Today marks the beginning of our 8th Matchstic retreat.  We will spend the next 3 days taking apart our company and putting it back together again.  One of the ways we commemorate our retreats is by releasing a new Matchstic t-shirt for everyone.  So above you’ll see our newest shirt arrival.  I call it the Flag Shirt.

The reason I call it the Flag Shirt is that it was inspired from the flag you see to the left of it.  On our last retreat we flushed out our three core values.  At the time I was studying a lot of country flags and love their direct relationship to a brand identity.  I wanted to develop something that represented our values without just stating them directly.  So I approached Alvin about this idea of a flag that represented our three core values.  Later he put together this shirt to represent the flag.  Here is a brief description of our three core values and which color bar of the flag represents that value.

Blue | Harmony. Great relationships are the cornerstone of great work. Great relationships internally. Great relationships with clients. Great relationships with partners & vendors. Great relationships with our community. When there is no dissonance, but pure harmony, then and only then does pure beauty soar. Great work always starts with Harmony.  The sky blue color is a great representation of Harmony.

White | Truth. We are in a constant pursuit of truth. We are not manipulative marketers. We are seekers of truth. We dig for gold and bring it to the surface, clean out all the dirt, and hold it tall for all to see. Truth is excellence. Truth is what’s right, not what one wants. Truth is sought after with unmatched urgency. Truth is always black and white, hence the white bar of the flag.

Red | Courage. Excellence comes at a risk. Risk of humiliation. Risk of failure. In order to risk, one must have Courage. Courage to act in accordance with beliefs, in spite of criticism. We must also encourage our clients to take the risks they need to take in order to accomplish their dreams. Courage is not easy, but it is a vital component of building a brand and working at Matchstic.  Red represents that courage.

Thanks again to our friends at Zoink! for yet another amazing print job printing our shirts. You all are the best.

This month’s Fast Company was laying around yesterday and caught me by surprise. A local design hero & innovator, David Butler, VP of Global Design for Coca-Cola, was featured on the cover.

David has taken one of the most intimidating and daunting tasks a designer could embark, the visual management of a billion dollar brand. Coke has over 450 brands operating in 200 countries, and 20,000 retailers selling 1.6 Billion servings of Coke products per day (that’s 1/6th of the world’s population)- which is 18,000 servings per second, is that daunting enough?

After reading the article, I’m most impressed with David’s persona of humility, straight talk, and quest for value. It’s very easy for designers (even legends) to fall into the trap of designer talk. David’s goal is simple, “Here, it’s about creating more value. How do we sell more of something?”

Butler inherited the Coke brand when turmoil was on the horizon for the behemoth organization. Global brands like Coke face the challenge of globalization and the temptation for a decentralized brand system. Just a few years ago, If a local distributor wanted to add local flair (ie- clovers and cloudy days for wee ole’ Ireland), Coke’s philosophy was “so be it”. This quickly translated into a system malfunction nightmare, even reaching here in the states.

Thus, enter the knight in shinning armor, David Butler. “When I came,” Butler says, “people recognized that they had a business problem. They just didn’t know it was a design problem.” After a few days on the job he wrote a three-page manifesto, titled “Designing on Purpose”. “I wanted to show how you could create value for the business through design. I had no organization, no influence, nothing to point to, but now we had that statement out there — a flag in the ground.”

He has indeed proven the value of design. In-fact case volume was up 4% for the second quarter and profits exceeded expectations. Coke’s market share has increased to 42.7% compared to Pepsi’s 30.8%. All of the credit isn’t to his domain, with the “open happiness” campaign and the acquired giant Vitamin Water, but Joe Tripodi, Coke’s global marketing chief, was quoted as saying “Butler happens to be one of the most visible and biggest facilitators of how we will win in the marketplace.”

What I admire most about David is his presentation of design as a business device and the value it drives all the way down to the end user. Buying anything is emotional, and great design connects and allures those emotions to our fullest realization.

David ended the articles with a quote:

“This is not a design story,” he tells me yet again. “I understand there are some people who would like to hear the words ‘design-driven’ come out of our CEO’s mouth. Honestly, I don’t care. We’re leveraging design to drive innovation and to win at the point of sale, which is fundamental to our business. Full stop.”

We’ve been discussing the healthcare issue around the office recently. None of us are experts on the issue nor do we claim to be. Discussions sometimes get heated because the issues are closely tied to personal views of social injustice and the role of government. Bottom line I think we all agree that things need to change but none of us are sure how.

My thought has been to approach the health care system like design problem in need of re-design. To apply the same principles and see what we come up with. I’ve personally tried to picture the healthcare system like a car. One that takes forever to start, is burning through gas and makes a “whoo-woo” sound. My hope was to isolate the part(s) causing problems for the rest of the engine and determine if it’s something small or something more systemic. Now I know this is a pretty tangled up mess and I’m probably oversimplifying a solution. But sometimes being outside of the problem can offer a better view. I know thats been the case in brand strategy, design or even counseling a friend. The one who can see the forest not just the trees has got a better perspective on things. So, based on my admittedly cursory inspection I think the problem is the whole design. For my purposes here lets just assume I’m right. That leaves three options:

1. fix the “whoo-woo” sound (for now)
2. throw the car away and ride a bike
3. redesign the engine (assuming I know how)

There’s got to be a better design. And here’s my point (finally), that as we develop the new design it’s got to be both smart and objective. No agendas, no backward problem solving, no ear marked parts. In my opinion, the best approach would be to start with a blank slate. We can agree the car has problems. Start there. Lets also agree that not everyone is going to get everything they want. Then go from there. Do you agree?

