Episode 2: Marty Neumeier | 'The Brand Gap' author - "Thinking Wrong"

so hey guys welcome to the second episode of just a chat with we are here to date with Marty Neumeier who is branding legend and thought leader on brand and story we have a very excited studio behind me and also myself and lives are really excited to have you here in the studio with us so I suppose and for people who are watching don't know who you are yeah I was just wondering mark if you can maybe like Taylor's a bit about describing your own words who you are and kind of like a better story yeah actually the my title for liquid agency where I'm employed most of the time is director of CEO Brandon so my job is to help CEOs tell their part of the brand story on behalf of a company so I've done all the other things under that and on you know CEO level yeah and have no no takers on that yet so it's just it's brand new yeah we're seeing a need for that so and see what happens inside new tank : is that it's a new title before I was director of transforming and that's the one I'd write yeah which is still what I do really get but we're pushing this idea that CEOs need their own brand yeah that relates you know you know logical way to the company brand and that's a pretty delicate balance and as you could overpower a brand by yeah emphasizing the leader instead of the company yeah nice person yeah it's a balance thing there you're gonna get right that's something that we connect so clearly CEOs out there open for business so I suppose and you know you've been in the design and brand world for you know and a reasonable might have tiny note like we'd be interested gonna know like hey we did it all began great idea Johnny no I started as an assistant to Gutenberg okay and I've been you know so sterile centuries next okay I was I was a graphic designer yeah and that's all I ever wanted to be a designer and after about two 20 30 years of that I realized that that profession is incomplete because there's a gap between any kind of design really and business strategy two different worlds different languages and the result of that is that design can't be very effective unless it's really attached to business outcomes and so I realized I had to do something about that just cuz I couldn't keep just doing the same thing you can be a super designer but if you if if you're not as concerned about results as the leaders of the companies you're working for yeah there's a limit to what you can do you know so you can do really great work in a vacuum you have to win lots of awards but and where are ya I got tired of all that after about 20 30 years and started looking for ways to connect the two worlds which led to my book the brand gap ya know I identified that gap and it resonated with people and that was life-changing for me but I was know pretty senior at that stage I was probably late 50s I wrote that and how did you how did the book come around so like what was your thinking at the time what was the reason why you failed in the world I had before that sort of worked my way up in the design world to you know from a general designer doing everything and to to go moving to Silicon Valley and and focusing only on tech clients yeah which is pretty absurd because I know nothing about technology to this day yeah but I realized that that's not what they need for me is to know their business you hope they need what they needed me me to do self translate what they do into action in the marketplace which means developing a language around technology there was nobody doing that when I can use like making it friendlier making it understandable yeah so my first clients were like Atari and apple and adobe systems and you know I helped I hope to introduce the Macintosh Plus yeah and it's the first one that you could actually do something with like you could print things using that and Adobe helped them launch postscript because nobody knew how to explain that what your additions were mm is that right it was that oh this is me before that was 1980 and you know I did that and I realized that the idea of specializing in something for a designer was very powerful or you know anybody any business specializing is a way to increase profitability because you eliminate competition and more specialized you are so I was specialized in technology but I realized that if I specialize further I could make higher profits if I could find something I wanted to specialize in but I realized what I really wanted to do was the packages that software came in but it doesn't do that too much anymore I don't think you get it in a package you just downloaded but at the time you had to go into a store and buy it on a shelf and I thought that's a pretty cool thing to work and I don't know anything about packaging but the front of a package is like a poster and it's got an image of something and it's got a logo I like logos yeah the back is like selling ad the side is like a data sheet I think I can do all those things and and so I just took that out as a specialty I just decided I would learn everything there was to learn about it and by testing research in the store with customers and then I just presented myself as as the only guy who knew anything about it I was just true and didn't know that much but I was the only one who cared enough to learn about it and in the course of doing that I mean I you know Apple became my client I did all the software for Apple all the major software companies that had to at least talk to me yeah and and so that was really successful and in the course of that I started to understand that I needed information from them about what they were trying to do with their business and they couldn't give it to me they actually had no plan there was no strategy other than we're gonna make some software and see if we can sell a lot of it and you know how to do that so yeah I said I do but I have to know why this product that you create is better than that one that's next to it on the shelf you know and you're not able to give me that and they said well let's you know it's got all these features