evolve - embrace brand evolution. The Sponge - master brand makers - embrace brand evolution

Recently it has come up in conversation that our brand design process is unique to that of our competitors. While we agree that it is a highly successful process, because it is the only way we know, it seems the natural way to work.

To understand what sets The Sponge apart and how time after time we achieve such striking and more importantly effective results, you can simply immerse yourself in the following narrative of our uniquely creative process and imagine how well it will work for you too.

Soaking it up

One of our friendly team meet with you to discuss your goals and objectives, as well as a carefully selected set of questions, focusing special attention on your Vision, Mission & Values. Our first and most important goal is to uncover your core message, or the pieces from which it will be masterfully created. This only comes through a comprehensive understanding of who you are (as an organisation/business) and what you intend to be as a brand. Only those who are prepared to invest the necessary resources, honestly bare all and then trust us to deliver will make the cut.

Each of the key members of our senior creative team is briefed with your answers.  We openly discuss them in the first of many forums in preparation for our chilli chicken session (a ritual of brainstorming over spicy Thai cuisine), so that each of us is crystal clear on the objectives. Any questions that arise are asked immediately of you via phone, email, or IM and the answers hungrily devoured.

Studying your competition helps reveals how and where you fit in the marketplace. If it is unclear, then we focus on what you do differently and/or what makes you unique, so as to position you in a space of your own. The team playfully explore “sticky” (memorable) words, or phrases that best communicate your position, to find a core message/positioning statement to build your identity around. The ideas generated here are shared amongst the team and used to fuel for the pre-brainstorm deep dive.

Pre-brainstorm deep dive, or lateral researching, readies the team with many possible design directions. We do this by deep diving in thesaurus, dictionary, quote books, Google search, photo stock, etc. Each new link is laterally explored, following each connection until we hit an end, then we jump back to a fork and follow a different connection until all avenues are exhausted. Every moment an inspired idea is revealed, it is documented or sketched for discussion at the chilli chicken.

Chilli Chicken

Even if it simply becomes a part of a custom typeface in a logo type, designing the symbol first is our first objective when creating your brand. A huge amount of potential communicating power resides in a strong symbol. We believe in thinking globally for your brand because of global trade and the reach of the internet. A graphic symbol crosses some borders far easier than words, for example we all know the flying kangaroo and we know the golden arches. There are a great many factors that come into consideration when designing an international symbol, i.e.  the nationalities and global demographics you are targeting, or hope to target in the future and their social, religious or cultural differences. Another veritable minefield is the international trademark databases and processes that need to be checked and navigated.

An open forum begins where each team member shares their findings from the deep dive and ideas and concepts are voiced. Ideas are quickly sketched with coloured markers onto the largest pieces of bond paper we can organise, the aim is not to create a masterpiece, but simply to convey the core ideas and open up a free flow of creativity. Dozens of ideas are scribbled down, discussed, improved, diversified, contracted, discarded or marked for development. Each idea is continually measured against the core message/positioning statement. Once we have well and truly pushed past the point of exhaustion of directions, as a group we decide which concepts are worthy of being taken to screen.

To Screen

The ideas that were selected are worked up in black and white in illustrator by our skilful designers.  It is important to get the design right in one colour first, for its many applications i.e. Engraving and Stamping. It also forces a certain level of simplicity, and enables a brand to own a single colour, something that is common amongst many of the world’s top brands i.e. Coke, IBM. Dozens of versions of each design are explored. Painstaking variations in size, shape, proportion, stroke, etc, are tested, each projecting a subtle change in response.  At this stage the concepts undergo further scrutiny as to whether they best communicate what they are intended too and what possible changes may enhance their appeal and concept strength.

From these many refined visual ideas we funnel down once more and select what we as a team consider to be the three most powerful and compelling visual ideas to progress onto typographic application. Careful thought is taken to choose a varied selection of fonts and typographic layouts that compliment the brand’s image and message. With thousands of typefaces to choose from, there are usually a handful that, with a little modification, capture the essence of the brand and compliments the icon well. If a suitable typeface cannot be found, a custom typeface will be designed.

From the assortment of typographic options of each of the final concepts, a further grading is done by the team. This new shortlist of designs conveying different character and strengths are carefully tested for balance by inverting on black so that the negative shapes become the focus. This highlights the balance of the shapes that create the logo, both internally and externally and enables further refinement. The designs that have the opportunity too, are refined further and tested again, and we still haven’t introduced colour yet.

