Business leaders lean on terminology like “design thinking” to define and quantify the process for innovation. It doesn’t matter what you call the process, what we all desire is more creativity in the process. Creativity is elusive.

Most of us don’t understand creativity, but all of us appreciate it. Marketers spend all their energy seeking creative solutions to the challenge of building enduring and successful brands.  Creating innovative products and brands people can’t get enough of is an elusive reality for many businesses–yet innovation happens everyday all over the world.

Knowing that innovation is happening everywhere, and not wanting to be left behind, most enterprises want to be really good at innovation if they are to create competitive advantage in the marketplace. This is where the organizational discipline of “design thinking” comes in play. It’s a trendy term that implies a higher value method for delivering creativity and innovation.  It’s jargon.

Innovation is radical not incremental.

Radical innovation is what happens when something unexpected shows up, and it just happens to be something people where waiting for– just not asking for– like Facebook, the Swiffer, and an iPad. Every one of these innovations was not based on user needs. Radical innovation is not about function and form, but about meaning– never driven by users.

So what then is the basis for creativity within the innovation process? The answer is simple– a creative mind with the passionate desire to pursue an un-proven and perhaps un-needed idea at just the right time.

Most enterprises aren’t set up for investing and pursuing un-proven and un-needed ideas. They’re organized around risk-averse quantifiable disciplines to make profit and return value to the owners of capital invested. Managing process requires linear thinking creativity does not.

Creativity requires the right dirt.

Like life, creativity within organizations requires the presence of specific elements and in precise quantities. We all want more creativity. For creativity (and innovation) to thrive in organizations, the dirt has to be right.  If it’s not right, then innovations coming out of the enterprise will most likely be incremental – one feature or benefit better than what the other guys are doing at a cheaper price.  Flat-screen TVs come quickly to mind.

In our me-too cluttered marketplace, incremental innovation is not enough to drive much change in behavior or demand.  Nor will it propose new meanings and context that’s highly valued by the marketplace. Building the ecosystems within organizations that spawn greater creativity and innovation is not something every organization will be good at. That’s why so many business leaders and consutancies embraced the idea of design thinking.  It’s a way of making creativity within organizations a linear process.  Business leaders love linear process and efficiency.

Jargon may make designers sound smarter, but it doesn’t enhance their creativity. Nor will it provide market leading innovation.

More creativity within organizations requires the dirt be comprised of:

• an engaged and passionate leadership with a big vision of change
• the vision and purpose is shared amongst all stakeholders
• a healthy shared acceptance of risk playing out on the edges of what’s possible
• talented and highly skilled people who share the vision and pursuit as their own
• money
• time

Take any of these essential elements away, or have them not be in the proper quantities and you can call the innovation process anything you like, but it doesn’t make creativity a force alive within your organization.

All people are creative.

Creativity is the unique expression of our most basic human nature. Everything that ever was, is now, or will ever be, is at first, a formless idea swirling in the goo of creativity inside someone’s head. There is no special club one has to be a member of to express their innate creativity. Both right and left brains are welcome and necessary.

What’s awesome about creativity is it’s such an inclusive thing. Everyone likes creativity because everyone believes they’re creative. And the good news is they’re right!

The behaviors necessary for people to be creative don’t require special knowledge– just empathy and awarenss of human needs and being sensitive to the people and culture you’re immersed in.

From that experience, people will creatively develop the specific knowledge and wisdom to frame up the problem and develop the organic ability to create and enact the right solutions. I suppose you could call that design thinking if it makes you feel better. Call it whatever you want. At the end of the day, the desired element is creativity.

Not all organizations are creative.

There are plenty of creative people designing away inside business organizations that are not driven by creativity or innovative. Every organization can’t be Apple even though they possess all the components that make Apple-type companies possible. This is what makes organizational creativity so elusive. Consequently academia (those that teach but cannot do) tries to provide the doers with fancy terms and quantifiable thinking models to make creativity and problem solving something more predictable and dependable. Seemingly, the more organizations try to mandate creativity as a core competency, the less creative and innovative they are. It’s a bit like dancing with your shoe laces tied together.