and it does this and that and that and I said well what does that add up to me who cares about that I'm sure people read all that and they try to make a decision but you're not helping them so what can you say in ten words or less that makes people want to buy this one instead of this one they didn't know so that was something we learn how to do so working from just the product level of how to brand something how to message it we learned how to do whole companies and realized that companies didn't know how to do this either even though they talked about branding hey hey hey so I set out to like what is this branding thing and all it really was at the time in the minds of business people was well branding is you know logos and colors and typefaces and advertising campaigns and things like that and I went no it's it's not it can't be that it's got to be something much more important so that led to thinking and writing about branding I had a magazine at the time for graphic designers it was about graphic design thinking the first magazine on design thinking and I talked about it a lot and I kind of met with resistance be like then they anyone hear any of that strategy business blah blah blah and in a you know a bunch of bad things happen to the business all at the same time he had in 1911 the stock market crash yeah and something else that slips my mind they don't come in one day they come in Manny Hanny crashing down on me and I lost I lost my packaging business the design magazine and I had let all my employees go never had to do that in my whole life yeah my wife and I hadn't built this business up over 30 years and yeah very carefully and then suddenly just crashes like that what size team where yeah I mean I think we had 15 15 not as big as you guys and we were doing I would say 75% magazine and the other 25% was supporting the magazine which hadn't made a profit yet yeah and everything collapsed so I had to let everybody go sadly and sitting around in a warehouse with unsold magazines and by myself and I thought okay what happens now and I thought you know I'm doing this all wrong I'm trying to tell creative people how to understand business when all these business people are just clamoring to know more about how they can use design they see the value in it in some vague way they don't know anything about it so I thought I've just got it backwards typical for me to get everything backwards before I get it right so I I decided I was going to talk to them I wrote the brand gap yeah to talk about that and instant success it was a home run it was my publishers after a few weeks said your book is an evergreen I said I think you know what that is that means it's gonna sell forever and they were right it sells the same amount every year never slowed down in the 15 years that it's been going and that led to many other books and how many does it fail a year now roughly seven seven and a couple others that are business books yeah half of it but and I'm not gonna stop because that is my medium I'm a graphic designer I can do I can design them I can write them I picked up writing on the ways just as a journalist writing about design and also then I had this magazine for five years that I was the editor of and I had to write lots of stuff so writing a book was just ordinary stuff at that stage so that's how I started this whole thing and then that led to a company called Neutron yeah helping companies understand branding from the inside so instead of doing all the work on the outside like you guys I just said done that the need is how do we get companies on the inside to embrace this to know how to use design to be prepared to you know capitalize on it and that was an instant success I mean large companies were saying coming and read just tell us how to do this go help us work together help us collaborate tell us who to hire for you know advertising for design for products and so we created a little kind of boutique company just handling the the best clients the ones we wanted it was quite profitable yeah and did unique so a gain on that sector there or did you niche on the service offering or well I was a service offering and we did some design but all the design was for internal use only there was never seed by the outside but it was award-winning design I mean if it was the other kind of design we would have gotten a lot of attention but that's not what we were doing it was all proprietary quiet only the company saw yeah but it was the highest quality design we could do and it was just great because for the first time our clients didn't tell us what they liked and what they didn't like and what they wanted from us and what was good what was bad which they had no business doing anyway because they don't know anything about but they hired us on the basis that they don't know anything about it and so whatever we did they would just sign off on it would be it's not important to them the important thing is they're getting their culture aligned around innovation we do a lot of that in terms of you know we call it kind of branding from the inside out you know we think that might have been our tackle yeah so and I think it's it's only just now starting to be a big thing that you know a lot of companies can get involved in because you know leaders now realize cultures I thought right because that's the thing they have the problem the biggest problem with yes you wouldn't think that CEOs would have any difficulty getting people to follow them they have all the power but that's what they complain about is like I don't know what's wrong with this company I tell them we're trying to do and they just don't follow me yeah like how could that be well because they don't have the right systems they're not incentivizing people in a proper way they're incentivizing maybe with low-level incentives like money instead of hey we want you to join in and help us be successful and that's gonna be great for you because you're gonna get opportunities like you never thought possible yeah that's what people want they don't want yeah you know a little perk