 Welcome to Agile Roots 2010, sponsored by Version 1, Rally Software, Vario, Amirsis, Agile Alliance, and Xmission Internet. Why can't marketing just handle that branding junk? By Nate Jones and Dan Phillips. We're going to do my work for SkyBend, and we work with people on branding, helping them with their software brand, and also their company brand, and how those two interplay with each other. Kind of have form and function, Dan is a graphic designer, and we work on brands from the largest steps of micro-brands for one-man bands and basements. Yeah, so the great thing about my partner, Nate, is that everything that is on e-programs and develops data is worked on. Large-scale data-driven applications, again all the way down to simple WordPress sites. So we get a chance to work together, and we create a collaboration, and this is kind of a project we've been working on for the past few years, and we're here today. So our title on the program was about being a programmer, and why can't marketing just take care of branding junk? We're not going to talk specifically about programmers. We're talking about anyone related to software and how branding can affect their daily lives. And then you bring some of the techniques we're going to talk about into your planning processes, and it'll help you enhance the brand and the company and the product, as well as make a better experience for your users. Okay, so to start off, we need some audience feedback today, so please don't get too comfortable. What do you guys want to kind of help out here? I'm going to ask some questions. What is brand? When you hear brand, what do you think of it? I think about a name associated with some product. A name, okay. A reputation, okay. A logo. A logo. A feeling. Okay. Anybody else? I think you represent something you need to give by an title of an organization or a group or something. It's associations. Okay. Symbolism. Symbolism. Experience. A little experience. Yes. Symbol, either the one chosen by the company or one that you choose in your mind, that you feel represents that company already. Okay. Okay. So I mean, I thought you know something about what you're trying to push. There were many symbols that you still didn't come up with that people would have thought of as being. Thank you for pointing out. This is not a political statement. I typed in confused. And this would be very first image that came back. So maybe you could be the sports person. Maybe you could be confused. Anyway, it seems to be a lot of great ideas as far as what brand is. And we're going to talk a little bit more about those. So some of the things I saw in your name, logo, symbol, those are kind of the tangible items. And a lot of times people think about brand and think about the tangible items. They think about marketing collateral. Okay. Collateral is, you know, don't get us wrong. This is the exact thing that everybody associates with brand. And this is where a lot of the problems come in when we talk about brand. You know, this is the Bahamas logo. I don't know how many of you have seen this. As you can see, we have their getaway flow, the pages. Everything is using their logo. And by the way, this is their logo. It represents the Bahama Islands. And I think they've done a great job of illustrating kind of their overall experience. Kind of happy, bright colors. You can see the website. Everything is really, really continuous and very well laid out and put together. So some of the things that we also have on the list. Our reputation, feeling, association, and experience is kind of the intangible items. And so we want to talk a little bit more about the intangible items and kind of talk about how we move clients from thinking about the tangible logo, symbol, branding, marketing material to the intangible items. Now, our first step is we create a story. And I know this probably sounds a lot like personas to this group. However, when our client comes in, Nate and I have worked together long enough to know that when a client approaches us, they have a vision in their mind of what the end result looks like. Nate and I have nicknamed this the movie. Somehow they have a movie, and every detail in that movie is planned out in their mind, and they don't realize it. And we know immediately when they realize it. When we show them something like, no, that's not it. Well, their ability to identify no, that's not it means they know what it is. So we have to sit down and try to find this movie. And the way we do that is we ask questions. We ask a lot of questions. So we have this client that we work with, and we're going to illustrate that right now. And he was a poker client. He wanted to start a clothing line. He wanted to start poker tournaments. He wanted to start anything and everything to do with poker. So we sat down and we asked him, if your brand were a movie, who's the main character? And our client said Brad Pitt. And we took him in there and took a look at it. Brad Pitt has been a lot of things. That doesn't help us a great deal. You could pick any one of his movies and end up with a different story. So we asked further questions. Which character of Brad Pitt did you most identify with? Or do you think most identifies with your brand? So anybody know the movie that this is from? What? Alright, here's Snatch. Now our client said, I want a badass. So we went through and we found badass Brad Pitt. Now this one is from Snatch where he's a fighter. How about this one? It's a little hard to see, but fairly recent. Inglourious bastards. Alright, it's a different kind of badass. And here's another brand of badass. Anybody know this movie? How about this one? So this is what we talked to our client about. And he says, well, it's none of those guys. He said great, which character is it? Anybody want to take a guess which character? Troy. Troy. No, Ocean's 11. This is Rusty from Ocean's 11. We