I just got back from this year’s MX Conference, a gathering of user experience professionals put on by Adaptive Path. Overall it was a great conference, there was a variety of talks ranging from the truly inspirational – why user and customer experience is so important, how culture and sociology relates to how we perceive experiences – to more tactical advice like what values to look for when building your team and how to create customer journey maps to weave a narrative across your project’s overall experience strategy.

There were, of course, some highlights. Genevieve Bell, the keynote speaker, started off the conference on the perfect tone. Her story seems an unlikely tale. How does someone with a background in anthropology and sociology end up working and thriving at a company like Intel? She brought us along her journey, from her initial task upon joining Intel of helping to “understand all women” to eventually creating an interactive and experience research lab with 100 people over 13 years later. Along the way, Genevieve and her team helped to imbue a sense of how important user experience can be to growing a relationship with customers. Through her tenure there, Intel has shifted focus on how it perceives its main contributions to society. Years ago Intel saw its unrelenting engineering focus on Moore’s law as the end goal. Now they understand that what matters are the products and experiences that Moore’s law enables.

Genevieve’s story was certainly inspiring, and reaffirmed that focusing on great experiences has the power to benefit not only products and services but society as a whole. Melissa Matross of Hotwire, however, gave us an interesting anecdote from her career on how focusing on customer experience helps in a very real, concrete case: bolstering the bottom line. When she started at Hotwire, she absolutely despised the banner ads that would appear at the top of every page on the site. They detracted from the focus of the page and would distract the person trying to accomplish their task of finding the best price available for their travel needs. Unfortunately at the time it was a necessary evil, in order for the banners to be removed the resulting loss of revenue would have to be replaced.

Melissa took that as a challenge and went to work focusing on what would make a better experience for the user. The result was a shopping comparison with their competitors. Hotwire added an easy way for people to view what they were searching for on competing sites like Expedia or Travelocity. This boosted confidence in their customers that Hotwire actually had the best price available, and if they wanted to check anyway, Hotwire would be paid for each search a person would make on a competing site. Not only did this strategy replace the lost revenue of banner ads, it resulted in a 2000% jump in the bottom line from increased sales and new search revenue.

The takeaway from the conference is that the importance of customer experience is undeniable. A person’s experience with your product, website, or customer service is intertwined with how they perceive your brand. In fact, a devotion to providing great experiences for your customers is an easy way to become a brand steward. In a world where products and feature sets are increasingly converging, a major differentiator is how great your customer experience can be. It just makes sense: if you delight people you will be rewarded with loyalty to your brand. Make things simpler, make them faster, relate to your customers rather than just simply interact with them. As the stories above illustrate, this strategy works. Thanks to the crew at Adaptive Path for a wonderful conference and renewing our resolve to make better things.

Over two days this past week, I had the pleasure of attending the Corporate Image and Branding Conference, put on by the Conference Board. This is my 13^th year attending this gathering of senior branding and communications professionals. As I look back, I’m struck by just how much its focus has changed.

Social, social, social.

In a tweet from the floor, I joked that the event should be renamed the “Social Media conference.” It’s clear that communications professionals are fully engaged in this currently hot medium. Roughly 80% of the content focused on the rise and impact of social media, and there were some excellent presentations on its use. Most important, I could see how the knowledge and knowhow in this relatively new area is growing exponentially. Compared to the more exploratory state of 2010, the contrast was striking. While there are still a large number of unknowns around social, it is clear that the value to companies is real and here to stay.

The best takeaway: Don’t start with a discussion around “What are we going to do with Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn?” Instead, develop a strategy for social that embodies your brand, is true to your voice and lives in channels that build real and deeply connected relationships. The space is much bigger than the top three and the opportunities are growing by the day.

Intersection of Sustainability

Picking up on the presentation that I gave last year with Lee Green of IBM, I saw that sustainability practices are being more widely adopted by major corporations in the U.S.. This is affecting communications – specifically reporting – but there is a bigger picture being formed. Sustainability is influencing key elements of corporate strategy, brands, image and reputation.

