Integrated: Re-birth Of A Buzzword

Don’t Hate This Word Because It’s Beautiful

By Josh Kelly, FINE Design Group

Unsupervised words decay over time. For instance, nobody’s been watching as the word “integrated” erodes into the verbiage equivalent of a once-great magician who now plays The Pocono’s and shills Prime Rib dinners. It makes shameless appearances as an agency cross-sales tool, validating the sorcery of coordinated marketing tactics that kinda sorta fit together somehow.

Let’s bring it back to its previous glory. Let’s do it such that, by the end of this article, it turns out thoughtful, strategic design services are very important. You will leave feeling your dollars are well spent in this department – perhaps you should even spend more. No slight of hand here; you get the agenda right up front.

I can be so overt because a long-forgotten, powerful premise supports me. Integrated marketing, and its corollary, integrated design, is based on an irrefutable truth that was perhaps never widely understood: integration refers to an effect, not a cause. Put simply, the audience does the integrating, and design helps them do it.

Whether you decide to proactively manage the process or not, your customers coalesce visual cues, experiences, impressions, and all sorts of information into a set of associations regarding your company and its products. The goal of building a brand is to effectively use these associations to secure a piece of your customers’ cranial real estate so that each time you talk to them you don’t have to say things like “Hi, my name is COMPANY, I sell PRODUCT, and there are lots of REASONS you should trust me more than COMPETITOR.”

Also, building a brand enables you to be wildly successful charging $5 for a cup of coffee.

Design is a principal tool in manifesting your brand’s core attributes and messages. It goes well beyond nice logos. The appearance of your website, packaging, advertising, retail locations, collateral, and any other contact points at your control all come together to create the visual point of reference to which your customers attach non-visual information. Design literally creates the focal point for integration.

Yet despite the military efficiency marketing lingo suggests (“targets”, “tactics”, “campaigns”), no company gets to fully dictate what happens in their customer’s minds. A well-conceived and, perhaps above all, consistent design approach is among the few variables a company can actually thoroughly control. Without this reliable air cover, the rest of the brand-building process is risky, dependent upon factors like the demeanor of front line employees, competitive product innovation, even the price of raw materials.

Sometimes it’s instructive to imagine that every contact you have with all your customers takes place through one guy, a salesman named Joe. This would significantly reduce the complexity involved with managing customer impressions. But the pressure on Joe would be tremendous. He could do everything right, but if he shows up for meetings with Fortune 500 companies sporting a mullet haircut and overalls, then scribbles his phone number on squares of toilet paper as a leave-behind, well, your company may not get the business. Don’t let the complexity of managing many more variables than just Joe dissuade you from providing customers strong, unified, visual evidence.

At best, failure to create and apply appropriate design standards through all contact opportunities means a failure to establish a common visual platform for customer relationships. At worst, it fosters a negative context. The important thing to understand is that failing to decide is a decision in itself. Either you (or your designated agency) must step in and manage design proactively, or your customers will do it for you. And they probably don’t care about your company or its products as much as you do.

It’s okay to value some marketing expense based on click-throughs or calls to your 1-800 number. But if you’re not simultaneously valuing the contribution to brand equity, building an asset that pays dividends when the phone stops ringing, you are wasting dollars. Reinventing your look and feel with every package, site, or print ad you do, for instance, is a good way to shift your company toward a purely infomercial model. Your product development roadmap should perhaps re-focus on handy kitchen gizmos, portable exercise devices, and no money down real estate courses. You’d still need strong design, but it would only require a 30-minute shelf life.

So we can rescue this downtrodden word from its near-death state and apply it to the important work of using design to manage touch points that impact customer’s integration process. Or, we can make up fancy new terminology (“unified design theory”, or “symbiotic perceptual amalgams” have a certain drama, but I vote for something timeless like “smart and consistent design”). Either way, the choice is between a conscious decision with potential long-term benefits or the idle hope that your outreach might result in more than just another contribution to ambient noise.

