Category: Case Studies

Customer personas and archetypes are usually vapid and prosaic lists of generic attributes. “What car does your ideal customer drive?” is a hackneyed favourite of marketing consultants everywhere. I prefer to work with a “customer narrative” that forces me (and the client) to really think from the customer’s perspective. We can’t have meaningful empathy for an anonymous customer persona. But we can feel the pain of the lead character in a well-told customer story.

An end-user narrative is a semi-fictional story of an idealised customer. The point of the story is to create a shared understanding across the design team of the audience’s emotions, behaviours and motivations. As in any good story, the moments of tension and friction are the most interesting.

Continue reading Innovation Warehouse 10: Customer Personas

After several rounds of review, we’ve completed the design system for the Innovation Warehouse. The new design is based on the insight that starting a business is one of the most intense things that any person can do. An entrepreneur is looking for both the freedom to do their own thing and the support of having a peer group.

We’ve created a design system that reflects the brand values, product architecture and company aspirations of the Innovation Warehouse. It’s also focused on the end-user journey and prioritised according to the business model. One of the main project goals was to help launch the new angel investing and startup accelerator offerings.

Continue reading Innovation Warehouse 9: Design System

Brand personality is the link between the internal brand architecture and the external brand expression. The main step in creating a coherent brand personality is to identify the team’s shared sayings and catch-phrases. These statements of conviction aren’t taglines and aren’t necessarily things that you would communicate externally.

Some of the sayings will provide visual cues for the graphic design process. Some of the sayings will inform the key messages for PR and web copywriting. As a whole, the saying capture a multi-faceted personality, mood and voice for the brand. Later on in the project, some of these sayings might be part of the brand manifesto. But for now, they are just a tool to help translate the internal brand values into customer-centered language.

Continue reading Innovation Warehouse 7: Brand Personality

The secret to building a great brand is to find a deep human truth about the end user. A brand architecture provides a structured way to uncover these insights together with the client. If we can find it, the singular customer insight behind the Innovation Warehouse will inform every aspect of the strategy, messaging and design.

Building a brand architecture isn’t a substitute for the hard work of empathy and creativity. Instead, it’s a rigorous process that helps triangulate the problem space. First, we build a set of brand attributes, then distill the brand values, then we converge on a brand essence. It feels like a process of deduction or corporate archeology. I believe that the best brands are already latent in the existing organisation, they just needs to be coaxed out.

Continue reading Innovation Warehouse 6: Brand Architecture

Using a company’s initials, in lieu of the full name, is often convenient for the internal team. But using both the initials and full name together in your branding can be confusing. Your company’s initials are like a personal diminutive. It’s usually best to introduce yourself with one name and then allow people to adopt a diminutive (as they get to know you). It’s a bit like introducing yourself as Jennifer and adding in the same breath that “my friends call me Jenny”. Leaving your new acquaintances wondering which is the right name to call you. Introducing yourself as two things at once just confuses people.

If you introduce yourself with a diminutive, the name that people use day to day will never revert back to your full name and eventually you’ll be known by your diminutive only. I tell clients not to lead with their initials unless they are willing to eventually abandon their full name. Few people remember what BP, IBM or CNN stand for. Furthermore, for a startup, the initials won’t be meaningful to your audience so you lose the benefit of your chosen name. Even BP and IBM started out using their full names and only evolved to using their initials after market awareness was established.

Continue reading Innovation Warehouse 3: Brand Naming