Creativity is a phenomenon not a process. Design is process, engineering is a process, and marketing is a process. CEOs who value a culture of strict process usually lead enterprises devoid of the creativity that drives radical innovations that change the world for all us.

Creativity doesn’t require terminology to help people be more creative or organizations more innovative.

In another era, a big part of my creative work as a writer and designer was in corporate and investor related communications. Every year my office produced a dozen or more printed annual reports.

Of course nowadays, you’ll find Annual Reports as pdf downloads on corporate websites. Not the lavish productions that were common back in 80’s and 90’s when my office was creating them. Designing corporate annual reports was an amazing process back then. When I speak to design students about the process, many look at me with blank stares on their faces. “You mean you didn’t use photoshop” they ask. That always makes me smile.

The printed annual report is indeed ancient history. In a recent conversation with a former colleague, we were fondly reminiscing about all the care, craftsmanship and money that went into producing this important annual communication extravaganza. We were marveling at the development process working with the company CEO, the storytelling, the design, the art and photography, not to mention the middle of the night press checks with our blurry eyed clients. Seems rather romantic looking back.

I once had four different annual report press checks going on at the same time at the same printer. Those were the days. Sometimes I miss the energy and the smell of ink standing at the end of a giant press with loop in hand.

Alas annual reports are not completely dead in print form, many companies still actively publish and distribute their annual reports in printed form.  For the life of me, in our digital age, I can’t imagine why? So I went back into the archives to share some of the lost annual report work I am still proud of. These examples are all from the mid 80s. Trouble is I can remember all the client companies and the specific year of publication.

Design is an essential thinking skill that must be mastered as a strategic business imperative throughout the entire enterprise. Design is not merely a decorative act.

Everywhere one looks in the marketplace there is revolution and disintegration. Wave after wave of technological change and ubiquitous choice comes upon us more rapidly, engulfing us, confusing us more profoundly. Marketers are struggling to keep pace with disruptive forces that are reshaping the manner in which they innovate new value in this so-called new economy.

Globalization has still to prove itself globally useful amidst a world experiencing the dynamic tension of growing consumption and dwindling supply. The new workplace has seen its own revolution. People no longer rely on the old paradigms of security within the corporation as out-sourced manufacturing, customer service, and even out-sourced innovation mark the end of an era of status quo–especially in the US. Ironically, the nature of this paradigm shift has un-hinged our own intuitive human connections even as we become more and more digitally connected in the social web.

Many marketers have been unprepared to re-think the structures of their enterprises and flow with the changing times, while new, more agile competitors are doing it for them. Brand strategy is no longer about differentiating brands within a category, but rather designing a whole new category your brand can own.

There are two dynamic realities marketers face in this new economy:

1) ideas are more important than process.
2) move up the value chain, or be cast aside.

Nature, in the form of our current economic realities, has had a wonderful way of clearing the dead wood in the system to make room for more innovative players to grow and prosper. Amazingly, as the rules of the game change in real time, improvisation and flexibility is now a useful strategic skill within organizations.

It’s an exciting time rich with opportunity for those who view it as such. Indeed, opportunity is apparent everywhere. If you are a marketing executive, charged with defining and managing the competitive advantage of your products and services, the implications of this disruptive age are of significant importance to your future.

For your brands to stay relevant, your “value proposition” will be less and less derived from attributes of product and service features, and more from the emotional connections and experiences your customers have through their interactions and associations with your enterprise. Creating these “experiences”, and the use value they offer people, is the result of the strategic and creative process of DESIGN.

Design is: a focused fanaticism to create value.

Design is, in all its disciplines (product, process, environment and communication) an essential thinking skill that must be mastered as a strategic business imperative throughout the entire enterprise. Design is not merely a decorative act.

