The Brand Gap

by Marty Neumeier

  Does Our Website Look Fat in this Dress?

  The award for Most Egregious Disregard of Natural Reading Sequence goes to...that’s right, the World Wide Web. Arguably the most promising medium of our time, the web took off like a rocket, but failed to escape the dense atmosphere of its own hype. That’s because the web, while a technical achievement, has been a usability nightmare. It began as the brainchild of a colony of feature-loving geeks, who fed it capability after capability until it became a hydra-head of non-information.

  Most of today’s home pages ignore the basic rules of visual aesthetics, including contrast, legibility, pacing, and reading sequence. Uncultivated websites shove a tangle of unruly data in your face, then expect YOU to sort it out: a typical home page tries to squeeze an average of 25 pieces of information, some of it animated, into an area the size of a handkerchief. The closest relative of today’s web page is a newspaper page, yet most home pages make newspaper pages seem easy to navigate. The concept of a natural reading sequence has yet to reach the bastion of bad taste we fondly call the web.

  Which Site Looks

  Easier To Use?

  Okay, let’s be fair. The designers of newspapers, books, movies, and television have had more time to refine their aesthetic “best practices.” Television shows were pretty hokey until the networks became big business and competition forced the issue. But what exactly are the invisible chains keeping web design from achieving its full potential? It boils down to three: technophobia, turfismo, and featuritis.

  TECHNOPHOBIA, the fear of new technology, keeps a lot of skilled designers out of web design. They’re mostly afraid the technical demands of the medium will engulf their projects, leaving little time to work on the aesthetics. The result is that most web design, thus deprived of disciplined designers, still falls below the aesthetic level considered standard for catalogs, annual reports, and books.

  TURFISMO, the second problem, is the behind-the-screen politicking that transforms the home page into a patchwork of tiny fiefdoms. You can see exactly which departments have the power and which don’t, as turfy managers fight for space on the company marquee. Simplify the home page? Sure, but not at my expense!

  Finally, FEATURITIS, an infectious desire for MORE, afflicts everyone from the CEO to the programmer. The tendency to add features, articles, graphics, animations, links, buttons, bells, and whistles comes naturally to most people. The ability to subtract features is the rare gift of the true communicator. An oft-heard excuse for cluttered pages is that most people hate clicking, and prefer to see all their choices on one page. The truth is, most people LIKE clicking—they just hate waiting. Eternal waiting, along with confusion and clutter, are the real enemies of communication. Put your website on a diet. You’ll find that subtraction, not addition, is the formula for clear communication.

  All brand innovation, whether for a website, a package, a product, an event, or an ad campaign, should be aimed at creating a positive experience for the user. The trick is in knowing which experience will be the MOST positive—even before you commit to it.

  Discipline 4. Validate

  The New Communication Model

  The standard model for communication has three components: sender, message, and receiver. The sender (your company) develops a message (web page, ad, brochure, direct mail piece, etc.) and sends it to a receiver (your target audience). Communication complete.

  What this model fails to recognize is that real–world communication is a dialog. I say something to you, you say something back. You may say it only to yourself, like when you read a magazine ad, but your brain is nevertheless an indispensible component of the total communication system. You respond by buying the advertised brand, or by mentally storing the information for future use, or by simply turning the page. With the standard communication model, the sender doesn’t know—and seemingly doesn’t care—how the receiver actually responded.

  The standard model is an antique. Today we can no longer afford to close our eyes, catapult a message into the ether, cross our fingers, and hope that it hits the target. Companies need feedback. Feedback turns communication into something more like a theatre performance than a magazine. If we’re dying on stage, the audience lets us know. The feedback is immediate and unambiguous, which lets us make appropriate changes before the next performance.

  When we solicit feedback from customers, the communication model has a fourth component. The sender creates a message, sends it to a receiver, and, instead of stopping there, the communication continues as the receiver sends a message back. With every turn around the feedback loop, the communication gets stronger and more focused. The new model is a blueprint for revolution. It transforms marketing communication into a contact sport, and spectators into full participants.

  People Are Different

  Over the last 15 years my firm has store-tested hundreds of package designs. When we first adopted this practice, the reactions of shoppers to our prototypes often differed in the extreme. One shopper would love design A, but hate—I mean HATE—design B. We began to realize that the audience for one product was likely to be different than the audience for another, and that its taste in design was also likely to be different. A little more delving revealed a fundamental split between two main personality types, those who relied mostly on hard information (facts) to make a purchase, and those who relied mostly on soft information (feelings).