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Josh Kelly is a Principal at FINE Design Group, a design and communications firm with offices in San Francisco and Portland. FINE combines technology and strategy capabilities with traditional design expertise to help clients differentiate and dramatize their brands through web, print, and corporate identity projects.

Weaving. Like Integrated Marketing, Except with Straw.

Also Here: http://www.finedesigngroup.com/words/theyrerich.html

Perhaps you don’t know any rich people and get few opportunities to observe them in their natural habitat. Their mysterious ways stymie your formulation of evil genius-caliber marketing plans to separate them from their surplus funds. This is an especially big problem if wealthy people are the only ones who can actually afford the products you sell.

There are two cornerstones of accepted wisdom about the affluent that may help.

First, being rich is as effortless as it is fabulous. It’s all velvet chairs, fluffed ascots, caviar dollops, and periodic urges to stir up high society scandal to fight the ennui that comes from never truly needing to get out of bed. Fortunes are amassed either through accident of birth, or as a by-product of living as though civil and scientific laws don’t apply.

Second, being rich may be fabulous, but it’s no fun. The rich secretly envy the simple pleasures that necessity invents. They long to sneak down to the ship’s lower decks and dance with the scruffy folk in steerage. Their luxuries insulate them from awareness of how miserable they truly are, and they will buy anything if it supports this illusion. During temporary lulls in the acquisition of furs, thoroughbreds, and boats with putting greens, they find comfort in decadent innovations, such as bathrooms wallpapered with 100-dollar bills. The richer the person, the poorer the soul!

One of the great dangers in defining brands and markets is to reduce customers to caricatures. Marketing to the affluent is especially susceptible to this because our observation of this segment has so much to do with our own measurement of ourselves. These powerful myths perform the dual social purposes of inspiring us to strive and consoling us when we fall short. So the first step in learning how to market to the affluent is to admit you have a problem.

The next step is to understand that affluence is a broad market category within which there is variation even as to the definition of affluence.

Measured against worldwide standards, the 14% of U.S. households that haul in $100,000 or more per year could be considered affluent, even though they may not be in the market for your vacation property or timeshare jet. But expanding to a global view, the truly wealthy can be segmented between the “Sorta Rich,” the 16.7 Million people around the world who have scraped together at least $1 Million, and segments of 600,000 “Super Rich” who’ve amassed a $5-500 Million net worth (The Luxury Institute, The Luxury Consumer Market, 2006).

At the far right of the number line are the world’s 2,000 some odd Billionaires. If they want your products, they’ll buy your company. Ignore them unless you are marketing sleds named “Rosebud”.

The next thing to understand is that rich people often don’t think of themselves as rich. Many of them made their own money, and still worry about the same things as the non-wealthy – like how to make more money. One study showed that 73.6% of people with $1 Million “were worried about how to become wealthy”. (Prince & Associates, 2007). For every silver spoon, there are four golden gooses that haven’t had enough time to get used to the idea of wealth – stop thinking of them as Thurston Howell from Gilligan’s Island.

Yet, there are some existing conceptions about the wealthy that hold true. They are no strangers to luxury travel, entertainment, jewelry, and designer fashion. They believe in indulging in life’s pleasures, even if they do not do so as frivolously as you may think.

But what defines this group (especially if you’re asking them and not yourself) is not just a stereotypical attachment to style, but an underlying appreciation of substance. Here are five ways to apply that insight to your brand marketing efforts:

