Awesome Saul Bass Google Doodle

Make sure to check out today's Google Doodle on the Google home page. They are paying homage to one of the awsomest designy-type people of all time, Saul Bass.

Bass is one of those designers/artists who sort of exists under the public radar, much like Paul Rand or Gil Elvren. It is ironic that his frequent commercial work — designing logos, posters, and letterhead and whatnot — would cause him to be rejected by the artistic mainstream, while at the same time that commercial work would allow him to be more influential on a large scale than many widely respected and well-known artists.

Similarly, like many great artists who have worked on movie posters, people remember the actors, the directors, to a lesser degree the writers and cinematographers, but no one remembers the poor designers who frequently create the most memorable images from those movies. Saul Bass is well known because the sheer scope and quality of his work literally forces the world to be aware of him.

Again, Make Sure You Are Ready For a Brand

In my previous post, I explained why being ready for a brand is, in a way, more important than getting the brand. If you are not prepared to live up the expectations of that brand, the brand will provide a “face” to which people can attach negative values after experiencing your less-than-exemplary business.

Oregon State University has produced a study discussing this precise mechanism. Only this study takes the “face” concept a bit farther and makes it literal. Logos and brands are figurative faces, but one way to brand is to create an actual face. Think Tony the Tiger, the M&M guys, or Ronald McDonald. This is called anthropormorphizing, literally, making human-like.

By adding human characteristics to a brand, the emotional connection becomes even stronger. This means that, when correctly implemented, the benefits can be large. But poorly implemented, as this study shows, the  detriments can be just as large.

As I've stressed, this confirms the argument that a brand is what your company does. The first step to a good brand is making sure that what the company does is exemplary.

Legendary Sony Bravia Commercials

Every now and then, a commercial really stops me in my tracks. The first commercial for the original Razr cell phone; the Three Little Pigs Guardian advert; and many others.

Sony Corp. has been in the absolute shitter for quite a few years now, so I'd like to take everyone back to a time when they weren't quite on the top of the world, but they were near enough to it. In 2005, Sony commissioned a series of commercials for their newly refreshed line of Bravia LCD televisions, and boy howdy, did they knock these out of the park. They are a case study in subtle advertising and an early experiment in using social media to deliver a message to people who active want to want what has been made.

Make sure to watch all of them in the highest-def available.




This "Domino City" spot aired a couple of years later and I don't consider it of the same caliber. It's not bad, but it lacks the majesty of the earlier commercials. Moreover, the earlier commercials don't use any tricks as the dominoes do. There's no CGI. There are actual bouncing balls, actual paint. They only used computers to edit out the support structures for the action.



Finally, a year after that, we were given Foam City to advertise all of Sony's A/V hardware. This is definitely in the same class as the earlier ads. The ending is awful, with the random and hurried display of products, but the rest is great.

Make Sure That You Are Ready For a Brand

As I was working on my earlier list of tips on designing your own brand and logo, a notion kept niggling away in the corner of my mind. I didn't mention it in the other article because it was already quite long, so I will address it here.

Make sure that you are ready to bear the burden of a brand.

Burden? How could a brand possibly be a burden? Indeed, after my article extolling the virtues of good branding, it seems like something every sane company should do. And assuming certain things, that's very true. But a brand can also be an immense responsibility. It must be nurtured and managed as something that the company owns just as any other capital expenditure.

Think about what a brand does. You are creating -- through images, sounds, colors, and words -- a "face" to which people can attach values. If we assume good values -- basically, if we assume good business -- then this is a desirable thing. But what if you are only doing a job as a part-time thing. What if your heart is only half in the work. What if, frankly, you aren't very good at what you do.

In this way, a brand can backfire. People attach values to your brand, and if these values are bad, your brand becomes toxic. The power of brand also makes these bad values persistent... really persistent. Indeed, when people attach values to a brand, they hang on like remoras. Repairing a brand that has been damaged by bad values will cost a fortune, which is the reason why so many companies that had had their brands damaged will simply choose to re-brand, sometimes even going so far as to change the name of the company.

