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The Jan. ’09 issue of Fast Company features a favorable article about David Kelley, one of the founders of the world’s leading design and innovation consultancy, IDEO, which illustrates an important principle of brand positioning and category creation: “A leading brand should promote the category, not the brand.”

You can read more about this principle in a book called “The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding” by Al Ries (“Reese”), one of the fathers of positioning, and his daughter, Laura. The Rieses say, “The most efficient, most productive, most useful aspect of branding is creating a new category.  … That’s the way to become the first brand in a new category and ultimately the leading brand in a rapidly growing new segment of the market. … You have to launch the brand in such a way as to create the perception that the brand was the first, the leader, the pioneer, or the original.” And, most importantly, “You have to promote the new category.”

David Kelley successfully applied these principles when he created a new category called “Design Thinking” a few years ago to describe the approach designers use to innovate and solve problems at a meta level. The underpinnings of Design Thinking are really IDEO’s methodologies adapted and applied to a wider range of problems than its legendary product design and development practice. Design Thinking encourages us, as Tim Brown, IDEO’s CEO, told Business Week recently, “to look at the world for insights instead of imagining you already know all the choices.”

Unlike the traditional analytical thinking methods many MBA schools teach, which show people how to converge on the best solution from among a known set of options, Design Thinking teaches people how to innovate and create new choices to make. Key principles include 1) Turning your problems into projects with defined parameters and constraints; 2) Observing what people do in their native environments and talking to them to understand why; 3) Working in multidisciplinary teams to generate lots of ideas for possible solutions; 4) Quickly testing your ideas in reality through iterative prototyping; and 5) Telling stories about your ideas to enlist the support of stakeholders.

David Kelley and Co. made a brilliantly abundant choice when they decided to openly share their Design Thinking methodologies for the sake of making the world a better place than to try and trademark and contain them for IDEO’s exclusive benefit. Becoming the leading advocates for Design Thinking only helped to catapult IDEO even farther into the stratosphere of influential consultancies and solidified IDEO’s leadership position as the first and best practitioner of Design Thinking principles. Consequently, the media and thought leaders mention IDEO in the same breath as Design Thinking all the time and the company’s evangelists are continually invited to share the world stage with the best and brightest to explore new applications for Design Thinking. 

The concept has captured the imagination of the academic and business communities and is quickly spreading through government circles as well. At Kelley’s recommendation, for example, Stanford has formed a d.school (short for “Design” school) where Stanford graduate students and others can learn how to think in a more divergent, innovative way.



And Tim Brown was invited to participate in the World Economic Forum in Davos again this year, sharing ideas with world leaders about better methods for solving seemingly intractable global issues, like “inaccessible healthcare, billions of people living on a few dollars a day, energy usage outpacing the planet's ability to support it, education systems that fail students, and beyond.”

Speaking of energy usage, green architect, William McDonough is the antithesis of the abundant approach David Kelley and IDEO have taken and he has the abysmal branding and business results to show for it. McDonough, who was once heralded for his foresight and salesmanship in being one of the earliest and most effective prognosticators of global warming and the need for sustainability has since fallen out of favor, as chronicled in another Fast Company article last November: "Green Guru Gone Wrong."

As Fast Company stated, “His radical cradle-to-cradle philosophy demands that every product be designed for disassembly at the end of its lifetime, either returning harmlessly to the soil or going back into a ‘closed-loop industrial cycle’ to be reused.” But it wasn’t necessarily that McDonough’s methodology was flawed. He fell from grace because he tried to hoard all of the attention and financial spoils from the early sustainability category for himself, which he’d anticipated years before the word had become part of the vernacular and well before the LEED (the green building standard) was established.