here and there you know a free tote bag or some tool for doing something so that's been huge and so I sold that company to liquid agency yeah and they had absorbed know all my materials and methods which left me free to go around the world like I am now and talk about this and write books and do workshops which I'm sure does not free you from the business site now you don't have to yeah yeah no spreadsheets no Wow you know could have done that in the beginning I had to earn that right but but I I'm at at stage and life where I really love doing that and I like travel so yeah and working with Andy to make more of that happen so we have a little enterprise to teach leaders designers strategists more about branding specifically about branding and certify them in this at various levels like almost a karate can a little black belt and kind of thing but we have five tiers and we just released the first tier and it looks like it's gonna be big success we've got just people saying how are you gonna bring it to our country when can we take it yeah when's the next one in London so we think it's gonna be big and this is gonna be our job and the great thing about it is is translatable to any country isn't it any any culture or anything if if they speaking was her because I don't speak you know when we're in this time when did you realize that you were a designer when did I realize I was designer when I was seven yeah yeah I knew I was like you know when they ask you what do you want to be when you grow up and the kid over there says I'm gonna be a fire truck yes that would get commercial artists in everyone win but I knew because my mother went to art school and she showed me how to draw and that was magic you know I mean if you can draw when you're seven years old or something and you draw a bird or a like I drew these really complicated clipper ships with all the sales in perspective coming out of units in this it's quick light like photographically all right because I learned to make a look to me that's just there is nothing magic about that really looks magic when it's done but it's just seen it's just about seeing things in perspective and being good about measuring stuff with your eye and being careful you know and if you care enough to do that you can do it and so you just in a strategy sight now where you still do stone by dissolvent and iBooks and in all my presentations yeah yeah so that's enough designed for me yeah I get to do it exactly the way I want and it's great and we hope to be doing some video and stuff like that in the future to which I'm looking forward to doing yeah now I know how you describe brand and you know I'm always I really like hearing different people hardly describe it you know Jeff Bezos Amazon talks about it's what other people say yeah but that's great that they're saying it's a job said a lot of things that I've heard before too but it's that Steve Jobs yeah so I'd love in your own words how you know you know how do you how do you say how do you describe what Brando's you know it's a person's gut feeling about a product service or organization yeah so the idea there is that we make our purchasing decisions more through emotions than logic even though we try to use logic to make every time we do it through emotion and then we rationalize it later I mean think about you're gonna buy a car riding in this all these cars out there and a lot of them have similar features but you know they're different they look a little different yeah but you could get into any one and just drive it it's not gonna be that different from yeah but there's so many features and so many numbers to think about the you know torque and braking power and stopping distance and Excel knows you know it's not a car person but if you start looking at things that way and then you consider price and like all that you just drive yourself nuts so if people start that way and maybe they make a decision maybe on one or two features I like the trunk space or so usually it's it's you can't that you have to do it through gut feeling it's the best way to do it yeah betrayed me want to join isn't it I did an interesting I didn't talk a while ago there and I like to cars and to all the badges all the logos over all the cars all the models I put them up to the audience and I said you know do you want number cup number one and number two or number three yeah and like it didn't go for the most expensive car they ended up going for the one that looked better without the badges the murder behind those and then I kind of mirror exactly what it was but then our flag is back on and suddenly they all want the ID you know they that that's the best way to that's a very good that exercise um take any old card and put a BMW badge on it see how much the price goes how much do you think this probably this bad cos it's a good social experiment there doesn't know there's something that you know and that's the value of that brand yeah if you multiply that by all the cars being sold that that's the incremental value that the brand adds and brands can add more than 50 can be more than 50% of the market cap of a company yeah with Apple I'm sure it's like 70% is not it's just nothing it's in our heads right it's what we think about Apple and I saw that in action you know maybe 20 years ago but when I was doing a lot of research in software and hardware stores testing our package designs I would see all the computers lined up on the table and there was a an iMac was the run with that kind of looked like a big see-through bubble you know bright colors and yeah next to a machines which had the same kind of look maybe not quite as cool but pretty close side-by-side Andy machines this is when Apple was trying to do it Microsoft did which was to license software so it wasn't just there wasn't a walled garden yeah and so they had this was the first company that was licensing Apple's OS and so they had it and side by side and there's a little card on each one it says what the specs are and the specs were the same except for the e machines had some specs that were better and