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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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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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?
A inspiring classic—worth publishing again.
1. Outlaw PowerPoint. Write down your vision as a story — with a beginning, middle, and end — to clarify what must change first.
2. Don’t rely on words alone. Bring your thinking to life: Create an exhibit, use diagrams, prototype ideas.
3. Make strategy an everyday act. The creation and re-creation of strategy shouldn’t be a process that you undertake only when budgets are due.
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For creatives, it’s about finding the opportunity in tough times.
A couple months into an already beat up 2009, and things are looking grim. What’s a creative entrepreneur to do? Earlier this year I chaired a panel for the AIGA called Design Through the Downturn, and the discussion surfaced some big ideas about the challenges—and opportunities—this new economy brings.
Opportunities? Yup, a number of people at the event observed that demand for creative services like design isn’t down, its just different.
There’s many ways demand will be different in the next few years, but here’s the one that might affect the creative businesses more than any other: a shift from artifacts to solutions. Read the rest of this entry »
