On Thanksgiving Day, I am finding much to be thankful for: My wonderful wife, my family, my dogs, a healthy life, a nice home. The list is long and I feel like I have been blessed by good fortune.
To stay on theme with this blog, I feel lucky too that I can practice my craft. There are many forks and decisions that have landed me in my current situation and I am pleased that I have both the time, experience and means to do what I love. It seems like I am a minority of people who get up and greet the day with enthusiasm for their work. For this, I am grateful. There are days when it gets tough, days when decisions are hard and pressure is high, but the next morning is always a new day with opportunity.
Today, the chance to change my corner of the world in a very small way is one of the tings that I am very thankful for.
The GAP, a clothing retailer, recently learned how social media can influence their brand in a bad way. After revealing their new logo, executives where confronted with an audience unhappy with the new helvetica based, simplified brand-mark. Afraid of a backlash, marketing officers quickly retreated from their decision to launch the new logo and replaced it with the previous iteration.
How was this the wrong decision? Unfortunately, the GAP is being short-sited in it’s handling of the situation. The logo, designed by the agency Laird & Partners, is intended as an evolutionary component of retail branding already in place in over 3,100 locations. The stores, almost completely dominated by in high-contrast helvetica type are an excellent example of uniformity and icon brand identity. That brand identity has one exception, their logo. The implementation of this new logo (aesthetics aside) would solidify retail identity, online, and major media marketing. This is the position that likely led to the logo’s creation and one that should have been held to in the logo’s implementation.
Crowd sourcing is a term that GAP executive had mentioned in the spin following the logo being repealed. I don’t believe that major branding decisions or the wisdom of the masses would result in any impactful branding presence. Rather, the use of the “collective” lends itself better to viral media or the use of products in the market. The mention of this is as a solution is an escape from having to stand your ground as a leader-and in the case of the GAP, a leader in fashion and aesthetics.
Social media, powerful as it is in the distribution of message is a poor creation vehicle. The vision and focus that is required to create great things must come with a vision. This vision is not housed on Facebook or Twitter. Part of using these mediums is knowing their strengths and understanding that you have to control the message-especially when it is an unpopular one. It is very likely that the resistance to the GAP’s new identity would have never effected sales nor would anyone have paid much attention after several days had passed.
Although I don’t think that the new logo would have yielded a design award, it worked well with and represented the GAP brand very well.
The work of Aaron Trinder, this short looks at the desks of great creative minds and what those desks, in their various states, symbolize. I’ve developed a bit of a fasination with desks and workspaces lately. I’m enthrawled with setupsandspaces and deskography. Although a desk is an open space-a sometime very public one, it’s incredibly intimate. It shows your processes, inspirations, loves, weaknesses and vices and the short shows all of that with the dignity it deserves.
Search engine giant Google recently announced a redesign of their homepage that enables a new way to see your search result. This new method, titled Google Instant, shows a real-time adjustment in your search results as well as “suggestions”. The new search mechanism allows users to see the results as they add characters to their search query. The page dynamically changes the search engine results page (SERPs) as well as the Google advertising that appears above and to the right of nature search results. The change is significant as it allows users the opportunity to adjust their search query immediately to fine-tune their results.
The change to the search behavior is currently only available on the Google.com homepage and the google results page. A more comprehensive inclusion of this technology into browser search bars as well as Google’s own browser Chrome is planned for later this year and early 2011. This does mean that not all searches in Google will have an equal experience (at least not in the short term). Mobile integration is also not currently available, even via the search engine’s homepage.
What does this mean for website owners and content creators? It could mean quite a lot if you are relying on search engines for your traffic. Previously, a user may have been searching for a particular subject matter, “web site design” for instance. This search string as a whole offers quite a few options (mainly websites hosting lists of web designers) all relevant to finding a talented individual to design a website. From the new Google homepage, you would begin to enter in the search “web” and you are shown links for webmd. Adding site and design to the search refines itself to the user’s query, but offers hosting, software and DIY solutions. Many which may distract or divert a user who previously may have completed the search and been presented with a web designer eager to have their business.
