From the outside: Saffron Consultants
Saffron Consultants is a brand consultancy founded in 2001, with 50-plus employees scattered across offices in London, New York, Madrid, and Mumbai. A client once said, “They’re the perfect combination of charm and brutality.”[1] It was this reputation for candor, and the firm’s design experience, that led us to believe it would be a robust test case for the Get Fired hypothesis.”
Wally Olins is the firm’s Chairman and Co-founder, and few names in branding are held in the same regard. He co-founded the venerable Wolff Olins [2] in 1965 and has overseen hundreds of brand creations and reinventions over five decades. Given his experience, he is uniquely positioned to advise how to realize new, expansive ideas.
For Saffron, the question is not as much about whether they might Get Fired for being too radical – after all, they are often hired to think in unconventional ways. Rather, it’s a question about whether a client has the ability to realize a radical idea and the organizational change that may follow it.
Why is it easier for some organizations to thrive on creativity and change, while others flounder at every attempt? “When you fail to innovate, it’s not because people don’t intellectually recognize the requirement to innovate, but it is because they cannot bring themselves to do the things that are required to make the changes.”
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Untangling brand and customer experience, in 10 minutes or less from Brandon Schauer on Vimeo.
Does the brand define the customer experience, or is the customer experience the brand? Your work may involve both, but you probably attack problems with a bias for one or the other.
Earlier this year I asked Josh Levine of Great Monday to simply describe the relationship between brand and experience, and I like what he said.
I went back and dug deeper with Josh to clear up the differences between how he described it and and the way I often see the relationships between brand and experience being practiced. What emerged was this illustrated question and answer, attempting to untangle brand and customer experience in just 9 minutes.
As humans, the drive to connect with others who share common values is an inevitable force. This behavior is so fundamental, so critical to functioning societies, academics have dedicated their careers to understanding the complex dynamic and ritual of tribal cultures.
Of all the years of academic research spent understanding tribal affiliation, inclusion, identity and shared cohesion, it’s only recently that business has taken notice. That’s not to say commerce based tribes haven’t been around forever—they have—but until now they’ve formed organically, without the considered attempts of brand managers to leverage this platform.
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These days when CEOs and corporate marketers talk about “investing in brand,” they’re probably referring to typical visible touch-points like products, advertising, or identity. Those are important tools in a corporate marketer’s arsenal, but what most don’t realize is that brand stretches its arms around much more than the stuff you can see. For a company to succeed in today’s tough business climate, executives, managers, and their agencies need to consider the bigger picture: one that includes invisible branding.
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An interview with zappos CEO Tony Hsieh.
In tough times every CEO takes a hard look at what his or her company could be doing better to weather the storm. Some cut jobs, others stop advertising, and still others try to innovate their way through. Those are all reasonable tactics, but what if they could’ve avoided the crisis in the first place? How do you build an unshakable business foundation from the start? Read the rest of this entry »
Building a brand today is very different from building a brand 50 years ago. It used to be that a few people got together in a room, decided what the brand positioning was going to be, and then spent a lot of money buying advertising telling people what their brand was. And if you were able to spend enough money, then you were able to build your brand.
It’s a very different world today. With the Internet connecting everyone together, companies are becoming more and more transparent whether they like it or not. An unhappy customer or a disgruntled employee can blog about bad experience with a company, and the story can spread like wildfire by email or with tools like Twitter.
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I just found this article on HBR by Rosabeth Moss Kanter, and I couldn’t agree more.
Challenging times divide winners from losers. Winners survive because they never forget the important enduring truth: High quality products and services are created by engaged employees who know and care about customers.
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In April’s Harvard Business Review this article caught my attention: How to Market in a Downturn. The basic premise is resegmenting your customers according to their emotional response to the recession. It’s basically encouraging businesses to deeply reconsider their demographics.
I’d go further and say it’s a critical moment and that business must reconsider everyone in their brand ecosystem—employees included. The downturn has touched everyone, and no one will be left unchanged when we come out on the other end (whenever that may be). To create a sustainable business, isn’t it time we take into account our entire community, not just the people buying the products?
This past Saturday, the New York times published a front page article about the “Vast Remaking” of the economy. Vast is not overstating it, and perhaps underplaying the severity of what we’ll see in the next few years. Watching the dollar tide go out reveals weak business models and long-forgotten market needs. Yet while many are calling it a collapse, what we need to understand is that it’s really re-framing. Today’s job-losses are an indicator that old needs are finally going away, and that new needs will fill the vacuum.
I think a lot about how I’ll see these new needs as they arise, and you should too. Now is when the next great success stories begin, not when the next boom finally arrives.