If you remain anonymous -- if you remain faceless, as it were -- this generally cannot happen. There is nothing to which people can attach bad values. This faceless world is a place where many lackluster businesses have flourished for decades, be they electricians, dentists, or contractors. Dave the plumber is indistinguishable from Joe the plumber, and bad experiences with one can quickly be forgotten by customers.¹ More or less, you are safe here.

Obviously, as I point out in my earlier article, in an ideal situation, you don't want this. You want the ability to stand out! But precisely because this endeavor is valuable, you absolutely need to be keenly aware of the risks. And truly, even the risks themselves are good in a way. If this process was easy to implement and maintain, everyone would be doing it, and it would thus not be valuable. A good thing that is difficult to implement only makes it better.

If you want a brand, remember this point: a brand only develops value through the customer interaction with your company. Your primary concern is always behavior. You NEED to make sure that your behavior will attach positive characteristics to your brand, and this is time-consuming.

Likewise, a good brand requires a fair amount of money behind it. If your company is small, this isn't a big deal, but if you are a larger operation -- say, a plumber with multiple employees -- having a brand can be pricey. You will need to ensure that your customer's experience is branded from beginning to end. Cards, signs, letterhead, outfits, training, websites, etc.

If you don't invest the required capital in the implementation of your brand, it will appear cheap and encourage a negative reaction even before you have a chance to actually interact with the customer. As I said, a bad brand well implemented is better than a great brand that is poorly implemented.

If you do not have enough money and wherewithal, do not brand. Brands can be dangerous and you need to mitigate that danger. Entering the marketplace with a poor brand implementation (cheap signs, interior design, employee training, etc) will cast an immediate pall on your company that will require hard work to overcome. DO NOT saddle yourself with that deficit.

Brand when you are ready to do it well. Not before.

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1:  Today, the Internet is casting some light on this shadowy realm through review websites that can attach judgments irrevocably to a name. Unsurprisingly, we have seen dozens of court cases where business that once thrived in anonymity suing the websites that enable users to post reviews. I find the lawyers suing to stop bad reviews the most ironic.

McBurgernald's And The Problem of Infinite Selection But No Choice

Much like a fighting game, all the characters are mostly
the same. From Lysol Jones.

There's a short and sweet article over at Pacific Standard Magazine about Hotelling's Law. This is something I should have addressed a long time ago since it is something not only of importance for branding, advertising, and business, but also for grander ideas of social justice and the problems of companies like Wal-Mart.

First, an anecdote. I live in Rhode Island, and along with a stunning crush of frozen yogurt places, we have burrito joints spreading like a very delicious infection over the landscape. Long before Chipotle set up its first shop, we had a local copycat. This copycat started expanding throughout the state and now has quite a few restaurants. Then they started opening locations near Chipotles. Then Chipotle started opening locations near the copycat. And now, right across the street from a Chipotle, and down the street from an On of the Border, a Qdoba is opening. WTF?

This is Hotelling's Law in action. It states, in simple terms, that competitors will gravitate toward one another in every way: location, product, branding, price, and even hours. This is the underlying principle behind a intersection with a different gas station on every corner, or a plaza with a TGI Fridays, Applebees, Chili's, and Ruby Tuesdays in it.

What could ever cause such madness? Greed combined with a lack of vision, primarily, but there is also a degree of good business sense hidden within the apparent stupidity. To wit, every company wants to appeal to the largest demographic, and that means competing with other companies where they already are. This becomes even more important if your competitor is successful, meaning that people like their product. If people already like it, copy it!

While this may have some acceptably solid foundation in good business, it has a palpably depressing side; it is one of the -- if not the primary -- drivers underlying America's consumerist march to mediocrity. When every company is chasing the same demographic, products skew toward the bland, because anything of interest is bound to alienate at least a few people.

I can think of no better example that modern Hollywood. With production budgets in orbit somewhere around Neptune, studios are loathe to do anything that may repel broad demographics. And thus, we get movies like Battleship. Perhaps even worse than Hollywood is the modern video game industry, which seems to have turned into an industry predicated entirely on video games where men shoot, stab, or crush other men.