  Eventually we were able to diagram the shades of difference we found in the shoppers we encountered. The chart at the left divides the world into four mindsets, based on people’s job interests: applying, creating, preserving, and discovering. “Appliers,” for example, gravitate toward graphics that are precise, realistic, and familiar, while “creators” go for the lyrical, abstract, and novel. Guess what? If you divide the chart down the middle, you have an approximate map of the left and right brain.

  Test Is Not a Four-Letter Word

  Unfortunately, audience research has gotten a bad rap from the creative community. It seems as if every third book on design and advertising contains a diatribe on the evils of market research. Such views are comforting to the creative crowd because they can absolve one’s responsibility to everything but one’s own artistic soul. As a creative person, I can bear witness to the seductive qualities of these anti-research arguments. And what makes them doubly seductive is that they’re usually delivered by the superstars of their professions.

  Any designer or advertising creative who has pored over stacks of research documents, or puzzled over the charts, graphs, and numerical detritis of serious marketing studies, may well conclude that researchers are paid by the page. The normal reaction of any red-blooded right-brainer is to politely take the documents, toss them in a corner, and get on with the job of being creative.

  An aversion to research has been known in the boardrooms of some of the world’s most innovative companies. Sony founder Akio Morita believed that testing new ideas was folly. “Our plan is to LEAD the public,” he said. “They do not know what is possible.” Even back in the command-and-control days of the production line, Henry Ford’s decision to manufacture automobiles was driven by intuition rather than market research. “If we had asked the public what they wanted,” he explained, “they would have said ‘faster horses.’”

  Innovators often feel that using research is like trying to chart the future in a rearview mirror. They’ve seen too many products and messages aimed where the audience was last sighted, instead of where it’s likely to be tomorrow. Okay, creativity is subjective, but it’s only subjective until it reaches the marketplace—then it’s measurable. Ford’s and Sony’s innovations certainly were measured, not by research, but by the market itself.

  But what if you could test your most innovative ideas BEFORE they got to market? Couldn’t testing help you protect a potential breakthrough from the “fear of stupid”? Absolutely. And if you can’t exactly PROVE that a concept will work, you can at least turn a wild guess into an educated on
e, and give your collaborators enough confidence to proceed. The direction of business is forward. Good research is the least amount of information that gets you out of first gear and onto the highway.

  An Aversion To Audience Research Paved The Way For The Money-Losing Edsel.

  The Myth of Focus Groups

  Whenever you mention audience research, people immediately think “focus group.” Yet focus groups rarely deliver any of the consensus-building clarity needed to innovate. They were originally invented to FOCUS the research, not to BE the research. When used as a decision-making tool, they cast ordinary people in the role of professionals, and tend to elicit the received wisdom of a handful of alpha-consumers who see themselves as critics—and who would probably behave differently in a real buying situation. Focus groups are particularly susceptible to something called the Hawthorne effect—the tendency for people to act differently when they know they know someone’s watching. In groups, it seems, some people just have to show off.

  Focus groups are good as a starting point for quantitative research. Just don’t use them to gauge sales, determine pricing, or analyze things like product design, package design, or messaging elements. What should you use instead? That depends on what you want to find out.

  If you need to choose among prototypes, one-on-one interviews can give you enough insight to choose with confidence. If you’re looking for an understanding of audience behavior, ethnographic observation can turn up some suggestive insights. A benefit of ethnography is that it tends to circumvent the Hawthorne effect by viewing human nature unobtrusively from the sidelines. As Yogi Berra said, “You’d be surprised by how much you can observe by watching.”

  How to Avoid Getting Skewed

  Often the first thing companies do when faced with a big decision is to order up a massive study. The bigger the better, because a large sample will minimize the “skew,” or the degree of unreliability inherent in the study. What gets skewed instead is the thinking of the marketing team, because while quantitative research is long on numbers, it’s short on insights, the little epiphanies that lead to breakthroughs. Of course, if you just want to cover your butt, go for a big stack of quantitative data.

  With Research, More Is Often Less.

  Quantitative studies, while impressive, can lead to analysis paralysis when companies try to turn them into meaningful initiatives. Somehow all those numbers cause people to focus on small, measurable improvements that don’t require any real courage, and in the end don’t make much difference. Afterwards they provide a built-in excuse: “We tried that. It didn’t work.” It didn’t work because it wasn’t powered by heart-pounding insights. It went after small problems instead of hunting big game.

  It’s usually better to get a rough answer to the right question than a detailed answer to the wrong question. The truth is, most large studies could be cashed in for a series of smaller, more effective ones, and still have change left over. The best studies are quick and dirty—best not only because they save time and money, but because they’re more likely to focus on one problem at a time. Why boil the ocean to make a cup of tea?