Good design is a value generator. Design has added billions of dollars worth of market capitalization to those enterprises that understand its power and higher purpose. In the new economy, design is the soul of enterprise strategy.

You don’t have to look very far for examples of brands where this principle is applied with phenomenal results: Apple, Nike, Starbucks, BMW, Harley Davidson, Herman Miller, Target, Gillette, Virgin – every one of these enterprises are absolute fanatics about design and its fundamental importance to their business strategy.

Whatever the product or service enterprise, you’ll find design fanatics at the very top of leading organizations. Fanatics who value design as the white hot center of competitive advantage. As a result, design elevates brands above the competitive plane into, dare we say, the more abundant creative plane. Design leaders are not bound by the restrictions of the competitive plane (think cost and commoditization), when they are free to innovate, grow and expand by leveraging the love (think passion and devotion) customers have for their offerings.

In a world of growing complexity and abundant choice, design is the great differentiator.

Successful packaging sells. Any company that invests millions of dollars in product development, consumer research, and marketing expects a return on that investment. The shelf is where that happens.

Product packaging is an integral component of the shopping experience. For many people shopping/buying is as much or more an emotional experience as it is a function of picking up stuff they need. With 80% of purchase decisions being made at shelf, the product’s presentation is the only form of marketing seen by 100% of the folks who reach for it and drop the product into their shopping cart.  Advertising can’t claim that. As a marketer, no one is more sensitive and aware than you of the daunting task to create successful packaging in an over-crowded-with-abundant choice retail environment.

The design of your packaging determines if your product will make it into the shopping cart or not. In every product category, from elegant wine and spirits, perfumes and apparel to laundry soap and toilet paper, successful packaging design is about connecting emotionally. If the product packaging doesn’t reach out and instantly connect with the consumer, it’s game over.

Packaging that sells is friendly to the mind and connected to the heart of the shopper. In other words your packaging must be designed to be imminently “shopable”.

Awareness + Emotion in a nano-second.
The mind filters things out with amazing speed and effectiveness. Think about times when you were shopping looking for something specific, or times when something caught your briefest attention. Your mind is constantly filtering out stuff underneath your conscious awareness while you are consciously searching for another thing. Yet when something catches your attention, to hold it long enough for your brain to register, it has to connect with your heart. You have to experience an emotion in order to continue to hold your attention for longer than a nano second. As marketers, that’s all the time the packaging has to make a sale and win at shelf.

The two battles at shelf.
To make a sale, there are two battles at shelf you have to win. First, people have notice your product and reach for it (as opposed to something else). Secondly, people have to drop it in the cart. You have to win both battles. The product’s packaging is the only weapon you have to win.

Designing shopability into your packaging.
Shopability is how well your packaging will catch the attention and connect to the emotions of your target consumer. Unlike so many other marketing tactics where you have far less control, you can control the shopability factor into your packaging by design. Packaging that is shopable shares these essential design characteristics:

The Brand Billboard Effect
If you have a complete line of products that involve several facings on the shelf, the brand’s visual identity should form a big billboard shouting out who the brand is across the shelf.

Simplify The Focus
Keep it extremely simple and focus on the highest emotional benefit the product provides. The consumer needs to know what makes the brand special and why they should buy.

The Brand Messaging Hierarchy
How many layers of branding are on the packaging facing? If you have layers of branding on the facing (corporate brand, sub-brand, product segment, violators and flags), are these layers supporting how the consumer’s mind is working? Is your branding useful or just white noise?

Spotlighting
Putting visual emphasis on a new feature or a differentiated attribute is a common practice. Is the spotlighting on your packaging a promotional disruption, or is it an integrated descriptor that is important to product segmentation and shopper experience?