said great, now we watched the movie Rusty. Actually watch it. Rusty, he's a badass, but he's a cool, calm, collected badass. Okay? This guy, how many times have I said badass? So Rusty here, he's got these shades. Anybody else seen the movie Ocean's 11? Alright, can you guys give me some words here on Rusty? Rusty, our main character here? He's a calm man. Smart. Swab. Okay? These are the kinds of things that our client, who can't, for some reason, say smooth, swab. He can somehow point to this character and say, this is what embodies my brand. So, now that we have Rusty, it's hard to see, but this is a movie clip of Rusty in the movie Ocean's 11. We have our guy. So now we asked the client, what kind of car does Rusty drive? In your movie, not necessarily in Ocean's 11, but in your movie, what kind of car does Rusty drive? Car says a lot about a man, alright? So, when he starts thinking about all these cars, he starts throwing them out. So let's start with the obvious. Pinto. Is Rusty ever going to go on a pinto? Alright, so we understand at that point, Rusty can only fit in so many automobiles. Alright? And the one that our client chooses is, I believe this is the 69 convertible Camaro. Now, Rusty fits in that car better than anybody I've ever seen fit in a car. I mean this guy's now got attitude. The story is really starting to come together. So now we ask one last question, and we ask, what environment does Rusty live in? Anybody care to take a guess? It's pretty obvious at this point. Vegas, okay. The casinos. And more specifically, where the lights are. Where all the lights are bright. This is what our client tells us. So this kind of paints a really good picture of what our client has in his mind when we start talking about brand. And this goes into what Nate was talking about with the intangibles. None of these elements are related to logo yet. They're not related to brochures yet. They're not related to any other object, other than the idea that's going into the creation. So in the end, this is the logo. It's still in the process. It's still in the works. And we're still playing with it. But as you can see, the company's name is Big Slick. Does anybody know what a Big Slick is? In poker? In poker players? Okay. So the Big Slick is a hand in Texas Holdem. And it is the strongest starting hand. It is an ace and a king. You can see in the logo we married those two together. And the Big Slick font there, and the stuff that we've dialed in is all trying to match them. And the other stuff that we've done that we can't really show at this point kind of relates with Rusty and his whole personality. So reiterating some of the intangible items, some things that we didn't see. We've got things like promise and trust and relation to reputations and ideas and integrity and faith and belief. Those are things that we really try to get to when we're talking about brand. It's not just the logo. So some of the things is we learn to trust certain brands. And the only way you can learn to trust a brand or have faith in a brand or learn that a brand has integrity is to experience that brand. You have to interact with that brand. Not the marketing material. You have to interact with story. You have to experience that. And I'll talk about a special limit on the intangible parts of brand. So pop quiz. What's the most loyal brand on the planet? Coca-Cola. No. Good though. Keep going. Please, feel free to say other things. What was that? Apple. Apple is pretty good these days. Loyalty is what I'm talking about. To the death. Marlboro. Good. Over the years, people will consider the most loyal brand to be Harley-Davidson. This is the only time we're going to use that effect because it fits. Yeah, we found a fire. Harley people are Harley people and you can't convince them otherwise. And it's a culture, which is another word we didn't talk about with intangibles. It's people experience Harley-Davidson. So let's take a little history walk through Harley-Davidson. So this is some of the early stuff from Harley. And so, you can see going back for our bad-ass word, this isn't quite there yet. It's kind of like skiing. You know, it's... And then here, it's fun. It's fun to be on Harley. And so this was Harley's vs. Davidson, these are their ads. So they didn't quite have their story yet. So it's going to be refined over the years. So Hollywood thought they'd take a shot at it. So they gave us this little more tough Harley crowd. You got the leather now. You got the motorcycles and they're living the life. They got their chick there with them. Is that an ascot or a scar? They didn't quite get it yet. Right? I don't know, he's pointing out. He's pointing out a lot. I think it's a scarf though, man. Okay. So then, this was kind of the reality, right? That was Hollywood's picture of it. This is the reality. There's a little bit of hardcore already. And this guy got some loyalty already. And this guy is really into it. And so, for the next one, Hollywood thought they'd refine their story a little bit and give a shot against it. They wanted to romanticize this. It's about freedom. It's about life on the road. Anybody know this movie? One of these is in Indian actually. So then Harley came back and said, well, let's refine the message. Sorry. So this is what Harley wants now. They went from skiing and fun over the years to that's the hardcore lifestyle right there. So they continue that freedom. Well, this is hard to read. It says, thou shalt not have any other gods before me. So Harley Davidson is putting out a very strong story of what they want you to experience with their brain. So this is, the bike is the man. These are actually parts of the motorcycle. So this is part of the images that I can't tell all these girls are pregnant. They're on the road in every town. It's called Harley Davidson tour. Leaving their mark I guess. So this is probably where we