Jared Spool - Strike Up the Brand

May 23rd, 2008

A few days back I arranged a collective viewing back at the office for the latest Jared Spool virtual seminar’s: “Strike Up the Brand: How Smart Design Can Strengthen Your Brand“. I can’t say I wasn’t a bit disappointed in terms of content, but could simply be because it was the very first one I’ve assisted, or for all the reverence I have for his work or even more simply to the fact that we were watching it live in late afternoon here.

Still I took down some notes for personal reference, but I’ve decided to share them as well for those colleagues and friends who couldn’t be there…

One Key Question:

How to Know if the design is actually helping your brand?

What’s Branding? Branding is normally associated with COLORS + SYMBOLS + PHRASES and as to do with a lot of EMOTIONS. Branding from the business perspective is often limited to the increase of long-term sales at the lowest possible cost! A whole lot of word-of-mouth, etc. From the Customer perspective things are somewhat different: as a customer:

• I choose a particular product/service because of the relationship I might have or wanna have with the brand
• because I’m willing to tolerate small issues
• I believe that the brand is working on my behalf
• Or simply for Pride, or because I’m passionate about it.

Goals of Branding

We can clearly identify two major classes of goals for branding:

• AFFINITY: making people aware of brand elements
• DISPOSITIONAL: ensuring pre-disposal to initially select a product

Homepage’s aren’t about brand, their about CONTENT!

User Expectations

How do we build expectations? People expect us to be great because we’ve been great in the past (as the other way around, if you sucked sometime, you’ll suck again)

Service vs Product Brand’s

There are two very distinctive ways of branding:

• Message Branding: indirect approached, based on brand elements, with a repetitive deployment and normally easy to design and implement.
• Experience Branding: often based on much more direct approach, with a conditioning process first before anyone actually experiences anything, normally much more effective but much harder to get

Measuring User Engagment

When trying to measure the level of user engagement, one has to consider the following user factors:

• Loyalty
• Confidence
• Integrity
• Pride
• Passion

Key Rules for enhancing the Brand Experience

• Remove Frustration Points
• Add delight
• Avoid Brand Conflicts

in a sentence learn and work for maximizing your user’s positive experience with your products/services.

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