so in other words this machine is actually better than slightly better than they had here okay and so the the Macintosh was $1300 and the e machines was $700 you'd think that people would go well look at it's just clearly better and the price is amazing we'll take it nobody nodded nobody they all wanted the Apple why because of the meaning yeah I'm joining that tribe yeah and I trust Apple they're gonna stick with me I know what they're about they care about design I care about design or whatever it is that you yeah if they care about simplicity I need simplicity yeah so good lesson right there I mean that's just so that means you know large large part of Apple's value is in their brand yeah nothing concrete or material yeah and you and you saw all this change you know will bind tribes now and you know companies are no longer you know there's a tribe that surrounds make wave and campfire and there's you know and you know you you saw this stuff really early you know how do you keep ahead all the time how are you seeing further ahead and connect and you know we're just talking about that interesting lady you'd think that I'd be like reading all detailed reports of everything that comes out I don't at all in fact the more I do that the worse I guess I answered if anything happens if I don't pay attention and just let things hit me from far away the most important things get through and the other ones stone and that's all I've ever done it's just like and be willing to not believe everything people believe something great and that we talk about that is just like don't look at everyone else if it's working in your gut right and you're moving forward and it's going the right direction just kill if it's em for me it's not my god as much as I'm questioning everything and anything that people believe I know is that really true and then I think what would make it untrue why what would be good about not doing it that way and so most of my insights come from just thinking wrong about things like I said I make the wrong decision about everything you know we're staying in hotels and be can attest to this if I come out of my room even if I just come into the room for the first time that come out I will turn the wrong way I will just go the wrong way to go elevators the other way I don't know what it is you know my mother taught me how to tie my shoes and I decided I couldn't do it that we had to do it a different way and I did that I'm still doing it that way so I don't it's just a mindset for me and I'm very interested in what's gonna happen next like what should happen that more like what should happen and then I have to test that against reality is it really going to happen how long is it gonna take so just don't accept anything at its face value don't accept that the way things are the way they should be and you'll start thinking about what what's probably next and then be careful about that too because you can just miss you can miss time at by years and years yeah do you ever find any priam things too early always yeah I have to think about you know if nobody else is talking about what I want to talk about it's probably too early and then I wrote a book called meta skills 6 talents for the robotic age this was 10 years ago now years ago seven years ago about the workplace of the future when machines start to really get in high gear and they become really predictive they do a lot of work that we're doing now what becomes of us I mean what does it mean to be human in the in an age of artificial intelligence yeah and then my whole thing was well our human creativity is going to come to the fore it has to that's what's gonna be valuable so I laid out the whole thing about what is that what is that where's that come from and I went all the way back to the beginning of the world basically I had to do a lot of research beginning of the world I mean who knows what I what I do now so so I start with I start with cave paintings and France where that I visited because we have a house there there's wonderful cave paintings and and draw a straight line from there to where we are and then say okay now we can see this whole pattern it's laid out in front of us there's nothing surprising about what's happening now this all this technology this isn't machines really this is us this is an extension of human beings so but but we have choices where are we gonna take all this stuff so that's it they had a case for the importance of aesthetics and what what are they or what is it how we how will we be valuable as human beings when machines take over a lot of this work and so that was kind of way ahead of its time and still today I think it's hardly gets any readership at all except by philosophers and yeah and I was really meaning it for policymakers and educators but they're like who you don't know what a big change this is - they introduced this kind of stuff from where we are now so I realize okay slow down I overshot that by 20 years it's not hard to do that by the way it's not you know genius or anything it's just like you just read the you know you just read the tea leaves you see where everything's going you're okay I mean I'm reading people that are predicting 50 years out so I'll probably be pretty correct but what good is that to you so I'm start a bet I want to get beat like I'm gonna be maybe ten years ahead max so it's doable and my books will last that long yeah that's the sweet spot it's hard to hit sometimes yeah how much of your success supposed to date do you trouble you to the books do you think it was based on the launch of brand gap but they notice everything I know people don't read books blah blah blah yes they do the right people do and and a book makes you clarify your logic I mean it's there forever right it's printed there and if you're serious about doing a book that will last you really have to make sure every single word is right and that makes you thinking of a really precise way and I need that because I'm not a precise person I'm really intuitive and so this is kind of like runs counter to to Who I am so I need that