Concept Podium

We move those concepts on to the next level of refinement where taking into consideration the tone we believe you need to convey, we explore colour applications and layout many variants and combinations. Each is judged by our team for the emotional and logical response the colour options command. Further suggestions are made and trialled. An official vote is conducted amongst The Sponge team as to which option works best for each of the three final concepts. The final choices are worked up as finished concepts and displayed in our proprietary Concept Podium presentation system. This is where we apply your new potential brand identities to present to you, showcasing them in various applications to give you a feel for each design and demonstrate the flexibility of each concept. The concepts are placed on the Concept Podium in our recommended order of Gold, Silver & Bronze as democratically voted by our team. The Concept Podium also provides a detailed written rationale of each idea and its intent.

We are yet to find a client who has not been exhilarated with our concepts and we challenge you to test our abilities. We love to be challenged and we love understanding new and different businesses.

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A friend of mine sent me a advanced release of his new book a couple of weeks ago. After reading it I feel compelled to give you 3 reasons NOT to get this book. When you read it and are inspired by the information contained within…

1.  You will have people all around the world talking about you!

2. These people will visit your website and buy from you!

3. You may even become the authority in your profession.

…all by simply harnessing the power of the internet and creating a World Wide Rave. Who would possibly want such things?

The book is called World Wide Rave and it is written by a friend of mine named David Meerman Scott. The truth is that this is a short, entertaining and easy to read book that will leave you with a list of things to try yourself (or talk to your design team to assist you with). I have to admit, here at The Sponge we have used, and continue to use David’s wisdom and suggestions on many of our clients online strategies.

You may want to look at some of David’s previous books and ebooks too at his blog.

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We have received some great feedback and now the new and improved BrandPulseCheck tool is officially live. Thank you for your help! Now it is ready for you to use it, benefit from it and share it!

This new tool allows us to freely share our knowledge with millions of people and gives you the ability to check your brand’s pulse in less time than it takes to make a cup of coffee. In that short time you can have your own personalized report, bursting with actionable information in any area which could do with improvement. The brand pulse check and personalized report are all completely free.

Enjoy!

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After some solid blocks of work we are ready to show you our brand new online tool. It is called the Brand Pulse Check and it does just that. When you visit BrandPulseCheck you will spend less than 6 minutes answering multiple choice questions about your brand.After you are done with the questions you are given your Pulse (and a breakdown). You are also given a personalised PDF report with information and action steps for the areas in which you have room for improvement. The best part for you, it is FREE!

We have not officially released it yet and I would love to get your opinion on it before we do.

[Much respect to all the business people and authors whose ideas have inspired our practises and this tool.]

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I’m sitting on a park bench in the twilight of a summer day in Sydney. My favourite colour blue in the sky, with a cool breeze and inspired thoughts buzzing through me.

I’ve got a brand new goal for The Sponge for 2009 and I have to share it. It is to expand my team and client base in such a way that I am able to split our work on a 50/50 basis. Meaning an even division between profit generating and pro-bono work. Naturally my team and I enjoy the fun, exciting and stimulating work we get paid to do by our amazing clients. We want to balance it this year with spiritually rewarding work that genuinely helps people change their circumstances and possibly saves lives.

Our vision is to create a more beautiful world… and this is the way we will do it this year.

So, I guess apart from this being a declaration of intention, it is a call out of sorts to those who need our help. My team and I would love to meet you. Drop us an email if you are inspired.

Peace
Luke

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At this time of year (or shortly for some) we are able to pause for a moment to take a good long look at what we’ve done since starting 2008. I plan to spend a few days sitting on the beach doing just this. What earth shattering, ground breaking ideas did you come up with this year? If you are at the top of the tree, how many ideas like this made their way up to you? Which of these did you take a stand for and push through the approval chain to bring to fruition? Chances are likely that it is none or not many.

Is it the case that pushing boundaries is not part of your job description? Should it be? But doing just that could mean the end of your job, or at least it may feel like it. It is understandable that you don’t want to mess with the status quo. It is safer to stick with the way something has always been done rather than insisting on a new and better way.

I think the fear of stirring the pot stops many a good idea from even leaving the mind of the thinker. Wouldn’t it be easier for an independent ideas consultant to come in, with no weekly paycheck at risk and uninhibited by company politics, to sift out the great ideas and make the hard pitch. Similarly, without the need to cover ones own ass, there is great liberty to think openly and freely, so this consultant role could be extended to that of the creator of the ideas, with the right input of course. Food for thought.

Whether the great ideas gets implemented by the powers that be, well that is another question entirely!

From all of us here at The Sponge, have a merry christmas (or whatever it is you celebrate!) and a happy and prosperous new year!

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(I say) It is People, it is People, it is People.

[NOTE: This post is about people… …or recruitment actually]

Working on the copy of our book, I was reminded of a well known Maori proverb that translates to the headline and opening line in this post. For us it has significance on many levels, but in this instance it prompts me to blog about recruitment. Ask anyone managing a business to list their biggest challenges and you will find somewhere at the top words to the effect of ‘finding and keeping good people’. It is not only a time consuming process, considering all the interviewing and reviewing of CVs. It can also be a significant investment to use a recruitment agency and when, after a role has been advertised for months, the best applicant fails the probation period, how can the agency expect their policy of replacing that person to even look like a reality, or an immediate solution.

