Creating a brand in a million easy steps | Haraldur Thorleifsson | ueno | Awwwards San Francisco

hello thank you thank you so okay this is behind me so my talk is creating a brand in a million and a few million easy steps and I say a few million because every single thing that a company or a product does impacts our brand in some way the person that answers your phone can make or break your brand and I also picked that title because I'm not gonna teach you all the things that are required to make a brand partly because we only have 20 minutes and partly because I'm just not that smart but I also want to use our own brand the way no brand to explain the main points because most of our clients wouldn't really want us to give you as much insight as I'm gonna try and give you today but there's also another trick I'm gonna use our brand because I have no shame and you are all stuck here and there's a thousand of you and I'm just gonna use this opportunity because you can't leave so I just have one job here today and it's not gonna be easy but I'm gonna try to have you fall in love with me and and then the 100 brand and to make it extra hard I'm gonna try and I'm gonna tell you all the tricks that I'm using as I'm using them and see if that helps or hurts now my name is Haraldur Thorleifsson and I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly it's a good joke the first conference that I actually spoke at was the award conference in Barcelona a few years ago and these are always really special events and for some reason they keep inviting me back so let's see if I don't fuck it up this time but I just want to thank for the wonderful awards crew for for having me I also want to say before I begin that this is the first time that I'm doing this particular talk usually I do the same talk a few times and as it as time I have a hair here as as time goes on it gets better so you're gonna be seeing the worst version of this particular talk and I also just started writing it three hours ago so but I have over the last year done a lot of talks and one thing that's happened through all of them partly because I've asked for it is I always get a standing ovation and I don't know if you haven't flown like first-class on a plane but it's very hard to go back to coach so so I just want to remind you in the end but just remember standing ovations so before I get into some of the other expressions of our brand I need to show you some of our work because no matter how good our brand is if our work isn't good or great we won't be successful I also know there's audience and remember I'm trying to make you fall in love with us so the best way to connect with you the first way to connect with you is to show you some work because you're all probably designers developers people that appreciate that kind of crap so let's start with some work we've worked with a bunch of big companies we've worked with oculus on a bunch of things we've worked with Facebook on a bunch of stuff uber as well we did some work with a startup called cowboy I'll just quickly go through these did this thing Apple stuff Asia something we've done all sorts of stuff it's all very impressive 3d Wow ESPN car stuff slack anyway so we've done so much great work that we had to hire an awards photographer just to take photos of our awards and just to prove that I'm gonna show you this video my name is James and I'm the official award photographer here at winner there's a lot of them and we got to put them on social media frankly it's a pretty steady stream I started the morning and then just kind of wait for the awards to roll in awards for best hair at an agency what side of the day we usually get that we got weddings here we go a few from D&AD got the Lodi the fastest living web so that picks a little wards the appease the click ease for most clickable the golden scroll got a hover award at the pointer event CSS Awards away from best rectangle fourth best triangle award for the pictures of the whitespace third runner-up at the runner-up Awards I kind of like to think that each of these awards really has a story to tell and it's my job as the award photographer to find it first I suppose regard the award examine it think about what it's trying to tell you and then put it on Instagram I guess so I showed you that video just to again laughing is one way of connecting with people so that's one of the tricks that we use when we explain people well explain to people we do like I'm doing doing right now but why is spreading important so here's probably most people know this but we're not we're not logical not a logical species many of us think we are I think there is probably some developers here and they probably think so but we are not we're all controlled by emotion and then we work backwards from our emotions and we rationalize the decisions that we made and so when you think about most products the most of the products you use our commodities we don't trip but we don't pick the ones that are the cheapest or the best just we pick the ones that we connect with so I don't know if any of you are old enough to remember the Pepsi challenge but it is something technically ongoing but in the 60s 70s well 70s and 80s I think PepsiCo set up the Pepsi challenge because they realized that in a blind test taste test plus blind test taste test most people actually preferred Pepsi over coke so they had people take a sip of each without knowing which one it was and then you know particularly they would say Pepsi but the thing go is that Coke out sells Pepsi 2 1 3 2 1 4 2 1 depending on the market so what the Pepsi challenge really proved was that the Pepsi marketing team was not great they had a product that was better but they're still massively under sold their competition so the Pepsi challenge really proved the power of branding for decades Coke and Pepsi have sold sugared water but they found it as something completely different and just me saying the word coke now will spark something in your brain you probably want a coke by the way this is talking sponsored by coke so again you hopefully you liked some of the works that I showed you before but the perhaps a challenge really proved that that's not enough there's a lot of people that create good work we had Matt fall from basic here before they do fantastic work we have Peter smart from fantasy amazing work a lot of people do really great work but how do you then stand out how do you become not like everyone else so everyone kind of wants the same thing everyone wants to belong they want to be loved and cared for you're gonna laugh when I have fun you want to be safe we're gonna be feet free from pain and so that's what we're trying to give you in a short amount of time something that gives you what you want you give them we give you an illusion sometimes but if you buy into it what's the difference between an illusion and reality you have a temporary feeling we help you solve a problem we give you a connection we give you a relationship and so to create that relationship we need to have common ground we need to have something that connects you to me or you to our brand or whatever we have to have a common set of values that connects us so you can absolutely fake feelings but it's a lot of work and especially at scales it's a lot easier if you're not faking it so to help articulate this a little bit I want to show you some of our values this is from a talk that I did last year partly again because I think it's important but also I kind of ran out of time so I needed some some stuff need to review some stuff but I'm gonna try and do this in a way that relates to you so we have five core values at wano the first one is that we're all in this together and I can I can talk about that in