I’ve Got Mail

Email. Facebook. Linkedin. I’m in touch all day with clients, colleagues, friends. Snail mail? Our office mail carrier—when she shows up—typically drops off a single Staples catalogue wrapped (mysteriously) with a rubber band.

But yesterday in my home mail box I received a post card. A wonderful short message from an old friend whose life I keep up with through facebook. And I was charmed. The experience—unlike all the digital means of keeping in touch—was emotional. Just a few short lines that took three weeks to reach me. But reading his post card I felt closer to him than I had in the years since he moved away.

It occurs to me that while constant digital communication is valuable and necessary it can’t come close to a handwritten message. You might scoff and say it’s generational, but my friend is 19 years my junior. He just has a wonderful sensibility and a thoughtfulness that has become rare. His post card reminds me how important real human connection is and how we’ve sacrificed it for the sake of ease and speed.

My new year’s resolution—and one I think I can actually keep—is to put pen to paper more often and be mindful that an email is expedient but can’t take the place of a heart-felt handwritten note.

 

 

Things that go bump in the night

My friend Sabine is a Halloween enthusiast; she delighted us at work one year dressed as a fairy. I must add that she is an excellent designer with a unique vision and very creative sensibility.

Her interest in the holiday extends to graveyards and she recently shared with me some photos she took at a cemetery near her home. Some unusual headstones captured her attention. I was enchanted not just by the artistry of these headstones but also by her innate curiosity and ability to find beauty in ordinary things.

This started as an entry with a Halloween theme but as I write it I realize that my interest in her images are really less about “things that go bump in the night” and more about the things that help us experience a shift in perception. (Or maybe a bump in perception.) Certainly there are cemeteries and headstones that capture our imagination. The above-ground plots in New Orleans. Chicago’s own GracelandCemetery. The Day of the Dead celebrations in Mexican graveyards.

But Sabine’s photos illustrate headstones that use typography to create an eternal and very personal love letter. I’m not convinced that when it’s my turn I want to be dumped ceremoniously into the ground, but if she’ll design my headstone, I just might reconsider.

Sending a Message About a Career in Design

Riding on the CTA this weekend, I was struck by two ads encouraging students to choose design as a career. One indicates that if you like to doodle you should be a designer. The other offers a two-year degree in visual communication and design.

These ads trouble me. As a practicing designer with many years of experience, it concerns me that our industry is positioned as one that requires a simple understanding of mechanics as a path to success. And I’m also concerned about the message that is being sent to potential students about design. A two-year curricula can’t possibly provide a design foundation, breadth of experience, understanding of strategic methodology and the considerable discipline required to be a successful designer. So these candidates, in a gloomy economy, eager to attain a degree that will offer them a career, throw considerable money at programs that can only provide a cursory introduction to a field that is complicated and requires a deep understanding of design fundamentals, liberal arts and the humanities.

Design is a wonderful and fulfilling career. But we do students (and the parents who may be writing checks) a disservice if we let them believe that it is easily achieved. Doodling is fine. But it’s not the precursor to a serious career.

How do you know when a name isn’t great?

In the interest of full disclosure, we are asked by clients to name a lot of things such as companies and products. And so we have an appreciation for how challenging the development of a great name really is. Sure, we employ what we believe is a great methodology and we think we know how to meld a scientific approach with a creative approach. But after thirty or so years of naming things we know that the best effort can lead to a real dud. Somehow, someway, a bad apple is able to elbow its way past all the other good apples, and make itself the client darling.

But how do know absolutely and with empiric certainty that you have picked a loser? It can be tough to know and deep pockets have a way of turning just about any animal part into a silk purse.

I watched with great interest when an iconic shopping mall in our area was purchased and renamed. Old Orchard Mall has been claiming the disposable income of the highly affluent Chicago North Shore for decades. The “handle” Old Orchard is understood and recognizable by everyone with a credit card and within a one hour drive. It’s an upper middle class mall and without the benefit of market research we’d venture ranks high in consumer association and perception.

And so when the new owners, who are from outside the U.S., opted to rename the mall so that it could be branded similarly to their many other properties I was skeptical. They plowed ahead and told the world that here forward, Old Orchard would be known as “Shopping Town.” It’s not just because the owners hail from Australia that I think this sounds like a place the Tele-Tubbies would shop. Gerunds should be left out of names if your trying to reach someone over the age of ten.

The years have passed and in my small circle I’ve never once heard Old Orchard referred to as Shopping Town. Who knows, maybe I’m an exception and everyone else has made the difficult transition.

And then yesterday I received an email that was the definitive rejection of Shopping Town. I popped into the Apple store at Old Orchard to pick up something for my wife. When the blue shirt was wrapping up our transaction he asked if I wanted a paper receipt or an email. “Send the email,” I called back from half turn speeding toward the door. And later when I opened my email I saw it. An email from: OldOrchard@apple.com.