that's then that's how I do it I have to do a lot of research I have to keep very good notes I have to make sure it looks logic and everything that at the same time when I'm surprising people so they turn the page how long does that protest take four years now these books like the brand flip that you have there is probably after I do the initial research nine months ingram including writing and design production so increase short but then they might do two years of reading before that kind of figuring out what I want to say yeah and I don't ever start a book until I have a title and a cover design because I've seen how that can go wrong like you got a beautiful book and I was like what am I gonna call it you know and then you pick something stupid and then some designer does a really bad job in the heaven I've done bad jobs on my own covers so I mean I know how easy that is but I always have that first so and do you write to all and do what was right to soar right you know well interestingly good question I do have help my last book called scramble is a business thriller so it's written as piece of fiction okay because it enabled me to to get into the heads of executives as they're trying to do advanced work on branding you're like what's that really like is it's not just following lists and everything it's got to be much more nuanced than that and of course it is because when you're trying to do any kind of new thing in a business you've got obstacles you set backs you got human beings to deal with you have seven saboteurs in your own backyard all this stuff happens it's pretty thrilling stuff so why not just write it that way and illustrate it with a story and that instead of trying to find an example in the real world and then not really knowing the full story I mean you can get a case study and gasp at things but you're never going to have a CEO tell you how he felt about something so what I did is I had a bunch of CEOs especially one Andreja dorrigo who loved my book Mehta skills so that endeared me to immediately and he says you know he really should write that let's write the book write a book as a story and I'll help you because you know you haven't run a big company and so I used him and some other CEOs and a bunch of other audience members to help me through this story the whole plot and what's in it and everything so I would just release a chapter at a time to first to my CEO friends and then and then later to the whole the rest of the potential audience yeah and got lots of feedback like I loved that character or that doesn't that doesn't ring true for me you know oh you're leaving out something that I've experienced you know it's a yeah you know so I'd go back and rewrite it so you know there's 40 Eve about 40 chapters so that's 40 conversations really and then that was tea I don't think it would have been on target without hearing back from people so you have a hit before you even publish it you know you know people are saying I'm gonna buy 10 of these yeah my whole team and I think it's great I don't know if I could do that with like the my other whiteboard books because it'd be so much so many new idea in there that I would just end up going in circles with people who couldn't quite understand it that so in that case I would have to just really think through it but when a story people relate to stories really easily if it doesn't ring true they'll tell you why why do you think storytelling has become so big you know that you know our story can you know because in the world because the world is really complex and we can't understand it logically yeah it's just too hard that's why Netflix and Amazon and Apple are going crazy with content and stories because it's the way we can get out these complicated issues and all the complexity is in there but somehow we manage to understand that better than if you broke it down into just the principles and rules to follow you speak about research a lot as well how do you think you get research right and why do you think it's an important valuable bit of making good work well it depends what it is so if you're talking about books if I know what the title is and what the subject is and what I want people to take away then I have to make sure I understand all the parts you know I'll do with like here are the parts I need to make this case and now here's a few parts I don't really don't understand I'm not you know I don't know a lot about retail for example what that challenges are there so let me read a couple books on those challenges and they may be kind of dry for most people but I'm taking notes right and I'm saying that's that's a great insight and so with my research it's mostly reading a lot of its online a lot of its in books and I have a giant stack of three by five cards and I anything I see that strikes me is usable I'll write it out the whole thing might fill up a whole card and I'll just put it in the pile and as I'm thinking about that I may say oh I've got an insight that nobody said no write that down this is something I've seen okay write them so I've got all these cards and then at the end I look at I just go through them all and I put them in piles and those piles become chapters in those chapters to put in a certain order that makes sense and then then I have all these things to talk about and then I could start writing and some cards never get used but it flows pretty quickly then it's just a journey man work at journeyman work at that stage you just like plowing through it you're writing you're seeing how to make connections you're backing and I would say typically when I write a book by the time I get to the end the first draft is about 90% good it's not rough I can't stand going back and untangling things that never should have been written so it's just really about tidying things up and you know tying loose ends making sure that you foreshadow things that you're going to talk about later yeah that when they hit in the end they they resonate because you read it in the beginning ha ha ha fantastic especially with fiction I mean you see all that stuff