The Design Well
The Design Well
July 12, 2011 at 9:55 am
The top of the design well visualizes your company as a set of concentric rings. It starts with vision at the core of the company and ripples outward through identity, culture, products, and brand – the place where your company touches customers. Each of these rings presents a design challenge, and it’s important to design a clear alignment from the inside to the outside. If there’s a disconnect between vision and brand, for example, your brand will be seen as muddled, inauthentic, or even suspect.
Alignment across the top of the well can be addressed through an organizational understanding of brand, plus the structures and processes needed to enable it. My books The Brand Gap, Zag, and The Designful Company will give you a better grasp of brand alignment.
The side of the design well shows the range of levels at which your audience can encounter your company. The shallowest level, at the top, is perception – the surface of human experience, including what we see, hear, touch, smell, and taste.
The next level down is reason, the logical processes we use to make sense of products, services, companies, and communications.
Going deeper into the well we find emotion, the feelings that drive many of our decisions, including those that are hidden beneath our reason.
Below the level of emotion is resonance, which gives us the intuition that a relationship with a given company, product, or offer is “right” for us.
At the deepest part of the well is ideology, the tribal connection we feel with a brand – the deep knowledge that we “belong” to a company or brand.
When you touch people at more than one level, you not only deepen their experience, but you reach a wider audience, since people vary in their sensitivity to each type of experience.
Designing deeply cannot be achieved through organization mandate. It can only come through the personal mastery of the designers doing the work. While Shakespeare was a great collaborator, it was his personal vision and skill that gave his plays – and his business – the richness and authenticity that created a legend.
Marty, I really enjoy your posts and I thank you for sharing them with us. I liked this one in particular not just because I am English and you make reference to Shakespeare, but the idea of Shakespeare as a Brand is far too compelling to pass over without comment.
The joy of Shakespeare is that often a simple black and white concept – two kids from different backgrounds fall in love, greed, being agains the odds – speak to the ordinary person but “mine the well” and the and the rich complexity of humanity is there to be found and enjoyed.
I often use The Shakespeare Analogy in my lectures on format television or entertainment. How the simplest of ideas draws in the masses, and then it is your responsibility to treat those eyeballs to a rich, enlightening experience. You could chose to educate or introduce ideas, or just make them laugh (just as important in my opinion). The same is true of Branding as you so rightly point out. And in my view the starting point has to be the simplest, vision and presentation. Human emotion is very binary – breaking it down, like & dislike, happy & sad, Love and Hate and yet it has been driving humanity since we stood upright and began to communicate. It is those binary, simple feelings that drive us to a rich bonded experience of our world and the people, places and objects it contains. For me this is the essence of “Branding” and the essence of “communication”.
Thank you once again for provoking my train of thought for today, on reviewing my comment I am left thinking if only it were that easy!
Hi Marty,
It always blows my mind how you can get complex issues and put it in a simple and easy way to understand! Thank you for sharing your knowledge with us. I am preparing a class about Culture to a group of Human Resources professionals in Brazil and it came just at the right moment! It will help me a lot to simplify the interconection of the whole organization to define culture! Thumbs up!
Best wishes,
Sâmara
Incredible thinking. Thank you Marty for all that you do for branding professionals.
Agreed, Jonathan. If branding is a kind of storytelling, we can do no better than to study Shakespeare. He seemed to anticipate the best thinking in modern psychology, aesthetics, design, management, and, of course, writing—all presented in tidy, satisfying little packages. I understand he wrote with a vocabulary of only 5,000 words. Amazing.
Marty, you are simply Genius…. Thanks…..
Marty – thanks for this. This simplifies in my mind all the aspects of brand that we’ve been working on over past years and to make it available to download is truly admirable – it shows you see the bigger picture.
My focus is on helping small business understand what they call this ‘brand’ thing – firstly that it’s not just a logo and secondly to assist them to identify their unique Foundations to Become a Brand People Love. Of course with small business often being so time poor, keeping it simple is imperative.
I’ve been working on this for a couple of years (as an annex to our business events company) and from small business to state government we’re slowly causing a shift which is so exciting!
My main point is to say THANKS! I don’t know how but I only just found out about your work some weeks ago, and glad i did! Every time I find someone else that thinks the same way it’s always encouraging to continue sharing the message. For me the thoughts came first when I was at a trade show and 3/4 of the sales people could not state ‘why I should do business with them’ even with 30 minutes notice!! That’s when I knew there was work to be done. Your willingness to share your knowledge (like the Design Well) for free shows that you practice what you preach and are indeed part of a shift in the world that will be something special.
I’ll be looking out for your next visit to Australia, will share your content further and of course have just signed up for your newsletter.
Cheerio!