Can there be a bigger rejecting of your branding than the Jobsian marketers on high declining to use your preferred name? It was like Charleston Heston looking down at Shopping Town grasping two tablets. “You don’t deserve this.”

This is about the millionth lesson from which we’ve learned that while we might want consumers to think one thing, the only thing that matters is what they actually think. Drawing your marketing boundaries around that is not a bad place to start.

In pursuit of the perfect payout

It’s wonderful to have Groupon around for many reasons including the fact that it is unmatched in serving up business debate topics for colleagues and friends.

I have absolutely no idea if Groupon is worth the wild sums that have been speculated. I’ve chatted up this topic with senior executives who should know and there is no clear consensus if the Google offer for Groupon was sufficient.

My own idea about what Groupon should have done with the offer was informed by the actions of a former boss.

We were concluding almost two years of courtship with a Fortune 100 CEO by presenting the steps we’d take to manage his firm’s reputation over a meal only slightly less complex than our plan. The setting was a small, very private dining room in a mid-town business club. We had reached step seven of twelve when the targeted CEO declared that this was exactly what his company needed. What happened next was a bit odd. My boss summed up the rest of the points, ended the meeting and ran out the door.

On the walk back to the hotel, with me lamenting the finery embedded in step #11, my more senior colleague set me straight, “the sale had been made.” Staying in the room, drinking wine and eating chocolate soufflé, extending the meeting only introduced more risk into the equation. The objective was to get the order and we had secured the order. Time to close the sale and move on.

Perhaps Google’s offer for Groupon some months ago was indeed low. And it’s possible a more astronomical payout is still in the offing. Though today’s news that Groupon’s hometown business performance has contracted and lines up with prognostications by faction that says the Groupon model is near mature.

A more seasoned executive would likely have taken the Google offer and run out of the room. Sure, you might be shorting yourself a billion or two. But other things can happen in pursuit of the perfect payout.

What the guys and gals at Groupon have created is incredible and I’m a big fan. The let it roll strategy is tons of fun. I’d just like to see them run out of the room in a good way.

More needs to be done

The recent resignation of  NPR’s CEO and and its Vice President of Development over remarks made at a fundraising luncheon (Hidden camera video) has created a major communications crisis for the organization at a time when it is facing a possible major government funding cut.

It is incredulous that a development professional would be as thoughtless in his remarks at a donor luncheon and that he would discuss giving patterns of other NPR donors, including demeaning the ongoing government support the organization enjoys.  It is a cardinal sin in the world of nonprofit development to talk politics. Demeaning your donors in a public forum is an act that defies description.

Appropriately, the organization leadership took it on the chin and resigned.  But, from a crisis management perspective, the resignation and self-reporting on NPR fall short.  Cleaning house is only a first step to rebuild the reputation of this respected organization.

Fortunately, local stations such as Chicago ’s WBEZ recognized more was needed and sent a well-conceived letter to its donors.  It arrived in a timely fashion and explained that NPR is a separate organization but a valued partner. And went on to explain how necessary federal funding is to the station, how it differs from NPR funding and openly criticized the NPR development officer’s remarks.  It then went into a great explanation of what public radio does and what its value is to the community.  Kudos to the general manager and his staff for immediately recognizing they needed to contain the crisis and boost their brand or risk losing the support of many funding streams.

Quick, truthful response is key to depressurizing any crisis. WBEZ did that in a candid, compelling manner that we would venture improves its future development efforts.

Social Impact Bonds – Wave of the Future?

President Obama’s new budget includes an innovative $100 million test program that can have profound effects on the social services world.  Social impact bonds combine performance-based payments and market discipline to overcome barriers to social innovation and encourage investment in cost-saving preventive services.

First tested in England on a prison recidivism program that has yet to produce measureable results, these bonds invite investors to put up money that will run privately managed social programs.  If the programs produce the quantifiable results anticipated in the program design, the government will pay investors back their original investment plus interest and performance bonuses.

As the Baltimore Sun reports these bonds have “the makings of a rare public policy trifecta—good for taxpayers, good for users of social services and good for private investors.”

The program creates opportunity for social service agencies while it challenges them on several fronts. First and foremost, agencies need to assure investors that they can bolster their evaluation methods to produce real outcomes, not just outputs.   That will mean developing criteria to demonstrate success and adopting more stringent evaluation methods that previously have been difficult to develop and expensive to achieve.

Service providers also must convince the private investors that their program model and management team are likely to achieve the performance targets. Major foundations are likely to find merit in these programs but will individual investors see the merit and take the risk?

The success of these bonds also rests on the ability of agencies to collaboratively define the treatment population so that the results will be real and measureable, producing the right return on investment for sponsors.  And at issue will be definition of what will happen to the chosen population if the programming fails.

These bonds could be the most innovative way to shape the way services are provided to those in need in the next decade or they could be a flash in the pan.  What do you think?