because really important characters become important for shadowing emotions the emotional arc of a stories that has its own story and you know and you have to pay attention to that if you want people to get to the end of the book yeah I learned a lot of that through scramble my latest book and yeah and if if that does but I think it'll do I'll probably write I have two more and I have the covers and titles inaudible at the moment inaudible yeah it's good to don't overly add then this one's not inaudible is it it is because so I'm publishing my books now because Amazon is forced us all to become self publishers you know it's just there's no money in it if you work through a publisher yeah for them are you so they've kind of forced us into this position so but then I own I own the rights to it and I can do my own audiobooks because if the publisher doesn't pay for it yeah I mean just to record a normal audio book is about $10,000 and takes maybe a week of time to to to record it and then pin to edit it and then rehearsing before that you know all that stuff takes time and if they don't want to pay for it yeah but they're gonna make all the money yeah so I I did I did sag if you're interested in one of the white brands listen to that okay yeah and I really like it and I learned a lot with this last one about reading like dramatic reading that I had no not start paying attention to actors and what how you use your voice and I'm still not there yet but I think I made it laughs well I like how quick these are these are really good yeah the way those it's called white board ovaries and they were designed to be read in two hours on a plane yeah I get that well no on the plane but I didn't under two hours okay they work but they should be rich enough with insights that you keep going back because you're how do i express that I need to talk to my client about that you go back and find it pretty easily that's totally what we do our creative director Steven he's always running over to me remember this and can I highlight yeah so I had taken two just taking those those things are sticking around at the end so you don't have to even look for them they're just there yeah yeah you know it's interesting on the Kindle on Kindle books people read those books and then they highlight things in their copies and that shows up on everybody's once you get to like a little sentence that a lot of people of underlying its underlined you buy the book and it's already underlined by everybody else and it's for an author I can go and say well those are a lot of yeah well somebody once said the yeah I started highlighting everything in them in the whole book was yellows story but but I love the to go through my Kindle books and go oh that's what people are really liking God to me that was almost a throwaway but to them that's really important so yeah then I'll keep that and pull that forward or I'll put it in a talk and make sure that I cover that because obviously people think that's that's important so that's probably interesting yeah and a question around you know sometimes when you go into a company and you know you know the brand needs to change or evolve or something needs to happen the first job usually has a creative agency R in your strategy is that you know you've bored of people in sometimes you could have a board that don't agree I was don't believe in branding and you know another half they do and what does he change and you know we do a lot of tricking trying to educate on what brand means at that point and why you know it should investor I'm interested to know how you approach that part of the create process so when you've got a room that's still not bought in and you know you arrived and what does that look like well we don't get to work with boards of directors earning less because they got separately if we did that would be interesting sometimes we get a board member in on what we call a swarm we have all the leaders together with our team banging through some prototypes of what what change would look like in the sand form it's nice to have a representative from the board there who can report back but mostly it's getting the CEO and the other leaders together with the appropriate department heads and the project owners whatever it is and getting an understanding together of what a brand is what it could mean for the company a good idea of where they are now and a good idea of where they could go and then try to figure out a path between a and B yeah which may require rewriting the purpose of the company could require repositioning products or the company itself if it could require changing the culture it may be inventing some products like in a rough form and whatever it takes we plan a week like five days four to five days of just eight hours of really intense work everybody working at the same time all once to come up with some visualization of what the future looks like could be products it could be a new name it could be a new business model it could be anything and it's really intense for people who haven't done this it's intense for us but for for the company they're seeing their life flash because there seems a lot of bad ideas so you throw it out of there go no dude but we always say look bad ideas can turn into good ideas because ideas are like you know they're like babies they're helpless you have to nurture them you know you don't know give up a baby just because it can't hold a job you you you know you you raised them right you trained them and so and don't worry about the bad ideas they will never end up seeing the light of day but the bad ideas are stepping stones to good ideas and so once they understand that they can relax and just say you know you're in total control of this but wait until you see what happens because it's gonna be amazing now you're gonna see ideas that you never even imagined to sort of come to life out of things like purpose and differentiation and a bunch of Minds working on this at the same time later we can test our assumptions make sure they're right we can do all that research but we can get really