The new Ramona Falls video “I Say Fever” from Barsuk Records is amazingly well done. Check out all the subtle attention to detail in the movements, eye blinks, cigarettes dangling. This is no Terry Gilliam/Monty Python concept. There’s some beautiful understated stuff going on. Awesome.

Thanks, Wendy, for sending this!

In the slug-fest that is retailing during a recession (coupled with an interest in green packaging) some of our clients are thinking a lot about their brand identity in the store.

Me, too.

But in a few commoditized categories, there’s an underlying doubt at work. For these manufacturers, research indicates that consumers don’t pick a product on the basis of who makes it. Instead, they are swayed almost entirely by the design of the product itself. Who made the sheets on your bed, for example? The towels in your bathroom? Your socks? Many people have no idea. They just liked the pattern or the color or the feel of the fabric.

If that’s true, why spend money and energy on branding in those categories? Here’s why: Because there are other decisions you can affect and other audiences you’re communicating with that matter. A lot.

Retailers
Buyers and store managers do indeed respond to the character, consistency and quality of your brand through your packaging, but also through all the other materials they encounter. The impact of the overall experience retailers have with your company lets them know how to position you in the store, what kind and quality of product they can expect, and how you perceive both your company and your consumer. That’s important stuff, and whether or not it controls the consumer’s final decision, it does impact your sales very directly.

Consumers
While the consumer may well buy a product whose design (character, fabric, style) they simply like, regardless of who makes it, they will have a reaction to your packaging. It lets them know who you are, for sure. But it also tells them who they are if they buy your products. You have a chance to reinforce their sense of self, to make them feel good, or not so good, about their purchase. And, of course, if this is a gift, then you can enhance the perception of their generosity, taste, caring and so on. If that weren’t true, you’d package your stuff in cellobags with cheap stapled paper headers and call it a day. But you probably don’t. And there are good reasons why not.

Web visitors
More and more, the web is the way people learn about your company. And one of the things they learn about is what your brand is like. Their web experience helps them envision the quality if the branding reflects it, and helps them justify their purchase. Consistency with the “you” they see in the store reinforces their decision to buy and reminds them of all the other nice things they know about you.

All in all, since you have to produce marketing tools (only one of which is your packaging) and since you probably care about how you’re perceived as a company, you really should develop your entire brand identity so that it supports you.

And that, in turn, will pay off in sales and market share.

I recently saw this little blurb in Ad Age:

Caribou Coffee bows first national TV effort
Caribou Coffee, the country’s second-largest coffee chain behind Starbucks, today will launch its first national TV ad campaign. The creative by Colle & McVoy seeks to poke fun at Starbucks loyalists by portraying them as marionettes.

©2009 Josh Freeman

As a Starbucks, Peets, Coffee Bean and even local café customer, this made me bristle. And I bet it’ll do that to other coffee lovers, too.

Caribou is not Apple, and Starbucks is not Microsoft. I’ve been to several Caribou Coffee stores, and they’re nothing to bellow about. They’re fine. Pleasant. But they don’t inspire, they aren’t highly innovative, and their coffee isn’t in a class by itself. So slamming people for buying coffee in a place that is innovative, that works hard to keep its experience fresh and relevant, and that transformed an entire industry, seems questionable.

Anyway, we aren’t puppets. We go to Starbucks not because we’re coffee snobs (head to Peets for that) but because it’s convenient, a little entertaining and has way better java than 7-Eleven.

In the posted spot, which I admit is pretty funny, Caribou is positioning their product as more “real” than Starbucks (or presumably anyone else’s). But the drink they show is a pretentious mess of whipped cream and chocolate gunk — basically a dessert. If they’re so real, why are they not talking about the coffee? (Answer: There’s no difference? Or maybe Starbucks’ coffee is actually — um — better?)

Looks to me like they’re setting Starbucks up for an easy counter. And I have to ask myself if this approach will end up putting Caribou on the endangered species list.

We just got the word that the brand new site we created for Outsource Partners International has gone live, and we’re excited to share it with you. OPI is a top finance and accounting outsourcing company, with operations on three continents and an international clientele. Their target audience is primarily CFOs of major corporations.