• 1. If you build it, they will come. Marketers often look upon this “Field of Dreams” quote with derision. But with this group it makes sense. They have the luxury of discernment, and use that to focus on all the details that characterize quality products. If the product and the entire experience that surrounds it aren’t wholly compelling, no amount of marketing savvy will compensate. Instead of skimping on the ratio of palm trees to people, for instance, your posh resort should be able to claim more palms per capita. All the amenities and marketing materials should be designed with the same principal. Think of extra investment in designing, branding, and servicing these products as commensurate with the cost per acquisition of a customer with 10, 20, 100 times the spending power.
• 2. Reach them where they live. The wealthy are easy to find, but hard to truly reach. Some modes of communication are by definition contradictory to their highly independent and interpersonal ways of gaining product knowledge. They are very well informed, but have neither the time nor the inclination to rely upon mass media sources. So while a highly customized direct marketing piece is a sure way to reach the right people, it must also carry with it the kind of messaging and design that separates it clearly from junk mail. And while carefully selected magazine placement can also help, it must be something that carries the confidence of a product that sells itself on its own merits.
• 3. Talk to the millionaire next door. Message them in ways that do not pander to their wealth. Selling luxury vacation property is about offering an environment where life’s true pleasures can be realized, not about bathing in caviar and comparing paparazzi horror stories. A timeshare jet is about getting you there in comfort, not about how much fun it will be to think about the bovine conditions of the slobs on commercial airlines. Enough with the ascots already.
• 4. Create a true brand franchise. You must think of wealthy-focused brands as a true customer franchise. It’s something that coalesces around a loyal group of customers, rather than some exercise in positioning packaged goods to the mass market. Wealthy customers can vary in age, gender, family status, hobbies, and income and must be defined and pursued on some basis other than simply their wealth. Perhaps the best way to say this is that rich people are people too.
• 5. Advertise on the other networks. A good way to think about how to establish a brand among the affluent is to think about how it will proliferate through interpersonal networks rather than mass ones. The wealthy find word of mouth and referrals from friends extremely important in making purchase decisions. They rely first on the evidence of their own judgment, second on the judgment of others they respect, and third on very little else. Creating messages, stories, and venues that resonate in this social context is important. Focus on creating evangelists for your brand through everything ranging from personal interaction to product demonstration. What story about your brand will carry news of it across this network?

Witnessing attempts to market to the affluent can be a bit like that feeling you get when you switch on the television in a faraway country to find that an entire culture may be getting its image of Americans from subtitled Desperate Housewives reruns. It makes you want to start a cultural exchange program. Or write an article.

Just as there are no true get rich quick schemes, there are no schemes to get rich customers quickly. Marketers who think beyond stereotypes learn that one accepted truth about this segment holds true – it turns out they do have money to spend.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

FINE DESIGN GROUP SETS SITES ON PORTLAND

PORTLAND, OREGON – MAY, 2007 – FINE Design Group, an award-winning West coast design and communications firm with roots in San Francisco, has opened a new office in Portland, Oregon.

“We actually followed our staff and clients to Portland,” says Steve Fine, Principal. ”Some of our longest-standing and best employees already live and work in the Pacific Northwest – we just needed to put them all together in an office to make it official.”

After 14 years in San Francisco, FINE staff began a steady migration north last year, and recruited some of the natives they found among the growing Portland talent pool of designers and coders. The company also works with collaborators as far away as Spain and Germany.

“The amount of creative and technology talent to be found in Portland is amazing,” says Josh Kelly, Principal. “Most people think you open new offices just to find clients. We’re here just as much to keep and find great staff as to generate new business.”

The full-service firm has gained notoriety for combining technology and strategy capabilities with traditional design expertise to help clients differentiate and dramatize their brands through web, print, and identity projects. Clients of FINE include are leaders in industries like Luxury Travel and Hospitality (Joie de Vivre Hotels, Francis Ford Coppola Resorts), Wine and Spirits (Trinchero Family Estates, Foster’s Group, Niebaum-Coppola), and Technology (Covad, Hitachi).

“I have to be honest,” says Kenn Fine, Co-Founder and Creative Director. “We’re hoping our official presence here will inspire an outpouring of creative juice never before witnessed in the Pacific Northwest and lead to our total domination of this market. But on the off chance that doesn’t happen, it’s still a great place to be.”

About FINE: Founded in 1993, FINE is a design and communications firm with offices in San Francisco and Portland and a worldwide stable of talented design and technology collaborators. FINE’s Portland offices will be located along the NW 23rd Street commercial corridor. The company can be reached at 503.243.3463 or via its website at http://www.finedesigngroup.com.

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