Taking 'Brands as Patterns on the road

I'd been slowly growing the tool-sets behind Brands As Patterns since my days in R/GA. Creating hybrids of traditional Brand thinking, User Experience design, Product Strategy, Data Architecture and Business Strategy.

My SXSW panel in 2012 was a great forum to share some of thinking. I invited my good friends Greg Johnson, Walter Werzowa and Robin Lanahan to debate a panel around the growing thinking of iterative brand.

We'd had some astounding good calls to debate the subject, both Greg and Robin had deep experience in managing brands on the client side. Greg with HP and Robin with Microsoft. Walter had created the brilliant sound design for Intel Inside and was a wonderful composer.

A day before the panel I was called by the SXSW team to say that they needed to change our location, I was a little saddened because I thought we hadn't managed to fill a large room. But, on the contrary they asked if we could be the opening panel in the main conference room, and would we do a repeat show on the next day.

We weren't really prepared for the popularity of our panel, after all it was a little esoteric. But the shift in business, brand and product was palpable, people wanted a debate around the value of brand in the digital context.

More than 2500 people attended those two panels. We felt a little like rockstars as people would come up to us for days saying they'd seen it. Walter and I were even in a restaurant where an adjacent table sent us drinks. It was really overwhelming.

Several amazing clients came up to me during the SXSW event, all inspired by the methodology of thinking about brands iteratively. Two stand out. LEGO immediately resonated with the thinking, understanding the modularity of my idea and MSLO.

The digital client team from MSLO, or Marta Stewart Living Omnimedia came to me with an interesting problem. They were having an issue agreeing on the information architecture and navigation of MarthaStewart.com

We engaged on a project soon after and I flew to NYC to work with Ted Booth, Dever Thomas, Alis Cambol and Paul Valerio. We quickly realized that this wasn't a problem with information architecture, it was a problem with brand architecture.

A corporate website is just where all the problems of an organization turn up together. Organizing them properly can result in a complete shift in the architecture of the business. This is one example why we should never separate business, brand and product. They're so closely related, solving one thing usually means considering the other. Our clients we're very open, so we extended the project to cover brand architecture too. 

It was a wonderful team, both Alis and Dever were so open to a new process. No-one had really tried thinking about interaction, information architecture, User Experience and brand architecture together. But there was inherent value in doing so. By looking at the existing customer and the future customer at once in both ethnographic and consumer research. We could see patterns of interaction, patterns of purchase but most importantly patterns of life.

We realized three major things:

Some of the Brands inside of MSLO were in fact products. Some of the brands had multiple consumers rather than singular targets. Weddings for instance appealed to someone who was getting married, but also a parent of someone getting married and potentially a grand parent.

 We realized that some of the channels that MSLO were in weren't suited to their cadence. MSLO was set up around periodic publishing. Magazines and TV programming were at the core of the company, which created a daily, bi-monthly rhythm. Pinterest which had a huge Martha following worked with this cadence but Twitter and Facebook did not.

The expertise personified by Martha Stewart was a double edge sword. Although it was magnetic to those who were skilled enough to create perfection it scared the hell out of people who could not.

From our research we discovered that Martha Stewart was relevant to entire new generation of makers. Especially female entrepreneurs who wanted to make it them-selves. All we needed to do was organize MSLO to let her be that icon.

We presented the concept of an experience ladder. A way for MSLO to organize their product, content and team to create ongoing engagement. 

The rule of the experience ladder is that those who are just beginning need help which is relevant to them. They still aspire to be Martha, but don't want to be alienated. As you move up the experience ladder your mentors would shift across the spectrum of personality within MSLO eventually leading to the virtuoso at the top.

The same rule could also be applied to content. We created a content matrix where each recipe could lead to a recipe which had similar skills which pushed you upward through the experience ladder. Even if you could only boil an egg, you could make egg salad. If you could only boil water you could potentially make Bouillon.

We deduced the core patterns of the Martha experience:

1. The context in which information was being shared was the most important, a good teacher knows when to say what.

2. A sliding scale of Materials. Choosing good quality ingredients is important, but working with the materials you have still can create a positive outcome and get you learning.

3. Staging creates more value. How you chose to present what you've made of who you are can be as important as what you've made.

4. Expertise. Virtuosity is something to be attained rather than feared. It is necessary in small doses.

MSLO had all of these values within the brand, but they had the order in reverse. Putting Virtuosity in front of everything scares away exactly the kind of people who could become advocates for expertise.

Mario Porto added his wonderfully steady hand to creating a small book which wrapped the project, the hilarious drawings on the front and inside back covers were from the supremely talented Baykal Askar which we printed through one of our other clients Blurb.

Meeting Martha Stewart was one of the highlights of my career. She's an impressive lady and her digital team did her proud. So many things came out of this product, most importantly was being able to redesign the website with total agreement across the company.