  The Swap Test

  Wanna check out the effectiveness of your brand icon? Here’s a simple test you can perform without leaving your office. Swap part of your icon—the name or the visual element—with that of a competing brand, or even a brand from another category. If the resulting icon is better, or no worse than it was, your existing icon has room for improvement. By the same token, no other company should be able to improve its icon by using part of yours. A good brand icon is like a tailored suit—it should only look good on you.

  Do The Trademarks for Polaroid And Nationwide Financial Pass The Swap Test?

  A variation on the swap test is the hand test. This quick-and-dirty proof lets you check the effectiveness of ads, brochures, web pages, and other brand communications. Take any piece of visual communication and cover up your trademark with your hand. Can you tell whose piece it is? If the communication in question looks as if it could have come from any other company or brand, then it’s less than it could be. Because even without a trademark, those familiar with your brand should be able to tell who’s talking just by its “voice,” or the look and feel of the materials.

  The Concept Test

  Copywriter Steve Bautista wrote: “When people talk to themselves, it’s called insanity. When companies talk to themselves, it’s called marketing.” How can you make sure your company isn’t talking to itself? By closing the feedback loop—preferably BEFORE you take your concept to market. A simple concept test can help you develop names, symbols, icons, taglines, and brand promises by addressing two issues: 1) getting the right idea, and 2) getting the idea right. In other words, it not only helps you sort through a range of alternate approaches, it helps you polish the one you pick.

  To test a concept, create a range of prototypes of the brand element in question. You can start with as many as seven concepts, but the most thoughtful responses will come when you get it down to two or three. (Like with a presidential election, people are most comfortable choosing between two candidates, and if necessary they can handle a third.) Next, present the prototypes to at least 10 members of the real audience (not company insiders), one person at a time (not as a group). Then ask a series of questions like the ones below. Notice that nowhere in the questions will you find “Which one do you like?” It’s not about liking. It’s about understanding.

  A brand promise, for example, might be illuminated by questions like these: Which of these promises is most valuable to you? Which company would you expect to make a promise like this? If company X made this promise, would that make sense? What other type of promise would you expect from company X? Always follow up with “Why?” because the answer to “why” will contain the seed of the next question.

  You might test a brand icon with a slightly different set of questions: Which of these icons catches your eye first? What made you notice it? Does it remind you of any other icons you’ve seen? What do you think this particular icon means? If it’s really supposed to mean X, do you think one of these other choices expresses it better? And so on.

  1) Getting the Right Idea

  A significant advantage of a concept test is that it costs very little and yields results in a matter of hours or days, not weeks. Often, a concept test can be conducted online, using PDFs to present the images and a telephone call to conduct the interview. This “instant” feedback lets you conduct anywhere from one to three rounds—design plus testing—in less time than it would take to conduct one large study. Are concept tests conclusive? No, because they’re not meant to be conclusive. They’re meant to be lightning rods for insight. But if you want a larger sample, you can easily expand a concept test into full-scale quantitative study, which will then have the advantage of being focused on the real issues.

  2) Getting the Idea Right

  True story: I once commissioned a worldwide brand study on behalf of Apple Computer. After spending a quarter-million dollars on a 10-city worldwide quantitative study, we ended up with virtually the same results as we got from our initial one-day test. Lesson: If you can live with a little uncertainty, an inexpensive concept test will often give you ample information to turn logic into magic.

  The Field Test

  Prototypes that can be tested in a realistic situation offer the best feedback, because the mental leap from concept to reality is easier. For example, if you can test a packaging prototype on the shelf, next to the competition, using real shoppers who happen to be shopping your category, your results will be more accurate than if you conduct the test in a facility, using “incentivized” subjects who will naturally begin to think more about testing than shopping. In other words, you’ll avoid getting skewed. The field test minimizes the Hawthorne effect by adhering more closely to normal shopping patterns.

  Field tests can also be used to preview the success or failure of a new product. If the first point of contact between customer a
nd product will be the store, then the store is where the product must first succeed. If the product comes in a package, then the package is where the product must succeed. Some of the most promising ideas have died quick and painful deaths, not because people didn’t WANT them, but because the products didn’t make sense at the point of contact. Happily, a field test can reveal fatal flaws BEFORE the product is launched, giving the team a chance to build a different package—or a different product.

  Now it gets more interesting. What if a new product idea could be CONCEIVED at the packaging level? Instead of beginning in R&D, a product could begin with branding, first by building a set of prototypes for an imaginary product or package, and then by conducting an “opportunity test” at the point of contact. If the product looks like a winner where it counts most, in the customer’s gut, then it can go to R&D for development. Remember, a brand is what THEY say it is, not what YOU say it is. Sometimes it makes sense to find out first, before you spend your whole development budget.

  What are We Looking For?