Companies like IBM and Apple are extending sustainability concepts into their brand stories. They’re taking action to protect their vibrant and valuable brands for the long haul. The goals: Make the company more appealing to talent, satisfy increasing demands from investors to understand risk and address the interplay of value creation in an interdependent world.

The learning curve on sustainability is not too different from that of social media. Interestingly, the two are connected in what we see as a powerful opportunity for leaders. From our perspective, sustainability is good business and incorporated into business strategy, it will ultimately create advocacy with stakeholders and in turn, the brand. Social media is an incredibly powerful tool for that advocacy.

Have a purpose

One of the areas discussed was the idea of purpose. Why? Companies are finding that they need new guideposts to help employees live and be competitive in this instant-feedback, always-on information age.

The collision of pervasive information technology, social media, new business platforms and sustainability is changing the very fabric of the corporate brands. And to add to the complexity, there’s strong competition for talent and investment as many developed economies emerge from a global recession. Corporations are being forced to address these new dynamics by reengineering their business and brand strategies.

The central change that is that brand strategies are no longer linear in development and execution. The “command and control” approaches that have served so well for decades are less relevant than they once were. Elements as the simple brand promise and positioning are being replaced by bigger, broader concepts.

“Purpose-driven brands,” as I call them, serve much better. Companies that have a compelling purpose, formed by their unique aspirations, culture and talents, are gaining an edge. That purpose must link to the needs of people not just consumers.

Not surprisingly, those companies that have a higher purpose are the most innovative for customers and are creating higher value for all stakeholders. The best example discussed is IBM and its vision of a Smarter Planet where pervasive data is treated as a new kind of natural resource that can literally change the way everything is done.

The logo is simple, clean, bold—and entirely American. The concept of “Fresh air” and “Fair and square” is a brilliant brand message clearly evident in the logo design and overall visual system. The advertising campaign (print, online and especially TV) is charming, whimsical and full of personality.

As someone who has spent many Saturdays at Target and feels more comfortable shopping at Macy’s or Lord & Taylor, I never thought I’d be exploring jcpenney’s Facebook and YouTube pages. It just goes to show that if you create a brand that people care about, social media will follow. It’s actually a pretty simple strategy, but one that is very difficult to achieve.

Now, I’m left wondering if the store and the customer experience will be able to catch up with the new brand expression. I’m certainly excited to watch the evolution of this brand and find out. I think I’ll even take a trip to the store this Saturday. Sorry Target.

For many years, web developers have strived to create fluid layouts that adjust with the size of the browser window, called the viewport. The biggest issue with most approaches has been a lack of respect for the typographic grid, meaning line lengths get to an unreadable length, and there is no optimization for image size on smaller screens. Luckily, these problems and many more have been solved with an approach based on a well thought-out methodology called responsive web design. Formalized by Ethan Marcotte, responsive web design is quickly being adapted as the solution for moving your existing site into one that will serve the needs of today’s devices.

Responsive web design is the idea of looking at the size of the viewport and having the site design adjust according to the width. It sounds wonderfully simplistic I know, but as with most great ideas there are a lot of complexity you don’t see. Things such as a flexible grid, flexible images, a way of knowing the type of browser being used, and of course a backup plan for older browsers. The desired outcome is for the grid—the graphical layout for a website—to adjust itself in an aesthetically pleasing way despite the width of the browser. The best way for you to experience this is a simple demo. We recently did the 2011 annual report for CFA Institute using responsive web design. This video demonstrates how the site adjusts for different sizes—you can instantly see the fluidity of the layout and the attention to detail.

Of course, I encourage you to view the site for yourself. Another example to try out is The Boston Globe.

While response web design requires a bit of a learning curve and is more time consuming up front, the benefits to this approach are numerous. The methodology ensures you are taking a grid-based approach to design, creating a more consistent visual experience. Supporting one platform—the web—instead of multiple, frees you from having to create multiple workflows for content creation across different platforms. Testing time is decreased. An mostly, because responsive web design applies a web standards based approach to web sites, the biggest benefit is that your site is more likely to work properly on the device your user chooses, providing a more enjoyable customer experience.