The Impression Hierarchy
The mind sees, imprints and recalls in a systematic way. To make an impression on the mind, packaging needs to support how people perceive levels of information when they are shopping. Information is processed incrementally in a sequenced manner. In order of perceptual importance to the mind, packaging design must support these impressions:

1. color–invokes a physical response

2. shape– creates and supports recognition

3. imagery– stirs emotions and fulfills needs

4.  words– informs

When you’re facing the task of creating and designing new packaging, it’s important to consider how the consumer’s mind deals with managing the intense overload of sensory information coming at them from every direction when they’re walking down the store aisle.  How they see, connect and recall things has important implications for how shopable your products are at shelf. Packaging that sells is always shopable.

The big battle for packaged goods success has always been at the shelf, and nobody will deny the influence packaging has on winning this battle. But it takes more than words on a label to win.

Right now consumers are shocked and paralyzed, and it shows in their purchase behavior. In response, marketers are in hyper mode tweaking their packaging, discounting their prices and promoting their brands–doing whatever it takes to get their share of a diminishing wallet. Winning at shelf keeps getting tougher.

A case in point.

The inspiration for this post came as a result of a recent conversation with a brand owner (who had experienced early distribution and sales success with their start-up ready-to-drink health beverage line) about the effectiveness of their current packaging to communicate the product benefits to influence purchase.

They were concerned about the descriptive words used to convey the benefits of the product’s attributes. They believed people cared about function, and they wanted to use better words. They believed the words on the label were the cause of a sales slide. They asked us for some advice on how to fix their copywriting problem.

The brand owners could not see the real cause of their sales slide. They were too emotionally invested in what they’ve been doing thus far, even though it was clearly no longer working. They were more interested in “selling tactics” without any deep concern or strategy for connecting with people. The desire for immediate sales was having the opposite effect.

Like many marketers, they went right out and did some tactical qualitative work to learn how consumers reacted to various descriptors that touted product benefits. They also tested these words in various decorative packaging design themes as well. As you would expect, they came away with lot of information about what words and decorations people like–but no useful information revealing why this start-up brand (that showed such early promise) was losing momentum and sales.

That didn’t seem to matter to the brand owners. They just wanted to know which words they should use on the packaging. Once they got the words right, they figured their troubles would be over. Does this story sound familiar to you?

Winning at shelf requires more than words on the packaging.

Fixing words on your packaging that need fixing is an easy thing to do. Influencing consumers to reach for your product at shelf rather than the other alternative is a very difficult thing to do. Marketers want the quick fix–some clever copywriting, a few design tweaks and–viola!

To win the battle at shelf requires your product represent a greater, more valuable idea to the consumer than the words and decorations used on the label to describe its function and benefits.

Consumers must value “the reason to believe” the promise of value. They must highly value the very reason the product exists in the first place. Certainly, product attributes, functions and benefits form the building blocks that differentiate one thing from another. Being different is not enough to win at shelf.

Consumers demand and expect products to function and deliver benefits. Today everything is good. On the shelf, good = the same. Delivering functional benefits is not enough to win at shelf either.

Abundant choice and clutter has made consumers deaf and blind. They’re immune to marketing, buzz words, descriptors and flashy colors. To win at shelf requires the product represent a higher ideal and a greater experience. If it doesn’t, it better be the cheapest price.

Fulfilling a highly emotional, expressive-to-self need is what people care about and pay extra for. To get consumers reaching for yours rather than theirs requires they hold a perception your product represents an experience they highly value and is difficult to substitute.

If the product doesn’t represent a higher ideal and is the same as everything else, copywriting and graphic design, no matter how clever and cool, won’t be effective in building long term sales growth and brand value. But you could win some design awards.

By the way, here are the highlights of our advice to the brand owners in our story:

Forget about features and benefits, they are antes in the category. Reconnect your team with the core purpose and higher ideal the product was created for (besides making money).

What does this product represent to people that is highly valued and difficult for them to replace. Craft a clear and relevant value proposition based on that.

Find out who really cares about this proposition and why.

Determine if these people represent a sizable market opportunity for the product to compete and win.