settled these days. So you've got your 30 to 50 year old guys and ladies out for a weekend ride and what's interesting about this picture is they're living the culture. They want the Harley culture. They're not quite there. These guys right here, there's such hardcore guys that they like their keys organized on a retractable key chain. And this guy's got his on a caravaner. We want to get too far from the office because he's got his phone. Their jeans are all clean. This guy's got a beard coast. This guy in the background does not play to the heart. I don't know if this is quite those guys you saw a minute ago that aren't one, but these guys are experiencing the brand. They probably go put their suit on during the week. And there's probably some of us in this room that do this. We're only in good fun making fun of ourselves. So here's the reality. So this is the loyalty. They're so low they're going to put this permanently. Lots of people. You see the freedom message coming through with the eagles. And here you've kind of got the harder side with the flames and the snakes and the tribal stuff. So this is why Harley is the most loyal brand on the planet because you've got these kind of eagles. So not the only brand people want to put on their body. Show you some other examples. So the frosty gear. What do you think your spirits had to be? I can't see it. Look at the costume. This kind of likes the shirt so much. The stitches are around the tattoo. So these guys experience the brand. Whatever brand it is, they experience it. This one here? It's a fail whale. Twitter. You love Twitter. So their experience had to be so great that they just want to put it on the body. Ikea. Fantastic. This guy's got to be upset because they changed their logo. We've got to do logo though. Yeah, it's coming up. There's a book publisher. Penguin Press. And I think that Blackberry is how many generations you go into a whole lot of Blackberry. And Popeyes, I love Popeyes. Mario. Mario Brothers. We're assuming that people kind of get into the experience and they want to mark that one. New Cisco logo right here? Very committed. It's kind of like Google. Alright. So with that, we're going to go ahead and we're going to take some time. We're going to do kind of an experiment here. Is this an intermission? Yeah, this is an intermission. This is a pin and paper. And we need to work together with the table. So if you guys can group up with guys that are kind of like new models on. We'll meet at least three. Or it would be possible for them to come in. Because we haven't met you enough with the comic. So let me give you a little bit of a tweak. This pop-up board, every flavor is different. Every single flavor is completely unique. Seriously guys? Your job is to identify the flavor and identify the character. Do you want to elaborate a little more? Yeah, so... You guys can have this one. I know you're on the table by the way. So we want you guys to kind of... We're going to see a product. So everyone has different flavors. We want you to taste it, feel it, look at the color. We want you to think about well-known characters and stories. And in a few minutes we're going to come back around and you can tell the story. What the character is. What the mode of transportation is. And what their environment is. Based on what we know of your popcorn. I want to know the well-known character, like Rusty, that represents your popcorn. It can be based on color. It can be based on the taste. It can be based on the texture. I also want to know what mode of transportation they use. And I also want to know what their environment is. Now we want you to use your imaginations. It can be sponge, bob, exquit, and tarantino if your popcorn tastes that bad. The idea is to come up with something that's creative, alright? Now keep in mind, I'm going to take one away from you. There is a guy that did this before. He's an eight-year-old guy who's since passed, now dead, and he's still felling popcorn. But we know he drove a station wagon and lived in an isle of farm. We don't want to hear it in Orville Redenbocker. Go ahead. Think about what's spicy. More on experience. You can't even see it. There's a sentence under this. Just do it. How many have you had? Thank you. That's a pretty overwhelming experience. Thank you. Do they make you run faster? Do they make you jump higher? Do they make you a better athlete? No. But you bomb. Would another product work just as well? Better. Better? But Nike is still one of the number one companies. And they're still going. Now, if we can talk about our experiences all day, and we know that we keep buying Nike, however, Nike is also susceptible to bad experience. If something doesn't work, right, or fails on your product, your chances of going back and buying it again are completely gone. And this one's in the sun. This is a sign that fell off. This guy's not buying a Nike. This guy's not buying a Nike. You're right. All right. So experience. This guy had an experience at this restaurant. What's nice about this is his experience, he decided to leave us a note about what he thought all the way up until he used the mustard that underlined so the experience. So, we're talking about Nike and then running and good experience, but we have the flip side so you've got to watch out for that. And so we have our software equivalent of this. That's quite a lot of software. Whoa! Presentation over, but good thing we're on a Mac. And so we've got a good experience so we can go ahead and put it past that. So this one hit me a lot. He's like, it's a 404 error on the web. Excuse me. Are kind of how we experience a lot of websites these days. And so this is a typical, you know, Windows, Microsoft message. You know, this guy, this one here, they put a lot of work into aesthetics. They made it beautiful. You know, beautiful 404 error. But we're not talking about aesthetics