How do you get started? It truly requires a cross-discipline approach, so getting your designers, developers, and content creators up-to-speed is the first step. Ethan Marcotte’s book is a great place to start. An on-site workshop for your team, lead by developers and designers that have created response sites is a quicker approach. And of course you can engage a company like ours to create a site for you, transferring the knowledge to your team at the end of the project. I’d love to hear your questions and comments below or on Twitter ( @larryroth ). If you would like to talk further, you can email me to arrange a time.

Attendees were primarily from Europe, where adoption rates of sustainable business practices and standards are generally higher than in Asia or North America. While each of the 12 presentations contained a unique take on ESG, I would characterize the speakers as falling into three distinct groups:

1. Advocates, who believe that sustainability adoption is a moral imperative that will help preserve our planet’s resources for future generations
2. Skeptics, who understand that ESG factors can help identify potential risks, but are less than convinced about the relevance of ESG in investment decision-making
3. Objectivists, including Brandlogic, who are seeking to help individual corporations determine how best to measure their performance against these factors

A sustainability Advocate, Jonathan Porritt from Forum for the Future, led off the proceedings with a speech filled with pessimism, bemoaning the fact that Coal India’s recent IPO prospectus contained no mention of the societal risks their business causes. He then turned to optimism, noting that we are approaching a “grid parity moment” that will occur in 2016 – when a kilowatt of energy from sustainable sources will soon cost as much as one created through existing, carbon-based resources.

The Skeptics included mostly credit analysts and hedge fund managers. Rory Sullivan from Ethix SRI pushed back hard against advocating for more ESG inputs to investment decision making, saying “Most of what’s written about ESG is advertising and investors should just throw it away.” Larry Abele, who runs Auriel Capital out of Jersey in the UK, cautioned against too much “long-termism” from the ESG community: “Let’s face it – the short term is more important to my investors.”

In the Objectivist camp, my colleague James Cerruti presented a summary of our Sustainability Leadership Report, which measures actual vs perceived performance on environmental, social and governance factors for 100 leading global corporations. Our report engendered a lively debate about reality vs. perception and how some companies are potentially risking their reputations by over-promising relative to their actual performance.

The diverse and eclectic nature of the conference is what kept many of the attendees in their seats until the very end. It was clear by the end of the event that ESG is not just another management fad – it is the foundation for an emerging management practice that will drive corporations and governments to think more about their relationships to the planet, its natural resources, and human society at large.

Change is in the air. Brandlogic has introduced an all-new look that is decisive, beautiful and clean. It is only fitting for our website to match the aspirations of the refreshed identity. When we sat down to plan our site, it was clear from a design perspective that the new site was going to be a stunning (and long overdue) incarnation of what came before. We were inspired to create a technical architecture that complimented the new visual design: a strong, modern foundation to serve us well into the future.

We’ve learned that constraints are a wonderful thing. An aggressive launch timeframe made it obvious that we needed a simple, focused approach. We decided that performance was our main priority, which neatly corresponds with our new positioning statement “ideas that drive performance.”

Why speed matters

More than anything else, we value the user’s experience when it comes to the sites and tools we build. Page speed is an important element in making that happen. It’s something that the user may not even notice when things are running smoothly, but when something is slower than expected, it surely can be frustrating. When it comes to usability, we believe performance is a feature as important as any other. Luckily, there is research to back this up, and it predates the web by a long shot. See Jakob Nielsen’s summarization on how much speed matters to usability.

Speed is so important to user experience that search engines have even started to notice. Last year, Google started measuring page speed as a factor in their search rankings. All other things being equal, a page that is faster than another will receive a higher rank in search results. So, just by making your site more enjoyable for people to use, you’ll get rewarded by search engines for no additional cost.

What we did

Here is an overview of some tactical approaches we use to achieve maximum performance: static HTML, combining multiple resources into one, caching and compression.