Craft a compelling positioning idea that focuses your organization and your resources on the art of sacrifice.

Define a high value target consumer,  aim your creativity and resources only at them.

Craft a relevant and credible story of value the people you serve really care about.

Develop a brand messaging platform on the higher ideal rather than features and benefits.

Design product packaging that is distinguished from other alternatives, and communicates with simplicity the ideal and experience your high value consumers really care about.

Rinse and repeat for future product introductions.

Contrary to what many believe, the logo is still the main event in communicating the essence of what a brand represents. Within our obsessively condensed attention spans, the logo is more important than ever.

Make no mistake, logos are ubiquitous and so are their creators. In an era of $100 logo design and crowd sourcing, one might conclude the discipline of logo creation has been reduced to automated assemblies of database centered type fonts, symbols, icons and pictograms. Seemingly, anyone with a flair for color and arrangement ought to be able to cobble together a decent logo.

Many big name brands have recently tweaked their logos in a crowd-sourced craze to connect with their customers (think Gap and JC Penney). Seemingly brand owners have devalued the importance of their logos through their adoption of these online easy-do-it yourself-generic-creativity-generating portals.  As a result, web sites like HP’s Logoworks have become thriving businesses.

On the other hand…

Creating a logo that brings enduring value and differentiation to the business enterprise it represents requires deep insight and highly specialized talent and skill.

As our world gets smaller through the technology advances in how humans interact and communicate, logos that are instantly recognized and clearly understood are more important and more valuable than ever.

The logo must work so much harder today–especially when compressed down to sixteen pixels favicons, used as buttons, links, or embedded in content on a mobile screen. The space is getting smaller and the white noise in the slush pile of the marketplace is getting louder. Truly effective logo design is being pushed to new limits delivering instant recognition in ever-smaller digital footprints.  Beyond the communication idea, these are important design considerations many brand owners are just beginning to realize and evolve their identities with the times.

And more importantly, when a logo can transcend any language, linguistic or cultural barrier, and still represent a compelling brand story, its value to brand owners increases exponentially.

What Paul Rand said about the importance of the logo three decades ago still holds true today: “If, in the business of communication, image is king, the essence of this image, the logo, is the jewel in its crown”.

Logos have always been an abbreviation for our preferences, and symbolic of the value that defines who we are and what we promise. For centuries, logo forms have been stitched into the visual fabric that surrounds and connects us. The logo and the ideals it represents are more important than ever–and so is the discipline and process of creating them.

Another iconic retail brand takes a stab at crowd sourcing their logo. This time it’s JC Penney. Although it appears to be another gapification of identity design, JCPenney seems to have slid this in under the radar. Where are all the pundits who were so vocal on Gap and Starbuck’s recent identity changes?

Apparently JCPenney (unlike Gap) took great pains to vet this generic jewel, claiming the new design won the approval of thousands of customers, and was endorsed by two design schools. (think contributions to their scholarship funds). Read the Adage story.

After a rigorous process sifting through 200 design submissions, turns out the winning logo was designed by a third year design student. Congratulations to the design student!  I’m sure this effort will lock into a solid entry-level position at one of the big brand design shops.  Here’s what the CEO had to say:

“We’ve made significant progress transforming our Company over the last several years by infusing great style into our assortments, delivering world-class customer service, and introducing new and innovative retail technologies that have made JCPenney a retail leader in the digital age,” said Chairman-CEO Mike Ullman. “Our new logo reflects the modern retailer we’ve become while continuing to honor our rich legacy.”

Really? How does this new logo do that exactly?  I never cease to be amused at vacuous corporate PR (bullshit) copy writing.

Far more interesting to me than the design, I haven’t heard a whimper from the snotty nose bloggers who dissed all over GAP. This seems completely strange to me. Nobody seemed to notice this at all.  If nobody noticed (or cared), how will this design represent JC Penney’s so called progress at creating a more exciting and relevant shopping experience?

Love to hear your comments!