As I returned from vacation this week, I received a pleasant phone call from our friends over at Crescent Hill books, a innovative producer of fine design books. They informed me that Matchstic had two submissions selected and flagged by the authors as featured case studies (which has actually never happened before). Just to toot our own horn a bit, they had over 2400 entries and selected only 20 for case studies (two of which will be ours). We are extremely honored!

The two selected case studies are for our “Build-A-Bot” Kit for The National Robotics League and the “Hot Off The Presses” Zoink Times, a newspaper style brochure.

The book is scheduled to hit the shelves early in 2010. Below are our winning entries.

Can this really be? That Microsoft, the destroyer of type standards, peddler of 1990s design, and unrelenting internet troll, has somehow discovered nice typography? Colors other than the default “RGB blue”?

Digital hell may just hath frozen over, because with the release of Zune HD, Microsoft has created something that can be described as, well, good looking. Seeing “well-designed” and “Microsoft” in the same sentence would surely raise a red flag and stir up images of what may have been ripped from Apple. But, as it turns out, they have something stunningly original here — something that could perhaps even be described as the anti-Apple. Black instead of white, industrial versus minimal, and an interface driven by huge type instead of cute icons. Dare I say, the website is also nice, as is the packaging. All in all a very consistent brand.

Zune HD even has some interesting features it can call its own, like HD radio and HD video-out. What I enjoy most is the nicely executed and unique brand identity, and the beautiful big-type interface. What I respect most is their unique positioning instead of copycatting (Zune as a portable media center vs. iPod Touch being a portable computer). Now if only the giant of Redmond can bring this vision cohesively to all of their brands.

Your thoughts?

That’s right.  Doctor Emmett Brown.  If his career as a hairbrained inventor didn’t work out, he would’ve made a perfect marketer.  Reason being that sales and marketing is all about bringing the future to right now.  Consumers live in the present; they only know what they know.  It’s the marketers job to help those consumers see what their lives would be like in the future if it included ___________. (fill in the blank with your product/service/brand)

When you constantly live in a different time as those around you, you forget that they don’t know what you know.  Around our office, we refer to what Dan and Chip Heath call the Curse of Knowledge.  As they put it in their book, Once we know something, we find it hard to imagine what it was like not to know it. Our knowledge has ‘cursed’ us.  And it becomes difficult for us to share our knowledge with others, because we can’t readily re-create our ‘not-knowing’ state of mind.

At Matchstic, we deal with it on several levels, two of which are:

• Helping organizations understand how fixing their branding problems will bring focus and clarity to all levels of their business.

• When giving presentations, helping clients understand how this brand identity will live in the real world, and not just on a piece of paper or in a photo of the “real world.”

But the challenge remains the same to us all.  Try to forget what you know.  Put yourself in the shoes of the other person.  Think like they think.  Try to remember what they don’t know.  Make it easy.  Walk them through it step by step.  Get out of the future and back to the present for the sake of them.  Afterwards, you can go back to the future.

(full disclosure: Back to the Future is my all-time favorite movie, so anytime I can find an analogy that fits with it, I am very happy.)

You’ve probably seen the recent ad spots by GM, featuring their newly Chapter 11-emerged Chairman, Edward E. Whitacre. With a Texas drawl, he walks through a GM workspace telling the American consumer that GM cars are worth another look…so much so they are willing to back it up with a 60 day money-back guarantee if the customer isn’t 100% satisfied.

He closes out the ad with a statement that sounds pretty ballsy, “May the Best Car Win“.

On the surface this sounds like an innovative message in auto advertisements. But skin the cat back a bit more and you realize this practice of buyer evaluation is already happening in the marketplace. The “best” cars are winning – and last I checked they didn’t bear a GM logo.

The Chairman’s line of thought, “People are going to like this guarantee. We’re putting a lot on the line here, but I think that these risks are necessary.”

Its a clever ad campaign in a way. It initially leaves the viewer with a tell-em-like-it-is, no holds barred kinda after-glow. But on 2nd glance, in the context of making a true purchasing decision, are consumers actually going to purchase a Chevy just because they can return it in 60 days if they end up not liking it?

I wrote recently about the idea of open source car manufacturing like open source software development. The idea being drivers determine what they want the car to be like regarding both design and function. Parts would be bought externally and then assembled rather than everything produced in one place. Factories would be small and focused. Overhead costs would be low. The goal being constant innovation, something proven achievable by those in the open source software world. With this method ideas are endlessly offered and critiqued by all who care for the product to be better. Good ideas are proven worthy and pursuable by the community of users who are also the designers and programmers. This is a designfully minded business model. A model designed to maximize ideation and minimize the time to execute. Innovation is not about big/small but rather fast/slow.

I found someone who is doing this.

Local Motors is just that, a local automobile manufacturer. Here’s how they work:
Car designs are uploaded and voted on by the Local Motors community with a city in mind, say Boston. Once there’s enough support for a design, they build it. The community watches, reviews and critiques as engineering is developed. Once design and engineering are finalized, you go to the Local Motors micro-factory in Boston and have one built to order. All parts, except frame, are bought from specialty manufacturers and assembled in factories not much bigger than a Home Depot. Total design/build time is about 13 months as opposed to GM which is about 6 years.

Small, local, hands on, transparent, innovative. These are the trends of today.

www.local-motors.com