Image by ISayx3.

It’s become very easy to simply reach into a hat to pick your concept so why pay the overhead for all of those turtlenecks, MacBooks, free coffee, trendy glasses, and downtown offices full of interns? Simple pick from the list below, insert your product, add your logo at the end and PRESTO! you have one of the top ten SuperBowl commercials. See? Wasn’t that easy?

1) Cartoon or clay-mation celebrity doing an irreverent “uncommercial”.

2) Mashup of current flavor of the week celebrity (best choice: teen one-hit wonder) and a beat up celebrity on the downward side of his career, but someone that the parents in the room can relate to.

3) sexual/emotional tension between two people in a new relationship (we’re seeing a gay trend in the coming years, you might want to jump on that).

4) Someone contemplating how mundane their life has become while inserting your product as their sure-fire escape from the banal.

5) Animated or puppet of cute animal doing something very human and interacting with an example of your audience.

6) Animal rocking out.

7) We Are Patriotic, Buy Our Stuff (even if it was actually made in Mexico, China or Canada)!

8) Misplaced popular culture icon.

9) the threat of a hot girl revealing even more.

10) Talking baby.

If your bosses or client are concerned that they might be perceived as cheapskates or not taking the SuperBowl opportunity seriously, there are plenty of up-and-coming or down-and-out 3rd rate celebs for second tear commercial spots or larger celebrities for upper tier budgets that will shoehorn nicely into any of the “turn-key” commercial opportunities above.

“It is the pervading law of all things organic and inorganic,
Of all things physical and metaphysical,
Of all things human and all things super-human,
Of all true manifestations of the head,
Of the heart, of the soul,
That the life is recognizable in its expression,
That form ever follows function. This is the law.”

It is my belief that “Form is the Function” in so much as the form is what makes the function successful. Often times the form is defined by the function. Now, I’m sure most non-designer would initially disagree with me, but let’s look at a few examples.

Membership Shopping Site

The sites below, Shop It To Me and Gilt, are both discount shopping sites that require membership. They are virtually identical until you look at their design, or form. Both function similarly in that members are sent an email (seen below) to show that day’s specials and incite you to buy now. Both feed their members products based on their profile and choices. The difference is in the form. Gilt has a much more high-end look and feel and, for the most part, shows a single sample of the product being used, essentially a lifestyle shot. Shop It To Me went with body-less clothes on a plain background. Their logo, the illustration of the lazy man on the couch, the quantity over quality aspect of product shots all cheapen their brand and make it a far less enticing place to shop from.

How does this impact success? While there are likely multiple factors that impact site visits, and I have no information on their sales, Gilt has more than twice the unique visitor traffic per month of Shop It To Me, despite the poor economy and the fact that Gilt seems to be appealing to a more elite audience and Shop It To Me is appealing to the more spend-thrifty audience:

Both sites have similar products, similar functionality, the obvious difference is their form.

This is not atypical of web platforms: the better the design, the more successful the company. It’s been argued that the better designed sites are because of their success not the reverse. The easy response to this is: If a company is already successful without taking the extra time and budget for a design upgrade, why spend the money? How often have you visited an ugly site and preferred a more elegantly designed competitor? This is because quality of design not only makes the site look more professional and trustworthy, it actually functions better because of that design.

A design agency I recently worked for focused 90% of it’s business on analyzing how design impacts conversion. Things as minor as the color of the CTA (call to action) had a significant impact on the number of conversions. More obvious aspects such as email, banner ad and landing pages that reflected each other’s messaging and design had a huge impact on conversions. The testing process would begin with a few different wireframes with similar design elements. The champion wireframe would then be retested with different design elements, over and over to find the most successful outcome. If the function of the site was to convert visitors to customers, the form was the differentiator.

While I completely agree that a site that functions better is more successful, the fact that functionality is so plug and play makes functionality a level playing field. The great differentiator is the form.

Update: The following article discusses a study proving that elegant design effects user trust. A good read:

Prettier Websites Make For More Trusting Web Surfers Study Finds

The Gap logo has been with us as long as I’ve been alive, it was first used in 1969. Recently something changed inside GAP. Brand agency Laird & Partners came up with an odd choice for a new logo:

Either the Gap logo is wearing a square hat or some horny gradient square is humping the serif right out of the Gap logo.