here. We're talking about experience. So this guy has an amazing experience with this 404 screen. He says, hey, based on what you were looking for, it might have been one of these things. You're doing some intelligent matching. You're also searching the entire site or you're suggesting that you check your spelling in your URL and so forth and so on. So this wasn't just a requirement to have a page that shows up when the user types in the wrong URL. It was probably the feature that the developer got. Somebody spent the time to think about not just the requirement and even the usability they thought something more than that. They thought about the experience the person is going to have, the emotions they're going to have, the feelings they're going to get, the belief in the brand that they're going to have after they see this sort of thing. Even if it is only a 404. So here, usability designers have the tendency to focus on goals and tasks. They take a list. They walk down that list based on requirements and they make something pretty. Experienced designers focus on the story. They focus on the character. They focus on the user. This is critical. Yeah, so don't get us wrong. Usability testing. Usability design. All the effort around usability, which a lot of you are talking about in this building, which is fantastic. We spend a lot of time doing that as well. But usability isn't enough is what we're saying. You've got to go further than that and think about the brand experience that we threw into the design of your software. We're talking about how to do that. Okay, so this is Amazon. First glance, everybody visits here every day. A few years ago, Amazon incorporated something that is the Buy Now One Click patent. Now that completely changed things for Amazon. Their sales went way up just because they put in a button. That's it, a single button. And that button is the power. Who's used that button? Raise your hand. Okay, what does it do? It buys it right now. It buys it right now. You're done. How does that change your experience? So Amazon's brand is about getting the product now. Right? What do you want? What do you want it right now? I want it right now. So it goes to their story. It looks like a button, but there's something behind it. Nintendo. We use Nintendo. We've had experience. Who's used Nintendo? How is the usability of Nintendo? Who's used it? We satisfied ourselves by playing the game. It was good. A couple years ago, Nintendo changed the entire brand. They changed it from usable to an experience. Okay, with Wii, it wasn't just a new remote. They got you off the couch and they got you to experience their software by having a remote. So experience is a type of test. Okay? So you got to be careful. These guys experienced the brand a little bit. Especially this, I feel bad for her. She's got trouble. By the way, this is a broken finger. They were up experiencing the brand. So the story of what Nintendo reinvented themselves as in this experiential branding. People got it. Most of people didn't have this problem. Alright, this is Google. This is a screenshot from 1998. There's something that just stands out right away with me. That is Beta. Beta has been Google's calling card throughout the years. Everything they do, they release the Beta. They didn't invent Beta. Beta's been around since the beginning of software, but the idea here is that Beta, they release that to us to test it to everybody. I know it takes time to get on their Beta waiting lists and whatnot, but you end up on it and you now have control over, well, not complete control, but you have some control over the direction that they're trying to map out for us, and this is their story. We're making better products that you will use so that we can increase our revenue. And they've done that. So, who's going to have 37 signals in base camp? As you guys probably know, their story, their entire brand is built on simplicity. Everything's simple. Just enough, maybe not enough, one less than enough. But it's all about the simplest possible thing. You have two books on the topic. So, their interface here, it's simple. It was probably more difficult to build this interface this simple than it would have been to pull some library out of the, you know, download and slap it on there and have it look like Office 97. They intentionally built it with square tabs and no graphics, because the story wasn't important. They wanted to have the product embody the story. Alright, so that leads us to what now? So, this kind of wrapping up here, so we're going to kind of give you the quick rundown here. How many of here in this room have a company that has a guidelines book on brand? Show of hands. How many of those people have read it? Okay, not bad. Now, this is a good start. However, we want to illustrate that a branding book cannot capture all the dynamics that are in a brand. It doesn't necessarily have a story or the experience that the person is supposed to have. A brand guidebook talks about the tangible items here. It talks about the symbols, it talks about the logos, it talks about the name usage and the colors. Not about the intake. So, this is a great place to start if anybody is wondering how to start putting together the experience. So, next the thing you got to do first thing when you get back is I want you to go find the Ronald McDonald of your business. Okay, not the goofy red head, but the Ronald McDonald who others, some of you got that one. The Ronald McDonald this guy knows what the story is. He knows what the experience that they want the user of McDonald's to have when they come. It's not just some goofy clown. It's about enhancing the experience of kids with a good of McDonald's. There's so many business sometimes it's the founder, but sometimes it's the marketing person. Sometimes it's just a product manager. It doesn't matter. Someone understand the story is passionate