As part of a comprehensive rebranding program, the site had to strike a balance between the high level of professionalism required when one company is trusting its most sensitive financial data to another — and the warm personal relationships that are necessary for insightful partnerships to develop. We balanced the immediacy of black & white photo journalism with a highly organized clean structural grid. Touches of bright color keep things lively and give users an aid to navigation, helping them stay oriented through a large and complex site.

While we more often develop entire sites for our clients, in this case, we designed the interface, created all the graphics, and programmed a set of master page templates from which OPI’s in-house team implemented the rest of the site. Kevin Consales was our lead designer (on the brand refresh as well). Chris Grau led the development team.

Joanna and the OPI crew have been great to work with, and, together, I think we’re putting a well-designed, well-targeted new face on OPI’s communications. One that much more accurately reflects who they are and where they’re heading.

What a week! I started in Boston at BAI’s annual Retail Delivery Conference and Expo (for which we’ve created the campaign and graphic theme for four years in a row — more on that in separate blog post), and ended up at the Opportunity Green conference at UCLA over the weekend.  To quote from their website, “The world can no longer afford business as usual. Opportunity Green emerged to confront this challenge and bring together the brightest innovators leading the growth of the new green economy.”

A few highlights of the conference — at least for me:

• Hearing Adam Lowry, one of the founders of Method cleaning products (whose concept, design, copy and creativity have made me a huge fan) talk about their beginnings, what the company has learned, and where he sees the industry heading. About how a company is more of an organism than it is an organization. And how, despite all the metrics and business models, sometimes companies “just have to do something awesome.”
• Seeing Chris Jordan’s mind-bending photographs designed to give the viewer an experience of the actual amount of garbage we create. And watching his moving, beautiful slide show documenting the decimation of the albatross population from ingesting the plastic now swirling in the Pacific Ocean — an island of trash twice the size of Texas.
• Being stunned at the positive impact Proctor & Gamble can have on the environment simply by making a cold-water detergent that’s as effective as the usual warm-water kind.
• Running into my old business partner Stuart Karten, a brilliant industrial designer, who brought half a dozen members of his team to get current on the state of the shift to a green economy.
• Hearing Annie Leonard and Jonah Sachs discuss their renowned video The Story of Stuff, and thinking about how their approach to story-telling relates so deeply to all the work we do.
• Experiencing the powerful Hopenhagen campaign that Ogilvy’s team has put together, and learning how this enormous agency knew when even its own resources weren’t enough — and sought partners to augment their message.
• Reveling in the news from a year-long study by MIT’s Michael Hopkins and BCG’s Andrew Townend that, even in this recession, corporations are not cutting back spending on sustainability. Then talking to Andrew over lunch about where things are headed and what it means.
• Watching 13 brand new green startups — all finalists in the OG25 competition — each give a 60-second pitch to the whole conference. Brilliant new ideas, three of which apparently found venture capital funding this weekend at the conference!

There’s much, much more. But this post is getting long. Bottom line, to quote Jim Davis from SAP, “A bullet train has left the station. You’re either on it, or you’re back on the platform. And in 10 years, you’re irrelevant.”

The original line of Karito Kids, now joined by their little buddies, Travel Charmers (see below).

We are incredibly lucky to have so many clients who do amazing things for the world.

Some raise money for women’s cancers. Others provide education, housing and support for developmentally disabled kids and adults. Still others support young athletes, build homes for working families, or create state of the art programs for seniors with dementia.

It’s a hell of a group, and we’re thrilled to be on their teams.

One of our favorites is the amazing Karito Kids.

A couple of years ago, two visionary women formed a company whose mission was to support services for children in some of the poorest parts of the world, while teaching kids about the value of being involved and giving back. (The name Karito [`ka-ree`-toe], meaning charity and love of one’s neighbor, comes from the constructed international language Esperanto.)

To do that, they created a line of multi-cultural dolls and books, and set things up so that a portion of every purchase supports children’s humanitarian projects worldwide.

The creativity of their product line combined with the company’s core commitments to charity and global awareness have attracted industry and media attention, resulting in dozens of prestigious awards, including the #1 Toy of the Year.

Now they’re doing even more.

Look! It's the new Travel Charmers line of soft, cuddly Karito Kids.

They just announced a plan to donate an additional $2 of every Karito Kids® purchase to victims of the recent natural disasters in Southeast Asia.