Static HTML

On a site using a traditional content management system (CMS), the pages that the user sees are most often dynamically generated by the server. This means that when a user browses to a page, the server collects the content from a data store, pairs it with a template or multiple templates and runs some code to put it all together into the viewable HTML document. As you can imagine, this all takes time.

What we’re doing differently is using an advanced CMS that pre-generates all of the HTML pages. When a user browses to a page on our site, the server doesn’t have anything to do except serve the file that already exists. With no database to call and no code to run, the server can send the page much faster.

You might think that we would have to trade off the ability to have dynamic content on each page load. Not true. We are taking advantage of the JavaScript engine race in recent years among modern browsers. For example, on our homepage we show a random team member on each page refresh using JavaScript. The browser is doing most of the work. By shifting dynamic features from the server to the client we are making the site faster for everyone.

Combine all styles into one stylesheet

When a user visits a webpage, her browser is doing a lot behind the scenes. It sends a request to the server for the webpage, the server responds by sending the HTML and then the browser needs to check that HTML for any external resources to load. These resources could be images, styles, JavaScript, etc. The browser starts the process all over again for each resource: it sends a request to the server for the resource and the server responds to each request. Once the browser has a good representation of the page, only then will it render to the screen.

One of the biggest bottlenecks is the communication between the browser and the server. Every request that is made for an additional resource slows down the whole process and just results in waiting longer to see the page. We alleviate this by combining all of the styles for the entire site into one resource. This means only one additional call is necessary to the server for the user to see the entire site as intended.

Another way we have reduced requests to the server is by embedding images that are frequently used (our logo, for example) directly into the stylesheet. By embedding these images, the browser doesn’t have to request them separately. However, a user must use a modern browser to experience this benefit.

Aggressive caching

As stated above, requesting resources from the server can cause an enormous bottleneck. Another way to alleviate this is by aggressively caching the resources in the user’s browser after they’ve been downloaded. Since we are combining all styles into one stylesheet, the user only needs to download it once to view the entire site. Therefore, we tell the user’s browser never to request the stylesheet again once it has been downloaded. We also do this for all images and JavaScript files. As a result, when a user is browsing subsequent pages on our site, the needed resources are in her browser cache and the site performs dramatically faster.

What about updates? If we’re telling your browser never to request a stylesheet or image again, how can we change something and ensure that you see it? We use another trick to address this issue. When our CMS publishes the site, it sets a version number to any resource that we are aggressively caching and renames the file using that version number. If the file changes in any way, it is guaranteed that the version number will change as well. To a user’s browser, the file appears to be brand new, so it downloads and caches it again. The end result is that a user never has to worry about resources being stuck in the cache again. Every time a user browses our site, she always gets the latest changes.

Minification & Compression

We can ensure that the downloaded resources are packaged as small as is possible. Looking at the source code for our home page, it’s actually rather unattractive. Everything is on one line, and it’s not easily readable. What’s missing is any extraneous whitespace and line breaks. By keeping the page as small as possible, the user gets to view the page that much faster. We do this for all HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

One last thing we do to reduce what a user’s browser has to download is to compress everything. Just as zipping files on your computer saves disk space, we compress files that have to be downloaded so that the transfer completes more quickly. The browser is smart enough to expand the content once it is downloaded so that the user can see the page as intended.

A better web for everyone

Being passionate about making our site faster is a win-win: server resources are reduced, bandwidth costs go down, and most importantly, the user’s experience is much improved. By adhering to web standards and the best practices described above, we hope to promote the idea of making the web a little bit better for everyone. Please take a look at our architecture diagram if you’d like more information about how our site works, or contact me directly to talk about performance.

Gastev / CC 2.0

The new technology is intended to be a way to present raw data in a way that is more understandable and consumable by humans, and thereby improve communication. However, it marks the top of a slippery slope. Technology has a nasty habit of changing how people think. It shapes our expectations and standards.