If you take this example and apply it to a large scale advertising campaign, you have several problems. The largest of which would be controlling search terms in as few descriptive characters as possible for any given category. Additionally, those competitors who may have a brand name similar to your own may have priority results where previously they had been ranked lower.
The obvious question is will Google Instant change search engine optimization? Yes, but not in a revolutionary way. Despite what some experts may be claiming, content optimization will likely make a tremendous leap forward. As users become more familiar with and learn how to refine their searches with addition of words, phrases and boolean statements, content creators will see less visitors, but a more engaged and “sticky” audience. Advertisers and brands should see a higher level of engagement and improved conversion rate. The SEO industry may see a temporary dip, but should come back as a re-invented and more targeted industry as a whole.
Google is the 400lb gorilla in the room, but not the ONLY gorilla. It’s easy to look at this monolithic presence and feel the earth tremble, but this new change is not as wide-sweeping as it may seem. First, Google does not host all search queries from their homepage. Many searches are begun on third party website, via toolbars, desktop utilities or from internet browsers themselves (10% of Google’s traffic alone is referred from browsers)1. Many industries have niche browsers. Bing, for instance, has one of the most popular platforms for health-oriented and travel searches. Yahoo is dominant in many foreign markets and with some age groups. You should look at where your traffic is coming from and how you interface with your audience before taking any reactive steps at all as a result of this new change. You may be in the fortunate position of receiving more traffic as a result of this new paradigm in search.
The market will adjust: Obviously, with any new technology, both users and marketers will find ways to use Google’s new solution as a platform and to generate traffic for the long (and short) tail of the market.
My professional and personal projects usually put me in a position that I am asked to contribute “BIG IDEAS”. Sometimes those ideas are presented with no thought to their potential, nor protecting those ideas from poaching. Other’s believe that you should hold all of your work close to the vest and protect them. I don’t agree with that philosophy at all.
I’ve become an advocate for giving away ideas—provided that you’re credited. I’ve come to this belief because a person’s worth (or an company’s) is not in a single idea, but rather the talent, expertise and vision to both formulate the idea and act on it. There are too many examples of people and teams creating fantastic ideas and either running late-to-market with the product or not executing on the idea at all. Sharing your ideas, your ingenuity provides you not only with the perspective of innovator, but also with the opportunity to share in the creative process.
Before I get ahead of myself or cause harm to a reader’s stock portfolio. I would like to frame the context of this post in terms of creative ideas and an environment of idea sharing. I think that intellectual property and the need to properly harbor business data are crucial to succeeding in the market. What I am referring to is the creative process-exploration and development of the actual workings of concepting, designing, building and managing the ideas process.
You can take a cue from how people are managing their social lives—we live in public—Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn. Our movements, actions and achievement are all announced and showcased in first-person and third. Why would we not extend that ideology to the root of the creative process?
The act of sharing is what had brought so many creative thinkers together before and is the root of our civilization. Artistic movements have been rooted in the sharing and feedback between peers. The Renaissance, Impressionism, the explosion of jazz. All of these movements had physical epicenters that acted as focal points for growth. The Internet is the modern parallel.
Even on the smallest scale, sharing, thinking, contributing is the spark that can bring an idea, even a small one, to greatness. A scalable concept very rarely stems from a single perspective. To flourish, ideas need space and perspective. You can only achieve this through exposing those ideas to other’s experience and vision.
Share your ideas! The next time that you conceive a ground breaking idea, share it with the everyone you know and if you’re asked to give some feedback on a peer’s idea, really expose yourself to it and soak in the luxury of the creative process.
Chris Cullmann is a Creative Director and Online Strategist. He works for Ogilvy CommonHealth Interactive Marketing, a digital agency dedicated to healthcare marketing. His professional and personal portfolio includes interactive websites, viral and social media, and online education applications. His portfolio and observations about the design and marketing industry can be found at www.cullmanndesign.com
The opinions expressed on this site are my own and do not reflect those of my employer or those who I am professionally connected.
On Thanksgiving Day, I am finding much to be thankful for: My wonderful wife, my family, my dogs, a healthy life, a nice home. The list is long and I feel like I have been blessed by good fortune.