This post is part about our own recruitment and part about recruitment branding, one way in which we assist our clients. In “Built to last”  by Jim Collins and Jerry L.Porras they found four common themes that visionary companies display (greater that their competition) which makes them more able to find and keep the right people. They are: fervently held core company ideology; indoctrination; tightness of fit; and elitism. To work for your business these themes must be authentic and implemented throughout your entire company culture, no easy feat if it does not exist yet.

A client of ours recently engaged us to create a new recruitment brand for them. Our objective was to take their well known industry brand and evolve it to communicate their core ideology and strong culture to new entrants to their market, specifically university graduates and interns. These bright young people have not yet been exposed to their reputation in the market, so in the brief exposure they get at uni, there needs to be a clear conveyance of these aspects - succinctly and engaging!

This particular client has a genuine culture that resonates loudly and is fervently held by its people. Focus groups and interviews revealed commonalities that we explored to create a powerful and engaging campaign. I have to admit that the first concept we presented missed the mark completely, and we learned that with a resounding “no”, it was the common approach that could work for any of their competition. When we approached this project with it’s people and culture in mind, we not only a created a concept that we liked and could really dig our teeth into, but on every level the people whose culture it is we were selling bought in.

In short, what we found was three major benefits of joining our client are: Experience, Diversity and Reward: Experience - being able to work directly alongside industry elite; Diversity - the wide array of service areas covered;  and Reward - monetary and acquisition of global skills. Because this elite financial industry values intellect, we created the headline: “We are growing and looking for great minds” and to support this we have illustrated a section of the unique open office floor plan to identify some of the great minds of the organisation and to illustrate exactly where a new hire might be positioned in relation to these minds.

Another way of defining it is: It’s about alignment. By identifying the company’s ideology and ambitions clearly in all recruitment efforts, the majority of respondents are ‘the right people”, and the pretenders are quickly found out in the interviewing stage. As for The Sponge, we too are growing and have added our new internship program and three new roles to our holding pattern site.

Heading these roles is a newly expanded upon set of Core Values. In them we have done our best to identify our company’s core ideology and ambitions. While we love to meet new and talented people, we are only looking for people who are the perfect fit for our company. We don’t want to waste anyone’s time trying to fit a square peg into a droplet shaped hole. We are always looking for more people with big hearts and minds and ambitions in sync with our own. When we find that person, we are more than happy to explore with them how we can create a role to suit them if one has not been advertised. In other words we understand the value of having the right people on the bus.

I’d love to hear your thoughts…

After thought: Seth Godin wrote that recruiting is most often not treated as the important marketing it is considering you are betting the future of your company on it. It only takes 10% as much effort to hire someone in the bottom 90% of the class. And it takes the other 90% to find and cajole and retain the top 10%. Isn’t it worth the extra effort?

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Inspired ideas can come to you in many ways. They could be a brilliant flash that seems to magically arrive in your mind from your subconscious, the superconscious, or God, depending on your beliefs. When acted on immediately, they can prove to be quite rewarding both in experience and financially. An inspired idea can lead to a new business direction and can make all the difference in the world. The key is to do something the moment you get the idea - take action – to commit yourself to the idea. If I am unable to act on it straight away, like when I am jogging or driving, I like to use the task functionality of my Windows mobile to set an alarm for a time when I know I will be able to. Otherwise I will make a call, send an email a text, or anything that commits me to the idea.

Now there are other ideas, those that are brought to you. These are the ones that others have had and you become part of because of their inspired action. Sometimes these ideas can be so well developed that they are ready to drop directly in to your business, or build a business around and start making you money. The best part is because they are brand new to you, they have often never been attempted in your industry before. The challenge is recognising the opportunity for what it is, rather than something that is too good to be true and being frozen in inaction like a deer in headlights while the opportunity passes by.

It is easy to let our inner critic start picking at a new idea because it is unknown and unproven, and sometimes we talk us out of a brilliant and inspired idea that proposes to make us millions in sales. How do we determine when it is a brave step that is required rather than the easier choice of inaction? We can foolishly compare the new idea to what we have always done and because we have nothing to measure it against it is easier to put it in the too hard basket. A quote that a friend of mine reminded recently which I like “If you keep doing what you’ve always done, you’ll keep getting what you’ve always got.” Do you like what you are getting?

I believe it is critical to be open to inspired ideas, especially in my game. Inspired ideas are what change your life. The more you are open to these ideas and the more you do something with them, the more inspired ideas that you will get. I’d love to hear your ideas. Who knows, we may be the catalyst that transforms your idea into reality.