far just with the brains we have in this room yeah watershed moment for me I I moved to Silicon Valley because I saw what Apple was doing and I thought wow I mean these guys are so creative these two Steve's and I know they would really appreciate what I could bring to this because I can see what they're trying to do and I know I can help them do that I need to get to know them first and see if there's a you know any relationship possible so I moved my company from Southern California up to Silicon Valley and started getting clients and I got my chance redesigning all the packaging for all their software which they had published under a different name klaris so klaris was their company for they spun off this all the software and that's I mean that was a watershed project for me because we transformed not only their saw packaging but the whole packaging software packaging industry we created a look that everyone copied still going oh yeah a logic to the system of how you do it what goes on in a pack at the back beside the top what you have to say about it how you talk about it how you sell it all that stuff we pioneered and yes like you say it's still going in some form but that was that was great for us and we became a really successful is that your motion and is that your favorite project your most Iconia or the one that you yeah I know of all the graphic design projects I've done I probably good point to that because I love the people I loved working with the CEO of their company and I learned a lot and a lot a lot about testing too so up to that point that designers don't like to test anything they don't want to really know when people think of it they want to believe something about how great their work is they really want to know because they might have to change something or they might feel bad about it so you know we don't you know we don't really test them it's all intuition that we're just so smart that we don't need to do that well I kind of thought maybe we're smart but I can probably sell a lot more of these projects if I can make companies feel that the the product the the package that they choose is going to be successful before they even II bring it to market because we've proven it in you know in theory really but with testing in an actual store with actual customers buying products in that helicopter category so we even just invented this really quick way of doing that and it was hugely successful and boy did I learn about a lot about design and what I didn't know about it and what none of us knew about it you know most designers especially when they get really sophisticated they overshoot the audience by 10 miles I mean they really expect their people are gonna see stuff in their work that they see and it's not true they don't care about that I mean they're just focused on some very superficial thing and if you forget that it doesn't matter how deep your design is if it doesn't work on the shallow level it's not gonna work so I learned a lot about that and what I learned really is don't trust yourself you know test everything anything that's important test it first learn from it and you'll be learning about different groups of people how different groups of people think know depending on what profession they're from or what it's a social tribe they're from they're gonna think differently they're gonna have the third group think that you can tap into and it's probably not going to be your group be somebody else's if you're professional so it's good to learn about that and the more you learn to respect your audience the better your gets that's that's a lesson that designers still need to get cozy with do you think the testing help the client to trust you to do something that was great yeah they stopped telling us what to do because they asked us no okay what should we do now that we got that feedback no we have some ideas you know so they stopped telling us how to design stuff you know we like the blue one too no matter anymore and I said yeah what if we show you the blue one is the third best out of these you're still gonna like it well no oh God if we think customers are gonna buy it that's the good one you know that's so it doesn't mean that aesthetics don't count all that stuff those are all tools to get something to happen within people's heads but aesthetics by themselves can really mislead you take you in the wrong direction I hope you think in the kind of suppose Age of the algorithm where things are infinitely optimized and amusing learning no do you keep the kind of crates of magic alive that we'll see I don't know I mean I think it's just another battle we all have to fight this like when is it good and when isn't it good can machines know something that people don't know maybe can they believe something that people don't believe no probably not because it's more like machines will reflect our beliefs more than our desire for actual knowledge I mean you could program something to do anything probably I don't know I think it's that whole thing is like emotions can lead you to better understanding sometimes then then numbers and you know evidence so you have to weigh both and see if there's a difference between them and then they kind of decide negotiate that difference this is not an easy time we're heading into it's not gonna make everything easy thanks Marty thanks for joining us you've been an absolute delight and thanks to you guys thanks for joining us from our second episode of just a chat with and the next one will be out in one month

Channel: Just a Chat With

Views: 2,726

Keywords: Podcast, Brand, Creativity, video podcast, design, scotland, glasgow, edinburgh, london, agency, agency life, branding agency, creative agency, design agency, business podcast, branding podcast, design podcast, creative podcast, jacw, just a chat with, madebrave, campfire agency, andrew dobbie, lewis phillips, branding .tips, brand building, marty neumeier, brand gap, the brand gap, zag, the brand flip

Id: T_HQX_8VGts

Length: 45min 9sec (2709 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 29 2019