As it turns out, this is some half-baked pr-stunt/meets social media experiment/divided by crowdsourcing (a web2.0 term for sweatshops).

Apparently Gap decided to go with PR-stunt/crowdsourcing rather than the alternative, less-web2.0-friendly concept: blatant brand theft:

Hey, at least they didn’t hire the Arnell Group:

We interact with the world through our 5 senses: hearing, visions, smell, taste, and touch. We should consider the 5 senses with our marketing efforts, specifically with efforts with Social Media.

Sense of Hearing – If you listen to your audience it will help you understand their language, culture, needs, desires, interests, etc. It will help you be relevant in offering value as part of your SoMe engagement. It will help you be a better brand and make better products.

Sense of Vision – There’s nothing worse than rehashing what someone else has already done. The Big Idea isn’t dead. Be Imaginative, be Innovative, be Passionate. Begin with a Vision.

Sense of Taste – Humor, sexiness, focus, intellect are all valuable assets in SoMe. However, there is a fine line between humor and potty humor, sexiness and porn, focus and myopism, intellect and being a smart ass. Stay classy people, keep your sense of taste in check.

Sense of Timing – Social Media is about timing and timeliness. Trends can change by the minute, don’t let an opportunity to be relevant pass you by. Don’t wait until tomorrow for a conversation you could have today.

Sense of Humor – Social Media needs to be social, or shared, or viral, or pass-aroundable. Nothing does that better than buzz-worthy content and no content is more buzz-worthy than humorous content. The most widely ingested media is humorous. Check out this video which clocks in with 214 million views. It is the third most popular video of all time on YouTube, behind Justin Bieber/Ludacris’ Baby and Lady Gaga’s Bad Romance (both of which are arguably funny):

Image courtesy Nayski

This means that when you’re planning your marketing strategy, doing quality control, training your customer service team, it will be your customers who decide how successful you are, they are the ones who will tell others how good you are. All of your PR initiatives, marketing campaigns, branded events, make up your Brand Intent: your efforts to communicate the brand you want to be. The other 99% of what your brand stands for is your Customers’ Perception of your Intent coupled with their experience with your product and your customer service.

Cigarette companies had it right. WAY back in the day, when cigarette companies still advertised, the would show their cigarette package mixed in with a scene of hip, cool, good looking young people having a great time playing pool or surfing (must have been tough smoking a wet one). They weren’t selling the product, they were selling the lifestyle.

Fast forward to a time when I have gray hair.

When you’re selling your service or product, consider that people are less interested in what you sell than what they can do with what you’re selling. Apple nails this with their new iPhone 4 ads. Let’s leave out their antenna issues for a second and watch the spot. It’s not about how shiny and sparkly the phone is, it’s the emotional impact of what being able to talk to a friend or love one face-to-face means.

Many agencies and brands have gotten so caught up in what they’re selling that they’ve forgotten why they’re selling it. Next time you’re looking to differentiate your marketing message, think about your customer using your product for the first time, the anticipation finally being paid off with “wow”. This is the sound of your client engaging with your product (unless your product sucks, then it’s a different sound, perhaps “ugh”, maybe “aargh”). Film your spot, design your site, and write your copy around that. Distribute it. Watch sales rise.

I used to HATE Comcast. I payed a fortune for TV, phone, and Internet. Most of my issues revolved around TV: no sounds, freeing picture, no service, etc. As an early adopter and technology geek I am fairly forgiving of technical problems as long as customer service is responsive and addresses my problem. In order to communicate with Comcast you had to use email, which took forever for a response, or the dreaded 1-800-Comcast. This last, more instant channel was and still is a nightmare. After getting shuffled through 5 departments, have of whose accents you couldn’t understand you ended up with some who said “I dunno. What’s your account number?”

This all changed when Frank Eliason at Comcast got the blessing of management to launch @comcastcares on Twitter. I can simply Tweet that I have a problem and within minutes (on a weekday, weekends take longer) I get a response.

The point is not to slag Comcast, I’ve done that enough on other sites. The point is that I’m no longer a Comcast Hater. As I said, I’m forgiving of technological glitches, now Comcast is addressing them in a timely manner. This has dramatically shifted my perception of Comcast’s brand.