Entertainment is one thing, though, and the stuff of every day life is entirely another. Hotelling's Law has rampaged across the shelves of the big-box retailers that dominate our retail lives: Wal-Mart, Target, and increasingly Macy's, J.C. Penny, and wholesale clubs. This isn't immediately apparent, though, since these same stores also operate on the principle of "more is better," in both selection and plenty. For example, look at the towel displays at Bed Bath & Beyond in the image to the left.

Americans like plenty. We don't just want towels, we want the Berlin Wall of towels. We don't just want a shirt, we want 3,000 different shirts.

But how, as a saavy business, is one supposed to provide plenty and immense selection while simultaneously not driving away too many people from any and all of the products? Blandness and minor differentiation, of course! It is the bread and butter of Target, J.C. Penny, and Wal-Mart: limitless selection with no choice.

This is undoubtedly a moral issue, since these massive stores work hard to keep competitors down, which thus deprives the populace of actual choice in everything from food to medical supplies. It is also a business opportunity.

It cannot be understated, this is dangerous territory in which to be. This is what it means to be a leader. You are purposely trying to move away from your competitors, not toward them, and for all you know, you might be moving away to lower sales. If you don't do this, though, you can never be a great company. You will forever be OfficeMax to OfficeDepot; Zales to Kay. Your only hope to grow is to hope that your competitor is stupid and thus goes under (as with Bed Bath & Beyond when Linens 'n Things crumbled), or you simply buy your competitor (as with Macy's and Filenes).

To truly succeed, your business must move somewhere new.

Don't do this willy-nilly or anything. If you sell clothing, don't up and try to sell Miracle Fruit or anything like that. Also of importance, don't sell "easy money" additions. To explain what I mean, an example. Linens 'n Things was a company that sold what was in the name, but unfortunately they took the things part of the name a bit too far. It got to the point where one-fifth of the store included things like margarita machines, Donald Trump dolls, and candy. Lots and lots of candy.

These easy money grabs were usually crowded on shelves as a customer approached the register. This is awful business. Yes, these products are able to squeeze a little bit more money from the customer before they leave (and thus satisfy executives who only care about the bottom line), but the experience has been damaged. The brand is no longer associated with something positive. It is associated with a hodgepodge of crap.

The correct course of action was for Linens 'n Things to draw back their square footage. If you are taking up space with crap that doesn't mix with your brand, then you don't need that space. Get rid of it. Save on utility charges, rent, and the people necessary to manage that space.

Oooorrrrrr, they could have expanded their offerings into something new, something that wasn't a tacky money-grab. This was the even more correct answer. Move someplace new.

Where this new place is is beyond my knowledge. I don't know what business you're in. Plumber? Expand into bathroom cleaning services. Printing company? Start doing one-stop marriage invitation and mailing. As long as your sales don't collapse, it means that people want your product. If you are making something wildly different then your competitors, then congratulations! You are capturing an entirely new market!

I make this sound so easy and it absolutely isn't. It requires patience, artistry, insight, and knowledge. But once you make that first big move into the unknown, and assuming that it is a success, you can then work to understand why your new business is working and then apply the basic mechanisms to increase value. Once competitors move in to your new business, move on to another one. Always lead, and never be left behind.

The Digital Entertainment Industry Is Leaving AMD Behind

Hello. Yes. Yet another article about an AMD video game system. Last one... for... the day. I swear.

CES has been a treasure trove of insight and work into the future of digital entertainment, but not in the way that technology companies usually talk about "the future."

In an interview with The Verge, Gabe Newell, CEO of Steam went over many of the points I addressed in my proposition for an AMD Radius video game system. It's amazing. It is obvious that I am not the only person thinking about ways to change the current paradigm of game rendering and delivery.

Newell's most insightful point is that motion controls are, for lack of a better word, crap. They are a gimmick, and considering that the Wii deflated, the Wii U flopped, and both Microsoft's Kinect and Sony's Move have long since been forgotten, this seems like an undeniable assertion.