Texting and tweeting is already requiring us to make sentences shorter and simpler. Attention spans are shrinking. It can be a challenge to express a complex thought. It would not surprise me if the line between automated content creation and actual human communication were to become too blurry to see – not because the robots will be that good, but because people will lose the ability to tell the difference.

There’s a key difference between copy “written” by a machine and human thoughts expressed in words. Good writing is more than just information delivery. It can compel, elicit emotions and drive action. That’s a vitally important distinction for marketers. The purpose of the written word is to communicate an idea, not just information.

Just as superior design takes research, thought and insight into what’s being expressed, effective written communication goes much deeper than canned thoughts assembled in grammatically correct order. Human expertise is – and will continue to be – an essential element.

I think it’s great that through the thousands of variations of colors and patterns, animations and illustrations during its 30 years of existence, the logo has never lost its intent. All of its iterations have only served to strengthen the youthful vibe that is synonymous with MTV. As someone who grew up watching MTV I always knew it was pushing boundaries and shaping American culture. They brought the music video to the masses and created The Real World when there was no such thing as “reality tv.” As a designer, I applaud the flexibility of their identity that has kept them fresh and fun all these years and the knowledge that they were doing this long before anyone else. Happy 30th MTV!

Over our history, our firm has grown through many changes, but none more important than our recent move to become a 100% employee-owned company. At the same time, our founder Wynn Medinger became Chairman, I assumed the role of CEO and Managing Partner and we appointed Dan Dyksen as Senior Partner and Creative Director.

During this transition, I set a very simple and clear goal: to continue building an enduring organization that is committed to doing the highest-quality work for our corporate and institutional clients. To do this, our mission remains steadfast — deliver ideas that drive performance. By addressing the wide array of branding challenges companies face, including emerging priorities that are reshaping brands, we create real value for the organizations we serve. Our new brand embraces this performance focus and expresses the firm’s culture, strategic thinking, creativity and technology prowess.

As part of our brand launch, today’s release of our inaugural Sustainability Leadership Report reflects our commitment to helping clients grapple with new issues. This report, and the suite of capabilities and knowledge behind it, captures the essence of our belief in how organizations should use their brands to lead and create value.

As Brandlogic steps forward, we are more excited than ever to help build great brands for great organizations. We look forward to the opportunity to partner with you, now and in the future.

Sincerely,
Hampton Bridwell
CEO and Managing Partner
Brandlogic Corporation

Why is that important? It has to do with what a name communicates to the marketplace and what it says about the organization. In our case, we have two pieces of information that we need to get across. First, that we are at our core a brand consultancy, and second, our credo: Ideas that Drive Performance.

The name of the firm itself does a good job of accomplishing that, but it came across as two separate thoughts simply because of that capital L. Often, clients would split it apart: Brand Logic. It altered the perception of who we are and what we do, in a subtle, almost subliminal way.

The reality is that “Brandlogic” is and always has been a seamless idea. Changing how we write it reinforces that thought.

Even the construction of the name carries a message. Leading with “Brand” reinforces our core competency. We are not “Logicbrand.” Roll that around your tongue for a bit; reversing the order conveys a different impression, doesn’t it?

The use of the word “logic” as part of the name also is deliberate: it emphasizes that our work is not based on gut instinct, best guesses or flavor-of-the-month trends. There is reason behind all that we do.

The name also shows that we are both creative and grounded in practicality. The business we’re in is immediately apparent from the name. The world is full of names that are, frankly, little more than pleasant sounds. Altria is in the business of tobacco and wine. Nuvis? A camera. Nubira? A car. Could any of these have been guessed from the name alone?

Contrast this with names that evoke compelling imagery. One of our clients – Javia by ARAMARK – has a particularly good name. They’re in the business of office refreshments. They sell coffee. The name alone is so evocative you can practically smell the roasting beans. Acela is another great example: it’s the name of Amtrak’s high-speed train. That name suggests speed and a clean, contemporary image.

Next time you look at a name give it some thought. Does it really tell you anything? How does its expression change your impression of the company or product?