“It was so easy, we could all do it together,” she said.
“We all?” That would be my brother and I, which means that the few times that we sat around licking the spoons were some of my mother’s happiest memories. Clearly, the Duncan Hines brand was tapping into something other than the absence of ingredients. It seems that it wasn’t so much about the cake than the symbolic meaning: good mothering means you can bake a cake with your kids.

It turned out she felt the same way about the Campbell’s soup she prepared on most days we came home for lunch from school. She acknowledged as much in admitting, “It gave me confidence that I could be a good mom when you liked the soup.” Good soup—Good mom? Sounds superficial, but the reason many people buy and use products have little to do with the underlying premise.

Duncan Hines cake mixes and Campbell’s soup aren’t just products. They’re brands that have associations with values to which parents and kids can connect: good mothering, sharing and, if I daresay, love. When you think about the ‘benefits’ these products fulfill, it’s easy to jump platitudes like convenience or simplicity. But the real value isn’t in the convenience. It’s in the associations that are important to the people that buy and use these products. That bowl of soup was a symbol of connection and consistency and was associated with something that was important to her…giving my brother and me food we liked. Of course, the product itself had nothing to do with being a good mother. But that’s what it meant to her.

We all have both simple and more complex needs. Cars are far more than transportation and the fashion industry provides a lot more than clothes. Products and the brands they constitute are symbols and to the extent that products can address some of the deeper more complex issues that customers deal with, the greater the chance you’ll have stronger associations and possibly a strong brand.

For more information on brands, contact Dan Droz ddroz@droz.com or visit www.droz.com

While I don’t have too much time this week for a lengthy discussion on how Gap (and their agency of record, Laird and Partners) completely botched a rollout of a new identity, I felt it wrong to let it go by without considering a few key aspects of the blunder from a branding perpective.

Broken Promises
Brands have a significant responsibility to consumers and the general public. While this goes far beyond the superficial layer of their identity, Gap Inc. has failed to uphold their responsibility to their customers, stakeholders and the general public in a few key ways. Their brand and all that it represents to their customers constitutes their “brand promise.” And for a very long time, Gap has done huge amounts of work (very well until now, actually) and invested a large amount of money into delivering on that promise – and gaining trust of a large and loyal customer base – both with the quality of their communication as well as their product. Then on October 4, 2010, they completely violated that trust by launching an identity that seemed by many (by all accounts the entire free world) to be hastily pushed out. So hastily in fact, that as David Cundy points out in his review the launch that it was done with “almost no executive fanfare, no press release, and minimalistic after-the-fact rationales.”

The connections retailers like Gap make with their customers can often span the spectrum from pragmatic and basic (“Their clothes are made with quality materials, and I would never buy anything else”) to emotional and nostalgic (“Every time I put this sweater on, it reminds me of why I shop with there – how it feels, how it fits me…and oh, yeah – there was that date with the girl when I wore this….“). I would wager that as Gap launched their new identity, many of us looked on with a pretty strong reaction from a place somewhere in between these two points on the spectrum – maybe it was confusion, or in my case, shock and awe.

Epic FAIL of Crowdsourced Proportions
While Gap has made a series of strange choices and bad decisions in their handling of this rebranding, their response to the backlash by deciding to open up the design dialog via crowd-sourced submissions is, In my opinion, by far the most awful among them. This move equates to speculative work, and as an AIGA member I take strong offense to this, both for what it does to the creative process, but more importantly to the value of design as a strategic business component. Shortly after the Gap rebrand and their plea to the public for ideas, AIGA executive director Richard Grefé sent a note to Gap to voice the opinion of the AIGA. In it, Grefé pointed out both the potential effects of their decision on their brand and to defend the AIGA’s policy on speculative work on behalf of their over 20,000 members (myself included). Since I can’t put it any better than he did, I won’t try:

Clients risk compromised quality as little time, energy and thought can go into speculative work, which precludes the most important element of most design projects—the research, thoughtful consideration of alternatives, and development and testing of prototype designs

Designers are taken advantage of as clients see this as a way to get free work; it diminishes the true economic value of the contribution designers make toward client’s objectives.

There are legal risks for both parties should aspects of intellectual property, trademark and trade-dress infringements become a factor.

If you crowdsource your logo design, you would demonstrate a disrespect for the professional design community and the value of creative property; compromise your likelihood of an effective outcome that meets all of your needs; and undoubtedly perpetuate a cacophony of critical voices in the blogosphere. Designers are influentials in the social community, including on style; it seems this is a community that you should listen to and respect, not demean. If your proposal to crowdsource a redesign was an effort to be more open to commentary, then we would recommend that you define it more narrowly as an effort to obtain perspective, but not design.

Then, in a move to recover their dignity, Gap reeled back in an October 11 press release, as Gap president Marka Hansen stated:

We’ve learned a lot in this process. And we are clear that we did not go about this in the right way. We recognize that we missed the opportunity to engage with the online community. This wasn’t the right project at the right time for crowd sourcing.

“There may be a time to evolve our logo, but if and when that time comes, we’ll handle it in a different way.

So, perhaps Gap is attempting to save face and can now maybe see the error in their ways as they rewind their blunder and reconsider a smarter course of action, but as for their customers (and for sure the design community) they will, for the unforeseeable future, have to deal with a rift between their brand and their customers…quiet a “gap”, in fact (ouch).

If you’re selling a service rather than a tangible product, you have a unique problem. Because services are intangible, they’re impossible to ‘test drive’ or be fully appreciated until after they’ve been delivered so it’s really hard to differentiate your service from someone else’s. And, if you can’t see the work product of a consultant, designer, lawyer or even a carpet cleaner until after it’s delivered, how does a client know what they’re going to get…before they buy it? The answer is what we call ‘productizing,’ ie, translating what you do into a ‘deliverable,’ with outcomes, names and processes. Here are five principles to help you ‘productize’ your service:

1. Define Solutions and Outcomes. Services become more tangible when they are perceived to be solutions to a particular problem. “Carpet cleaning” is a service. “Spot Removal” is a solution to a problem. “Golf lessons” are a service. “Lower Handicaps” are an outcome. “Branding” is a service. Creating a “personality of an organization” is an outcome. By defining what you do as a solution or an outcome, it’s easier to demonstrate tangible benefit.

2. Identify. Create a name or identity that corresponds to the solution and communicates the outcome. In the above examples, giving a “Spot Removal” process a distinctive brand identity such as SpotGo or CleanSpot captures both the benefit and provides an opportunity to brand the service. A process for lowering handicaps might be called “ScoreCure” or “The ProScore” System. A branding process might be called “BrandMapping.” Naming your process or deliverable helps differentiation your service and can help communicate the value.

3. Visualize. Although a document such as a brochure may not seem as product-like as a toaster oven or screwdriver, it can visually represent a process. Using charts, graphs, drawings, diagrams, and other visualizations of a process can help give tangible meaning to a process or service.

4. Simplify. Processes and services can be complex. It’s one of the reasons they are sometimes hard to describe. For example, by breaking down a complex process, into a series of 5 steps, you make a process or service appear simpler to understand. The “5-Step” ProScore System or BrandMapping Process allows a complex process to appear simple and tangible.

5. Concretize. At the end of the process, provide some tangible evidence of what you’ve done. A photo, report, evaluation, summary, certificate or any other tangible representation of completion helps to convey that you’ve provided a concrete deliverable.

If you’d like to productize your own service, get our free guide and audio program at www.droz.com.