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What do you think happens to a successful company when an overbearing, charismatic leader leaves? And what’s more, what if the leader hadn’t the foresight to empower his successors with a unified vision and strategy for the future?

The chances of growth or positive return on investment for shareholders are a likely as oil prices going down. Unless preventative action is taken it can be a quick and rapid decline into oblivion. Let us take for example a large Swiss financial group who we will refer to as “Gold”.

Unlike its real world counterpart, this gold was depreciating in value. They were staring down the barrel of a continuing decline in profitability. A lot like a bogged car spinning its wheels, they had become stagnant in a growing market. The competition however, including a bunch of upstarts, were successfully chipping away at their hold on the market. Although limited by their intimidating leader, Gold’s board were able to convince him to hire a new CMO to attempt a turnaround.

After interviewing key personnel, reviewing business processes and with intensive consultations it soon became blaringly obvious that Gold was experiencing a very common problem. It is a problem that is shared by many businesses across the world irrespective of industry.

The problem was essentially (but not limited to) that there was no current VMCV (Vision, Mission or Core Values) set to unite and empower the staff to make any decisions for the benefit of the company. This was mainly because the soon to retire CEO fearfully held onto a dictator leadership style that pushed out natural and talented successors, strangled new ideas and breads the same dog-eat-dog style management down the line. The latter was in the process of being quietly and gradually dealt with by some brave members of the board, the first challenge by the CMO and consultants.

The Sponge Solution

When you ask why a company like Gold has no VMCV you often answered with a shrug and an answer that basically passes the responsibility for that upwards. What you will usually find is that there is also no brand strategy, no strong marketing strategy, or core message being communicated to the market.

In order to develop any of these everyone involved in the evolution must first understand a few key things (but not limited to these). They are:
1. Who are your clients and what do they want or need?
2. What do they think about your company?
3. How are you currently being perceived in the market place?
4. What your staff and stakeholders think of your company?
5. Why those that have parted from your company have done so?

These are basic questions which deliver key data that can help pinpoint your location in the market, like a GPS system for your brand. In order to get these answers along with other company specific and world view challenging answers, The Sponge Brand Analyzer System is configured and deployed. The system involves proprietary components designed to elicit high levels of response and return rich qualitative data. Keep in mind that it is imperative to poll a database that is formed from an unbiased stand point and includes past and present clients, staff and stakeholders, including those who parted company on bad terms.

The data reveals a variety of fluffy feel good answers from those who have established good relationships along with critical data that can be used as a catalyst for change. Being able to sort the results based on status of the participant’s relationship with the company enables the gleaning of what work needs to be done and exactly where the leaks are in the ship’s hull which is causing it to sink. Naturally some of these are predicted by the CMO, some board members and the consultants and rightly so; how could they have made it to this level without some idea. However, the more alarming answers are not predicted by anyone, which is entirely why we insist on this process. A real eye opener for the CEO and the board, it earns the CMO more freedom to implement the next necessary steps.

When the key findings show that the majority of staff does not understand what the core direction of the company is, which makes them unmotivated and see coming to work as something of a disliked chore that they have to do rather than want to do. Even though the range of services is good, current clients that are only just “satisfied” with the customer service are not ecstatic. Clients that leave do so because of lack of attention and information. The staff that leave do so because they feel they are being suffocated and that the environment is cut throat and very stressful. Not at all the rosy picture that is painted by the CEO! And with this paradigm shift comes willingness to participate and create a legacy.

Cultural planning days involve a lot of drinks, chatting and group participation. When held off site in an unusual venue, the invisible shackles that usually clamp tight around the ankles as one enters the office are not present and there is a sense of equality for each participant. Huge white boards, butcher paper and post it notes are scribbled on frantically as ideas form out of discussions stemming from the survey findings. Facilitators guide the 3 day event and implement particular exercises and procedures to work through a program designed to produce a successful outcome. Interspersed amongst these creative sessions are bonding activities, where different levels of management are paired and have to trust and rely on one another to fulfill extreme activities.

The result of the weekend is a united team with a clearly defined (although quite raw) and emotionally charged set of company Vision, Mission, Core Values and clear objectives with a basic process of how to achieve them. More work by the consultants and the CMO is required to transform these raw gems into exquisitely cut and polished diamonds that can be published and communicated wherever they can be of benefit. The platform of the company culture is created and the key people claim ownership of it, like a pebble dropped in a pond it is only a matter of time before it ripples through the entire company. This culture is the core of the brand. It is what drives all communications and relationships.

The next step is the creation of a strategy to communicate this new company culture to the market, but more on that later…

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I was recently invited to speak to some talented design students at Australia’s best design school [ Enmore SIT in Sydney ]. Here is the introductory video I used to set the tone and demonstrate what it is that we do at The Sponge, that is we make brands.

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