Zappos is another brand using customer service to grow it’s brand. it’s ‘customer focused” culture has skyrocketed it’s repeat customers helping the brand not only grow conversions from existing customers, but to generate great word-of-mouth marketing as well as free PR.

If there is one thing that brands struggle with right now is brand ownership. They believe that they still control their brand. In reality, they never did. A brand is not built on websites, pr, and TV commercials, it is built on how customers perceive it.

Brand Intent v. Brand Perception

This is not to say that marketers are out of a job, far from it. Brands control their intent, that is to say through marketing, design, PR, advertising, product development, customer service, etc. a brand can develop a personality, culture and conversational tone. All of these things will influence customers for better or for worse. But the User Experience is made up of more than banner ads and pop displays. The quality of the product, it’s accessibility, support, sales are all part of customer service.

Word-of-mouth has always been and will always be the single strongest channel for marketing. Customers with a good experience tell one person, with a bad experience tell 10, etc. With social media this formula has increased dramatically as bloggers and tweeters rush to get their reviews out there.  If the dynamics of the good customer experience versus bad customer experience hold true, it is in the best interest of brands to make sure that even those with bad customer experiences are treated well through customer service. Doing so can very likely turn even a hater into a lover and turning a lover into an ambassador.

Image by Nebbes61

I see a great deal of fantastic UX design (CNN), sometimes side by side with very bad UX (Facebook). User Experience, even just the User Interface portion of it is not relegated to the Web though. The greatest form of User Experience ever is the sandwich. Think about it: it requires no special tools and can have completely customized content. A sandwich can be flat, rolled, cold, warm and can include a variety of brands from private to Oscar Meyer before engaging with your mouth. Is this taking UX to a too simplified place? Not at all, anymore than discussing the genius behind Modernista’s non-website. For those of you not familiar with it, Modernista’s non-website is merely a layer of navigation over Google results for their name.  Technically it’s genius, but more importantly it uses this abstract of a website as a way to qualify clients. If their non-site is too weird for a potential client then its obvious that that client isn’t potential.

Don’t think for a second that User Experience is relegated to web designers. I mentioned the sandwich to give you a point of reference for how broad a reach UX has. Let me give you a recent personal example. As recently as 10 minutes ago and as personal as my breakfast. I’m talking about butter. Stop & Shop butter.

Believe it or not there is a glaring User Experience mistake here. Do you see it? It may not effect everyone but it does effect anyone with both salted and unsalted butter in their refrigerator. Imagine that you’ve just reached into the fridge to pull out butter to put on your corn or bread. Now imagine that you quickly glanced at the box and decided “I need the red butter, that’s the yummy, salty one” because the salted butter box is red. Now imagine how it will taste when you grab the red stick instead and read no further. You’ve just slathered your breakfast toast with unsalted butter. Have you ever tasted unsalted butter? It is NOT yummy.

Of course each stick has the type on it, but half way through a stick the wrapper is crumpled and yucky, barely legible. Why a designer chose to make the unsalted butter box blue but the stick wrapping red, and vice versa is beyond me. However, it is a good example of User Interface design that most of us can relate to. User Interface, and User Experience is everywhere and we all have to deal with it. How many of us have poured orange juice into our cereal because we haven’t had our coffee or put our glasses on and the cartons look the same? How many of use have cars with cup holders that can’t hold out coffee mugs? How many of us have struggled to figure out how to activate the automatic faucet in a public bathroom?

The fact is that more of us are involved in User Experience than we realize. My wife is a kitchen designer. She is constantly solving User Experience and Interface issues. Customer service is another extension of User Experience. Other examples with which you may be involved?

Crosswalks
Answering the phones at your office
Public bathroom cleaning
Slicing salami at a deli
Deciding if the IN door on your store swings in or out
Picking the music that will play in your changing rooms
The signature at the bottom of your email
Choosing when to do road work
Putting your name on your mailbox
Spraying graffiti on a wall
Making sure there are pricing labels on your products
Choosing which mobile platform to develop for
Cleaning the lines for your draft beer kegs
Throwing away your old company collateral

Any others you can think of?

User Experience can be complicated but it can be as simple as paying attention to and being thoughtful about some of the the things I’ve listed above.