Collaborate & Conquer
Left-brainers and right-brainers of the world unite! Success is only as limited as your ability to work together.
By Ken Peters, October 2009
Everywhere you turn the brightest brands and the bright
minds behind them are embracing design to innovate and succeed:
“Design is the fundamental soul of a human-made creation.” ~
Steve Jobs, Chairman & CEO, Apple.
"Design is the single most critical factor in
determining the winner of the 21st century.” ~ Kun-Hee Lee, Chairman & CEO,
Samsung.
“Design is critical to innovation and building brand
equity.” ~ A.G. Lafley, Chairman & CEO, Proctor & Gamble Co.
“Leaders dare to [design].” ~ Chris Bangle, former Chief of
Design, BMW.
Design is shaping business at an increasingly rapid rate.
Around the globe, innovative ideas and creative solutions are being brought to
life by design to meet consumer demands, create new categories and change the
way people experience and interact with brands. While it’s true that design
alone isn’t going to save the world (that’s Bono’s job), it’s equally evident
that businesses that don’t embrace design simply won’t be competitive in the
21st century marketplace.
Yet, designers and businesspeople often mix like oil and
water. Conventional thinking is that designers are egocentric aesthetes and
businesspeople are penny-pinching prigs. Nothing truly great or innovative ever
came from conventional thinking, though. Smart practitioners of both
disciplines understand that amazing things are accomplished when talented
people come together to explore the combined potential of their unique gifts.
Collaboration is the catalyst for real innovation.
Collaborate and Conquer
Innovation happens where smart business intersects with smart
design. Merging the best and brightest from both worlds allows you to leverage
capabilities and exploit opportunities to fulfill unmet needs.
Trusting design (and designers) is sometimes difficult for business thinkers. Problem is, in a spreadsheet world of quantifiable
corporate cost structures design is often dismissed as frivolous embellishment.
Truth is, design is a targeted enterprise, planned, purposeful and results
driven. By its very nature design does away with the superfluous to clarify,
simplify, streamline and improve.
While great design is often embodied in an object of beauty,
design is a verb as well as a noun, a process as well as a result. As such,
design is the remedy for both aesthetic and functional mediocrity. Design
solves real problems – for businesses and for consumers. That’s why
strategically building design into every level of a business model can save you
money while it makes you money.
On the product side, design addresses human factors to
improve ergonomics, functionality and usability. Design delivers those superior
products to market via more cost-effective, predictable, scalable and efficient
methods of manufacturing, shipping, distribution and other cozily quantifiable
logistics. Design drives success on the consumer side by shaping the
relationship between your brand and your customer across every touchpoint.
Great design determines the purchase decision well before the point of sale by
creating desire, influencing behavior and fostering emotional bonds between
brands and consumers.
Those reasons, and more, validate good design as good
business. Innovators have always understood this. Consider the story of an
innovative start-up from Memphis that's been maximizing the possibilities at
the intersection of smart design and smart business for years to consistently
deliver...
Overnight Success
Federal Express originated door-to-door overnight package
delivery in 1973 with 14 Falcon jets and a modest fleet of rented vans. 29-year
old entrepreneur Fred Smith leveraged a $4 million inheritance (roughly $21
million adjusted for 2009) to launch his air-ground delivery concept based on a
simple hub-and-spoke model that he had outlined in a Harvard MBA paper – which,
incidentally, received low marks.
Initially, the company offered service to 25 cities. At the
time, nationwide door-to-door overnight delivery was seen as so radical that
Xerox Corporation tested Federal Express’ system by shipping empty boxes for
two weeks before being comfortable enough to entrust the company with real
documents.
Nearly 20 years later, Federal Express was generating $8
billion in revenue at the forefront of a fiercely competitive global industry.
By late 1992 that amazing growth offered new opportunities that called for
reinvention. To herald its expansion into emerging sectors and strengthen its
presence in the market the industry leader made a bold decision... it would
completely overhaul its visual identity. Enter San Francisco-based design and
brand consultancy Landor Associates.
Building On Strengths
Landor was asked to assess the Federal Express brand
position within multiple global markets. As with any good design process the
first step was collecting input from and about the client to understand the
context of the world in which their products and services exist and compete.
This research revealed some eye-opening data.
For one, the popular truncated form of the company name,
FedEx, had come to be viewed as the generic synonym for overnight delivery
(Note: When your brandname is added to the cultural lexicon as a verb you've
struck gold). Further study showed signature brand colors orange and purple
communicated urgency and leadership while the identity overall held powerful
cache in speed, reliability and service.
Research uncovered problems as well. Whereas the word
“Federal” had contributed clout to a plucky post office alternative in 1973, by
1992 it conveyed “bureaucratic red tape” and – worst of all – “slow”. Among
Latin consumers negative associations with the term “federales” prevailed,
while in other parts of the world Federal Express was simply too hard to
pronounce. Solving these problems was critical for a company on the cusp of
launching dramatic new global initiatives.