many different ways I can tell you about dueño which is our initiative to give a million dollars to good causes over the next 10 years I can tell you that half of our people are women which is very rare in in our industry I can tell you that 1/2 of any increase in profits that we have we give out to our employees and by telling you all this you know think that I'm super nice so that's how that works number two we have our values be raw and just imagine that I told you something very vulnerable and so that's how that works figure it out if you if you don't have all the all the things you need just create them every 4th floor is a dance floor if you you know don't wait until you're at the place let's just do your little jiggy bring the chocolate I don't want to talk about this one and and then life is short enjoy it so this is one of my favorite ones because life is actually a short it's not just it's a good phrase but it's true and and so we do a lot of of things too to have fun so this is sort of the middle of the talk and I was I wasn't sure how it will go so I did one trick gene if you can come on so one of my tricks here is I brought gene with me and he has a t-shirt gun and it doesn't make any sense to the rest of the talk but it kind of just it's it's going to be memorable you're gonna remember this thing that we did no keep going and and to make it extra special I also wanna show you this photo June and and and for all this although all of you that don't get a t-shirt I don't know too bad they're really great one more all right goodbye Joaquin one of the smart things that brands do is they use stories stories are how we as people have understood the world for thousands of years and a great brand is really great at telling story so when we wanna tell stories we start with our brand we start with our values most of you will forget most of what I said here but you will be hopefully left with a feeling an emotion one way to create emotions is to do to surprise you to be vulnerable which I affect in a little bit earlier to open yourself or to make you feel heard I could for example I could ask you you know where are you from and you know something like that and you would feel like oh he connected with me I won't do that but that's that's the trick or I can use humor one way to let people put their guard down is is true through laughter and so this is what great brands do they first go for the emotion through their stories and then they use logic and the facts to help rationalize the part of the brain that justifies the emotion so when we tell stories there's a lot of different stories we tell we we tell stories is what I mean want to hire people for example and we could do that in a in a pretty direct way or we could tell you or show you that again gene that maybe you're in a sucky job but maybe you want to leave that sake job and you have hovering art directors and you want to join a place that doesn't have that we also have that but we can trick you we can we can make you think that if you join one no it's not going to be like this let's you'll have a lot of autonomy and you'll do great work for great brands and you'll have a nice time but there are many ways to tell us the same story we also created something called the interview where we took some of our people we created these little 3d characters out of them our photographer Troy for example or national Ahuja's was our people experience manager we created this little game where you could interact with our people you could chat with them in sort of a nonsensical way and then you would fight the big boss which was me and then by the end of it you wanted hopefully to work there and we tell you hey we're hiring and you click that button and then you know made that mistake or we can tell you stories through through videos or we can tell you whatever anyway I'm running out of time and I hadn't done this talk before so I'm gonna talk really fast or not okay so a brand is not a logo recruiting here is a little off but the brand is really about how you behave things you do for people how you do them why you do them but there are things like logos that exist and we make them and they're important too but a logo is just the tip of the sphere so this is our logo our logo just needs to be able to sit next to some crazy shit it's it's a sophisticated part of us that we want you to believe that we have it's the part that says don't worry we know we're doing that's all it needs to do and also it's our name so that helps and then there's like the logo rules I don't know who comes up with this crap but you know don't do this apparently we have a pretty complicated brand because we are a brand company and so we could create a very big brand we have a lot of different colors we work with a lot of different illustrators to create art this isn't working and create all sorts of things there very nice this thing was created in paper for some reason that's my daughter we also created systems for our brand we created rules on how to use these assets and from there we created all sorts of stuff like notebooks and and more notebooks and we have typography guidelines and from there we created chocolate stuff so I'm about to wrap up it says 20 seconds here but that's not accurate but the last thing I want to say is that branding and culture are really two sides of the same coin every single interaction or customer has with your brand is important and the only way to tell those to have those interactions live up to your brand is if everyone is at your company understands your brand and they live them that brand are they they breed that brand and they they fart that brand so we spent a lot of time internally telling stories we support initiatives that we that we like and create offices and that are extensions of a brand where community and collaboration and art all come together and we do all sorts of other stupid stuff we have for a 5 year birthday we decided to cry create song to write a song original song and to make a video and we created an international superstar Tori satins and his album the flowers of my youth and this is almost at the end of this dear Awards people I'm out of time I know but I'm gonna show you this video because ladies boy that is my exquisite pleasure to introduce to you a man who needs no introduction the man whose musical machinations will take their ears on a journey to the center of your soul stray from limbo County it's my man Taurus a decade since long with a half-baked plan started with a cane for classy diesel use working but the clients working so we hired a friend and um we've grown now we're living the dream and building a team goal didn't grow but lots of new faces and while office spaces creators of things are the mall energize maybe we're clearly roll this harmonizing in strategizing yes when who is breaking a know now the slacks an email send me okay so again my job today was to try and get you to fall in love with me and and do I know I don't really know if I work probably not again this is the first time is the worst version of this talk so but I do have one last trick I'm gonna play a song that everyone loves and then you're gonna translate some of that love onto me that's how that works so again remember what I told you in the beginning about the siting ovation it's that time so no pressure no but some pressure think you're all for coming I hope you have a wonderful time goodbye

Channel: awwwards.

Views: 17,314

Keywords: marketing, branding, designing, product design, storytelling, design agency, brand values, logo design, brands, interactions, ux, design talks, ted talks, awwwards conference

Id: dHu7ev4x8Lg

Length: 23min 10sec (1390 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 25 2019