Through an initiative called “Project Reach Out,” they’ll send extra funds to help families affected by the recent earthquakes and typhoons in Indonesia, Vietnam and the Philippines. This additional “Project Reach Out” donation will be in effect through October 31.

Laura and Lisa — and their whole team — are simply amazing. As are their products. Do yourself and the world a favor and shop now for the holidays. It’s not too early to get into the real spirit of giving.

My theory of the day: Going green is the next World War II.

It looks to me like global warming will be the huge economic push that will get the whole economy moving at full steam again. (Pardon the pun.) As the oceans rise, as the land becomes parched, as cities flood, as the populace migrates, enormous opportunities will also open up for companies with enough awareness to see them.

As with World War II, we will have no choice but to deal with the problem. The government will spend money, and taxpayers will fund the expenditure. People will simply have to get truly creative to solve the problems a warmer climate will create.

I don’t know that what we now think of as “green” will be the main focus. I imagine it’ll be a part of it because there will certainly be a desire to slow the process down as much as possible. But being green tends to take vision and sacrifice, and lots of people are too self-involved or unconcerned or uneducated to be willing to participate.

In contrast, money is a great motivator. As is water lapping at your upstairs windows. I think lots of other new industries will emerge:

• New forms of mass transportation will have to be built to deal with relocation.
• New forms of housing will be needed — cheap, insulated, self-contained, probably modular housing systems.
• New forms of farming will be developed, with genetically engineered crops (whether we like it or not) that yield more nutrition with less irrigation.
• Massive new engineering challenges like bridges, pontoon-based structures and levees to protect people from the rising sea.

You get the idea.

People who are thinking ahead will be in a position to capitalize on all this while helping their country, and the world, enormously.

And, with luck, we’ll be part of those innovative solutions.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about where we’re all heading — as a company, as a country — and what we can do about it to help make things better.

Michael Bungay Stanier is a business coach in Canada devoted to helping companies and individuals do Great Work (as opposed to just Good Work). He sent out a link to this terrific little video. I thought I’d share it with you.

It addresses some of the things I’ve been pondering, and it makes me happy to know there are lots and lots of people out there who are thinking along the same lines.

Maybe you’re one of them. Enjoy.

Patricia and I just got back from a couple of weeks of traveling, mostly in England. We got to spend a day with two good friends: the artist Terry Cripps and writer and consultant Susannah Finzi at their gorgeously restored and remodeled old home in a tiny village in the Gloucestershire countryside. After years of working as a commercial illustrator and photographer, Terry is now doing what he truly loves. He’s painting abstract images.

We picked the fresh vegetables the couple grows in abundance, which Terry and Susannah cooked brilliantly, along with the spectacular aged lamb they had helped raise on a neighbor’s farm. We ate, drank and talked. And, after two years of having promised ourselves we’d do it, we finally bought a couple of Terry’s pieces to bring home.

Our conversations about Terry’s paintings led me to an interesting question about design. Why do so many people think that the things we create have to be instantly recognizable?

Clients worry about legibility, even if they’re talking about a huge, single-word headline that happens to be set in an interesting font, or a light tint. They worry if we turn words sideways, even though nobody has any trouble reading the headlines on street banners while driving by at 40 mph. They worry about whether people will instantly understand the form of a logo and immediately connect it to the object it might represent.

But not every single thing has to be clear right away. Often the most powerful images are the ones that make you scratch your head for a moment, then lead to a delightful “ah-hah!” reaction. Ideas that leave you curious, that get you interested, are so much more memorable than those that demand no involvement.

Often, reducing a design to its essentials — controlled abstraction — is part of our process. We ask, “What can we leave out and still make this work? What’s absolutely necessary to leave in — that thing without which the concept doesn’t make sense or affect the viewer?” People’s instinct is to include everything. And, generally, that desire is fear-driven: “What if they don’t notice me? What if they have a question I didn’t answer?”

I know, I know. I’m becoming a GTD nerd. (At least I’m in good company!)

As as designer, though, I couldn’t stand looking at the many kludgy charts around to guide you through processing the stuff in your “In” box. So I designed my own to use as a desktop background (“wallpaper” in the Windows world). I’ve posted them in the GTD section of this site. If you want to see them, just click the GTD tab at the top of this blog and download them to your heart’s content.

Meanwhile, if you’re not yet acquainted with David Allen’s “Getting Things Done”, do yourself a favor and check it out.