A New Brand World
Armed with insight into what something already means
designers have freedom to explore what it could mean if used in a new way. Such
was the approach to Landor’s solution of embracing FedEx as the new brand name
and summing up the company’s most powerful attributes in the succinct tagline,
“The World On Time”.
Upper management liked the concept. They also understood the
perils of design by committee review and avoided undo delays by taking the
astute step of designating a single decision maker for the company. Gayle
Christensen, then Managing Director of Corporate Marketing, was given the
reigns. “We have a CEO [Smith] who understands the power of design,” says
Christensen. “Because of his leadership, corporate image is not viewed as
something frivolous.”
With that blessing from the boardroom the creative
collaboration began in earnest. Hundreds of preliminary sketches were developed
for the new logo. Christensen and Landor designers ultimately narrowed the
field to five concepts for presentation to Smith and top executives.
“We were fortunate that our client had a good understanding
of [design],” says Lindon Leader, Landor’s Senior Design Director on the
account. “People tend to look at a new identity and dismiss it as a logo
change. FedEx understood that it’s really a byproduct of the overall
repositioning of the company.”
Delivering the Goods
Because the cost of that repositioning was always a concern
smart design kept the bottom line healthy. To avoid the expense of sandblasting
and repainting tens of thousands of drop boxes – in an array of sizes and
configurations – a decal system was designed to retrofit existing units. But,
boxes were just the beginning.
The length of the original Federal Express logo limited the
height of letters on the side of a tractor trailer to only 58-inches.
Shortening the name, replacing the dated type with a more contemporary face and
removing the cumbersome purple box around the logotype improved aesthetics as
well as function. Now, the letters of the condensed FedEx mark could be
extended to six feet. Delivery trucks became rolling billboards. Merely
eliminating the purple background of the original symbol allowed the company to
save nearly $10 million in labor and materials when updating their 10,000
tractor trailers.
Re-identifying the air fleet provided even greater benefits.
Less dark purple paint on the planes decreased weight and surface temperatures,
reducing the energy needed to fuel and cool the aircraft, thus lowering
operating costs and creating a smaller carbon footprint. Purple pigment is also
sensitive to ultraviolet light and less of it meant less of the costly
protective coating required to resist fading. Lastly, the larger, more legible
new logo meant that the planes could be easily read from across the airfield.
With thousands of trucks and planes criss-crossing the world daily, the
tremendous advertising exposure provided by each vehicle is incalculable.
Designers got hands-on experience as couriers and handlers
to ensure designs for new uniforms, holsters and back braces met employee
needs. Interior and exterior signage was applied to locations worldwide, while
the bold new logo was positioned for conspicuous visibility on the millions of
packages handled daily. Finally, extensive graphic standards guidelines were
provided to licensees worldwide to ensure global brand consistency.
The Brand On Time
After approving the sweeping identity system in February of
1994 FedEx brass asked Landor to have all brand components designed and ready
within four months. New initiatives were close to launch and management was
motivated to make sure they carried the new look. Financial factors also played
a part. Large numbers of trucks and planes needed to be emblazoned with the new
brand before scheduled delivery.
Landor design teams logged long hours to meet critical
deadlines and overcome logistical hurdles. On June 22, 1994, the FedEx brand
was unveiled on time, in budget and with great fanfare. 20 years after
launching an industry Federal Express boldly acted from a position of strength
as that industry's leader and dramatically re-calibrated its identity to stand
out and stay in front of a growing field of challengers. 15 years later FedEx
remains the industry's trendsetting leader.
“The reason this entire changeover was so successful,”
Leader concluded, “was because FedEx management was so committed to making it
happen in a big way. From day one this company understood the value of
effective marketing. They have never lumped the management of corporate image
into advertising or public relations, like other companies. They have a
fundamental appreciation that [design] is their most strategic marketing tool.”
Avoid the Shock of Your Life
Successful collaborations like that of Landor and FedEx
illustrate how smart development and application of design can make an
organization more efficient, sustainable and profitable. So, left-brainers and
right-brainers of the world unite! The possibilities are only as limited as
your ability to work together.
Who'd have thought that Vanilla Ice had it so right when he rapped, "Stop! Collaborate and listen." Could it be that Ice has even more to teach us? Doubtful.
Still not convinced? Ponder this… Will Rogers once observed
that there are three kinds of people in the world: those that learn by reading,
those who learn through observation and those who have to pee on the electric
fence to find out for themselves. Don’t watch your business fail because you
weren’t smart enough to be in one of the first two categories.
©Nocturnal Graphic Design Studio, LLC
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