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Discover, Distill, Depict, Design, Deploy is the five-step
branding process known as Perception Branding 5D. We recently
completed D1-D4 for our client, UCN. Listed below is a brief review of
our efforts during this process. To see other examples click
here.
D1: Discover
We interviewed everybody from the President to the Chief
Technology Officer, as well as independent industry analysts and
clients. We audited existing marketing materials and their
competition's materials as well. Their company name had no
significance to the target audience and suffered from low
memorability, as do all companies who use initials. The look and
feel appeared sports related.
D2: Distill
Together with ideas from the marketing department, new taglines
were proposed. An image and adjective brainstorm sought visual
and verbal ways to describe the brand. With the research
completed, we sifted, sorted and segmented the information to
determine the Brand Promise, the target's "take away" after
engaging with the brand.
D3: Depict
The Brand Concept Board is a visual depiction of the brand.
Together with the Brand Brief, a summation of findings and
recommendations, they serve as a litmus test against which design
deliverables are measured.
D4: Design
We presented five different conceptual directions for the new
company logo and name. The preferred direction was refined to
incorporate elements from alternate proposals and tested in
various applications to determine suitability. We're now working
on D5-Deploy, making the new identity and strategy a reality in
all the customer touchpoints.
Justin Milo, sometime modern8 employee, is attending the Cooper Union for the
Advancement of Art and Science in New York City. Justin has been experimenting
with Cellular Autonama, which are simple procedures that outline complex behavior.
These 256 drawings are based on
scenarios involving cells with three neighbors. Click through a few iterations. / Randall visited Justin this
month while in the "Big Apple" (see lead article) attending the AIGA Gain conference.
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Last week I attended "Gain" in NYC, the business and design
conference sponsored by the AIGA. Tom Kelley, general manager of
IDEO, a global design consultancy, served masterfully as
moderator of the event. Kelley introduced a speaker commenting on the idea of how we
stop seeing things; how we often overlook the obvious. We go though life screening
out things we see as distractions to our immediate objective.
The art of anthropology teaches that observation is the key to
understanding and an important part of innovation and design.
Simple observation may not be enough, however.
Marcel Proust, the celebrated French novelist said "the real act
of discovery consists not in finding new lands, but in seeing
with new eyes." Kelley names this idea by turning around the
more familiar word and calling it "Vuja de", meaning, "the sense
of seeing something for the first time, even if you have actually
witnessed it many times before." When you go out to observe in anthropologist
mode, you should aspire to Vuja de, the opposite of Deja vu.
As noted in the Fast Company
magazine blog, "If you want to find untapped innovation
opportunities, watch the world around you with "fresh eyes." Go
for a sense of vuja de, and then ask yourself why things are the
way they are. Why do people wear a watch when their cell phone
keeps perfect time? Why don't movie theaters sell soundtracks as
you exit the film? Why do we all have answering machines to
record messages from telephone callers, but nothing to record a
message from someone who stops by our home or office?"
— Randall Smith
 Companies change—sometimes in big ways. And if you're not
innovating and changing you're falling behind. UCN started out as
Buyers United, a reseller of long-distance services, which became
United Carrier Networks, which became UCN. That's when we met
them. We were engaged to help with yet another change. The
company had become something quite different. Long-distance
telephone services today are just another commodity. UCN,
recognizing the need to innovate, has developed a new product
approach that delivers software for call centers over the
Internet. The application delivery model, known as "Software as a
Service", provides significant scalability and deployment options
compared to typical on-site call center software/hardware.
We used our Perception Branding 5D Process to determine the brand
strategy (described in detail in the left column) and then used
the strategy to inform the execution of a new identity and name
change. The logo we created was based on the idea that real
humans man call centers; speaking and communicating, the essence
of what customer service is about. The new company name,
inContact, reflects the name of the company's product platform,
already familiar to their customers.
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