about the story of your product or your business. And if they don't start throwing red flags, you can't find anybody that can be that person. But I want you to go find them. I don't want you to sit them down. You can't do this over email or chat or anything like that. Get yourself down. And I want to have a conversation with them and ask them about the brand. Talk about feelings that should happen when people interact with you. Talk about these intangible things we've covered today. So that you can better understand what should happen when you're building the software or when you're testing the software or when you're speccing out features for the software. Okay, once you understand that, then you go back to your product and you can paint your racket. Okay, these guys got these guys got the experience track. I know you can see this pretty well, but this is like a suit though. Alright, in the 70s. So next, everybody's familiar with this. This is an iPhone that we're focusing on as the pictures. There's probably a thousand other photos across the world. And Apple put it into a handheld. They didn't just put a photo after you can look at your pictures. You can see that anybody that's used an iPhone, they changed the whole experience of using it. They made it so that it's working to the user specifications instead of just a static image. The idea here is that they went above and beyond. They've learned what their audience wanted or not even wanted but beyond what they wanted and gave them what they've never dared to ask for. They gave them a whole new way of doing it. And now, every other application and every other cell phone provider is trying to come up with things that do justice. And this is just one simple application that Apple used to do that. So, the other thing we need to point out here is you need to go and you need to find your brand experience, build your brand story, so that we can push further. I want to add one thing to that last slide. After you understand the story Dan said, when you're in your planning meetings and you're speccing out your stories and a lot of people put a sentence right here on the back of their story cards and things like that, I want you guys to put the brand experience criteria on the back of that card. I want you to put down the emotions the person should have when they're using that feature in your software. So then as you go to the next step, everyone's doing usability testing these days. You hear a lot about that. And that tests how usable it is. But it doesn't test whether you're successfully achieving your brand experience. So, now that you've established what those criteria should be, when you do your testing, I want you to also look at the people who are using the software like you want them to be doing, but also experiencing what you want them to experience. Who's going to do this, Chris? Tell me about the state. Um, it comes out very hot. Very hot? Very good. My experience actually was not good. I've only been there once. Okay. Bruce Chris in the back. I've been there actually once, but it was very excellent. It's something where you kind of feel like you're special, if you will. Okay. So you're special, that's an experience, right? It's not a logo, it's not a marketing thing. This hot thing, that is their brand experience. Their state comes out 1800 degrees hot, and it's popping and sizzling all over the table when they put it down. And the person stands there and watches you cut into it to make sure it's perfect. So, if I want to do brand experience testing, I can do that by looking at his face when they put that thing on the table. That's what you need to do when you're doing usefully testing yourself. Now keep in mind, state, you can go get one at Chili's. Anybody can cook one at home. We're talking about usability. We're getting full. Bruce Chris has started into an experience. So, to wrap this up, the three things to become, for you to become the story. One, go back and take the inventory. Learn about your brand. Second, experience criteria. You've got to be able to write down what your clients are going to need and beyond. And last, we need to test for your brand experience, not just usability testing. Everybody tests for usability and that's all fine and good because that ensures the product. But we need to do experience testing, which is finding out if our users are actually enjoying the experience or if you just force fed them something that they may not have necessarily wanted, but it's the only game in town. And with that, we can do, we have short on time to go to the next speaker. Does anyone have a quick one or two questions, maybe? To answer your question that I know you're going to ask, which is flavors. These are the flavors of the popcorn. Yeah. We're going to need to talk to you after. But just real quickly, as far as illustrating those products, the best thing to think about is when you're building a software, you're building the experience. And so, I'm just going to throw out a really quick experience example here, but we had a client who had, I'm going to say, five to ten screens and we had a client who had, I'm going to say, five to ten screens and one of those he felt was re-emphasizing what he wanted to drive home and how he wanted it to be portrayed. He never put himself in the shoes of his character and what we did is we went in and we were able to, again, tear it down and make it just three simple steps and that helped his client or his character become a part of the story. But there wasn't really, I guess the best way to put it is when you look at brand, there's two sides. You've got the whole product owner who's sending that message and wants to force that message but at the same time, you've got to have the user who wants to hear and you need to be constantly worried about what they're thinking about you. Does that help? Anybody else? Thank you, thanks.