McDonough’s monopolistic approach runs counter to the Rieses’ argument that you should “… make your brand name stand for the category (the generic effect) at the same time that you expand the category by promoting the benefits of the category, not the brand.” That way, “you create both a powerful brand and a rapidly escalating market. … What happens when competition appears, as it inevitably does? Most category leaders just can’t wait to shift into brand-building mode. That’s a mistake. Leaders should continue to promote the category, to increase the size of the pie rather than their slice of the pie. … There’s always room for a second brand and a passel of lesser brands. Instead of fighting competitive brands, a leader should fight competitive categories.”

William McDonough’s efforts to control and monetize his cradle-to-cradle methodology, including a system for scoring and certifying products as sustainable, have failed because of the prohibitive certification fees he tried to impose on would-be compliant companies. As Fast Company reports, “McDonough continues to scare off the very forces that could bring his idea to life. One corporate sustainability chief, who asked not to be named, says that when McDonough pitched his company to consult, the architect said, ‘I want to be the Bill Gates of sustainability,’ and [that] he wants to make a royalty off of every green standard and every green product out there.’ The company saw the statements as a red flag and decided not to bring him on board.”

Consequently, instead of becoming industry standards, McDonough’s ideas have become stepping stones for others to build on because he couldn’t bear the thought of sharing his intellectual property and spreading the wealth. On the other hand, David Kelly says, "I can give our methodology away … because I know we can come up with a better idea tomorrow." In the process of giving that methodology away and teaching others to fish as the leading proponents of the “Design Thinking” movement, Kelley has built a world renowned 500-person consulting firm and a loyal, referenceable client following, including Bank of America, Procter & Gamble and  Kaiser Permanente. Clearly, advocating the category has paid off for IDEO.

Tags: green | sustainability | design thinking | category creation | brand leadership | Branding | brand building | ideo | william mcdonough | positioning | category leadership | brand positioning

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This theatrical three year-old loves watching “Pirates of the Caribbean” and got into character trick or treating door to door. For his trick, he attacked any bowls of candy that had creepy motion sensor mechanical hands in them with his sword. At one house, he went back and forth endlessly attacking a talking scare crow and a creepy mechanical hand. The owner of the house got a kick out of it and his dad couldn’t have been prouder—“That’s my pirate!”

You know something’s a brand when the generic version just won’t do.

As another case in point, I have a friend named Brick Bergeson who dressed up (or down as the case may be) as Michael Phelps for his work’s Halloween costume party. Brick happens to have been a four-minute miler in college not too long ago, so he still has the physique to look believable in nothing but, well, a Speedo.


 

With remnants of Summer Olympics imagery still cycling across our collective screen saver, everyone immediately recognized Brick’s costume not just as someone who swims, but as Michael Phelps, proud owner of eight—albeit homemade in this case—gold medals draped around his neck. This is a good thing, because you don’t want to have to do a lot of explaining when you’re walking around the office in a Speedo.

Mimicking Phelps’ signature pre-race arm swings and assuming diving position on a lowly office chair was all it took for Brick to take home the top prize in his company’s Halloween costume contest. Let’s hope the free movie tickets were worth the annotation human resources made in his personal file.



Apparently, there have already been some fringe benefits for Brick. He says that a lot more people around the office recognize him and say ‘hello’ to him. The only question now is what Brick will do with his new-found brand recognition.

I remember dressing up as Nu Skin’s president and CEO, Truman Hunt, one Halloween when I worked there. It was an easy costume: white Sunday dress shirt, dark suit and tie—with some gray highlights and that was all it took to look the part. I was part of a group talent show later that day and we won first prize for parodying a company-wide speech Truman had made recently, in which he referenced his love of Beetles music. 





Ironically, he happened to have been wearing a (generic) pirate costume that day and I can remember him brandishing his pretend, but symbolic pistol at me from the front row of the audience as if to say, “Watch it, kid.” I was branded by some from that point on as “Truman,” which was fine as long as he wasn’t there when they made the reference. Like Tina Fey and Sarah Palin, you have to be careful who you imitate because the comparison might just stick to your own brand.

 

Tags: CEO | Halloween | Brand | Branding

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