It's interesting that the failure of this gimmick is being presented in the shadow of another entertainment gimmick being declared dead: 3D. It's doubly interesting because both 3D and the various motion inputs failed to set the world on fire for the exact same reason: they were concepts being bolted onto current paradigms in the hope that they would reignite dying business models.

3D first exploded into theaters with Avatar, even though it had been percolating for years. Movie studios and theaters jumped on it because they saw it as an opportunity to charge more for tickets. Of course, they missed the biggest problem, which was that overall ticket sales have been flat or falling for a decade, and ticket sales per capita have been plunging.

Of course, media companies were ecstatic at the prospect of getting this into homes, since it would make people buy yet another television, media player, and media. But again, this was simply trying to sell more crap within the same business model. Companies love that. They love to pretend like they don't have to actually think or innovate. "The current model is fine!" they say.

It's for this reason that I put "the future" in quotations in the second paragraph. When companies talk about the future, as everyone at CES is doing, they aren't actually talking at all about the future; they are talking about the present with a futuristic sheen over it. There are few technologies more representative of that than 3D, with every company under the sun was babbling about it for four years, then, nothing.

The various motion controllers were hoping to expand the video game industry beyond the 30-million gamers that were, born in the 70's and 80's, simply growing up with the industry. Nintendo explicitly stated this when they were describing the philosophy behind the creation of the original Wii — they wanted to grow the market. Of course, they were ignoring the advent of the Internet, digital distribution, and the rise of cheap games, which was the problem. Nintendo was innovative but blind. The paradigm remained the same, they just changed an element of it.

And much like 3D, every company under the sun was talking about motion control for years. Every company had their own take on the gimmick. Every company did it because it seemed like the future without actually being different.

But gimmicks are never the future. If companies are all talking about it at CES, it's not the future. If the CEO of your company immediately loves it, it's not the future. The future is scary. It is hard to explain. It is hard to grasp.

I'm glad that we have forward thinking companies like Valve talking about the actual future, where old business models are dead, dead, dead. No sugar-coating. No circumlocution. No sticking collective heads in sand. AMD should have been the company at the forefront of this charge, but if they want to ignore this, than fine. Valve will be more than happy to demolish an entire industry on their way into the future.

Nvidia's Project Shield Takes More Opportunity From AMD's Hands

I've been going on about this for quite awhile now. AMD is standing idly by as a great battlefield of technological innovation leaves them behind. My focus on having AMD make a video game system isn't just about games, it's about entertainment. As our entertainment becomes more focused on huge hunks of data, the hardware to decode that data is going to get very valuable. Any hardware that can generate a unique and enjoyable experience will be even more valuable. That's why people are willing to pay extra for Apple products: the hardware creates a unique, powerful experience.

AMD is the only company on the planet with the expertise in architecture, CPU's, and graphics processing to pull together an entire system by itself. They have the hardware available now to build something new and innovative. All they have to do is package it!

That's all just me repeating myself. Nvidia has announced the new Project Shield at CES. It is a portable, Android-based gaming platform powered by Tegra. It seems mostly similar to the recently-Kickstarted Ouya, and it is. It's also ugly, unsexy, bulky, and poorly thought out, but it has many seeds of greatness in them, not the least of which is the Gamestream.

That's the word that I made up to describe the streaming technology that is in my hypothetical AMD game system, Radius. Basically, a powerful system somewhere in the house renders a game, which is then streamed via a wireless connection to a dumb terminal, be it a tablet, cell phone, or lite laptop. I lifted the concept from Dave Perry's game streaming service, Gaikai.

Project Shield will be a failure, but its ideas will not. AMD can still own this. They can still create a new paradigm for entertainment generation and management. But with Steam, Nvidia, Intel, Ouya, and even Nintendo to a degree pushing for new things, AMD doesn't have all the time in the world. They need to hurry the hell up if they have any hope of securing a place in the future of the digital entertainment market.

Because as I've said repeatedly, AMD has lost its other markets. It has lost servers. It has lost desktops. It has lost laptops. It needs to find a market that's still churning.