Gary Buck

Let’s try something new

• BY Gary Buck
• November 6th, 2009

It’s been twenty years since I abandoned computer engineering for the right-brained world of advertising and graphic design and it’s time for a another reinvention. For the past fifteen years, my focus has evolved from interactive multimedia to website design to information architecture to brand strategy. And after studying and working in all of these related but diverse subject areas, I’ve finally decided what I want to do for a living. I call it “Brand Experience Strategy & Design”, and this new website is all about the brave, new world I’ve created for myself.

As you can see from my work history description above, I love change. Professionally, I love helping companies change from “the way we’ve always done it” to new ideas, concepts, products and methods that actually work, that their customers buy, and that are highly profitable. The business buzzword du jour is “innovation”, though it’s becoming a tired and overused word from misuse and abuse. Even the meaning of the word has evolved from “introducing something new” to “the application of inventions or new ideas to real-world practice”. The ideas exist all around us and merely need to be applied to business problems to create solutions. Sounds easy, right?

But twenty years of working with clients has taught me one thing above all others. Nearly every client I’ve ever known is (secretly) resistant to change. They say that they’re not, but when all is said and done… They fear that change might fail and they’ll be blamed. Seems fair enough with job security such a precarious concept these days, but it also seems as though no one is willing to risk doing something that might be wildly successful. Even though there are hundreds of business books telling the same stories about failures leading to phenomenonal successes, most firms seem to be willing to rest on their laurels and eke out another one percent of growth each year. It’s no wonder we’re all stuck in a recession. But here’s the naked truth:

If you’re not making waves or rocking the boat, you’re dead in the water.

Unfortunately, “dead in the water” is how most businesses are weathering the current global economic crisis. The opportunity for dramatic change is tremendous right now simply because your competitors are petrified with fear. Customers are not spending with wild abandon as they have in years past, but they are still buying expensive and well-crafted smart phones, golf clubs, audio systems, bicycles, watches, e-book readers, designer vodkas, software, cookware, and hundreds of other INNOVATIVE products. And if the products aren’t particularly innovative, the marketing, advertising, sales and service of those successful products is. How has your business innovated lately? What’s new with you?

My new focus is to facilitate change.

I’ve spent the last several years researching consumer behavior, creative problem solving, crowd psychology, lean thinking, social networking, motivation, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, learning, brainstorming techniques and dozens of other relevant topics. I’ve attended training courses on facilitation, user experience design and brand strategy. Add that to a long career developing brands, marketing strategies and campaigns, information architectures, product names and user interfaces and some things have started to become very clear. The thought processes needed to achieve successful innovation are neither complex nor difficult, but are definitely unique. And when those pieces of the puzzle fell into place, the epiphany came.

Visionary, innovative brand experiences (VIBE) are created by being open-minded, honest, trusting and engaged with customers and logically considering their needs, desires and fantasies via a structured problem-solving process.

I’ve assembled a methodology using the ideas and processes of some brilliant thinkers and problem solvers. (Innovation is the application of invention!) I’ve spread this new thinking to highly-skilled colleagues with whom I’ve had the pleasure of working on past projects. And I started testing the new concept with customers of my own. The response has been overwhelming and we seem to have struck a nerve that is waking businesses up and getting them moving in the right direction. The results have been amazing and our ship is sailing along at a brisk clip, making waves and rocking like never before.

The direction is new, the methodology is new, the thinking is new, but all are based on the experiences, skills and knowledge gained from a lifetime of solid work. We’ve applied these inventions to practice and are innovating for our clients and their customers. Are you open to change? Give me a call and let’s get started.

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• Category: GB BLOG

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Would you invite your brand to a cocktail party?

• BY Gary Buck
• November 5th, 2009

Hosting a cocktail party can be one of the most enjoyable experiences or one of the most frightening, depending upon your perspective. Some consider the opportunity to mix, mingle and converse with friends, both old and new, to be an exciting occasion. Others find the concept of creating great food and drinks for friends to be either a scary proposition or a chance to show off their culinary talents. But many agree that often the most difficult aspect of a cocktail party is deciding who to invite.

How do you evaluate each possible guest? You may find yourself describing each one in these terms: The life of the party. The crashing bore. The one with the great stories. The one-upper. The sweetheart. The nosy one. The interrupter. The joke-teller. The loud talker. The funny one. The name-dropper. The smart one. The smartass. The salesman. The gossip. The flirt. The perfect guest.

It’s easy to boil down the essence of a potential guest into a few words that sum up their possible contribution to the party atmosphere. Certainly, it may not be fair to make such a narrow judgment of each person, but we all have opinions based on a history of experiences with everyone we meet. Those experiences form an overall assessment that can often be distilled down to a single phrase that describes a person’s personality.

When explaining the concept of “branding” to clients, it often relates to their everyday world in terms of “personality.” Everyone has one. Some are good and some are, well… less so. But if we’ve had any experiences with a person, we can easily sum up their personality in a few words. This is their brand.

Note that a person may have dozens of “brands” depending upon which of his acquaintances you ask. His mother will describe one brand while his ex-girlfriend will likely convey something completely different. The successful business partner may sing his praises while the disgruntled employee may curse his name. The more consistent a person’s behavior across the spectrum of their life, the fewer distinct brands they will have. Alas, those brands may or may not be the ones they want.

Just as companies try to define their brand, people try to manage their personalities and reputations. But both may find this very difficult to accomplish, as a brand is determined solely by those who receive the experience. Just because you want to be known as “the smart guy” does not mean that others will not perceive you as “the smartass” instead. The best way to define your brand is by paying attention to your interactions and experiences, not to your wardrobe, hairstyle, memberships, press releases, brochures or tweets.

A man is defined by his actions, not his words.

How has your company defined its brand? Do the experiences you provide to your target markets align with that desired brand? Are they consistent across all possible customer interactions and to every audience? Are you living that brand or do you say one thing and do another? Do your buyers see you in the way you want to be seen?

Would all of your desired customers invite your brand to their cocktail party? If not, why not? What experiences do you need to redesign to change their minds? How can you get from “no, I don’t think so” to “we’ve gotta invite him”? The party is starting. Let’s get you there.

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• Category: BXD BLOG

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Sending out a good VIBE

• BY Gary Buck
• November 4th, 2009

Brian Wilson revealed to Rolling Stone magazine that, when he was a boy, his mother tried to explain why dogs barked at some people and not others. She said, “A dog would pick up vibrations from these people that you can’t see but you can feel. And the same thing happened with people.”

The songwriter used that knowledge of “vibrations” to create the Beach Boys’ hit single “Good Vibrations,” which leapt to number one on the charts in 1966. It is widely considered to be the highlight of Wilson’s songwriting and producing career and Rolling Stone lists it as the 6th greatest song of all time. But what made the song resonate with so many music fans around the world?

Wilson utilized a highly innovative mix of rock instruments (electro-theremin, saloon piano, cello) and layered recording techniques to achieve a unique sound for “Good Vibrations”. It took over six months in four different recording studios, ninety hours of recording tape and dozens of Los Angeles session musicians before Wilson was satisfied with his masterpiece. Capitol Records was furious about the expense – $50,000 made it the most expensive single ever made at the time – but quickly stopped complaining when it sold over 400,000 copies in four days.

Wilson recounts his own reaction to the final recording as, “It was a feeling of power, it was a rush. A feeling of exaltation. I remember saying ‘Oh, my God, sit back and listen to this!’” The “good vibes” that he felt from the song were echoed by critics and fellow musicians alike. Paul McCartney was in awe of Brian Wilson and recommended his music to everyone he met. As David Leaf writes in The Beach Boys and The California Myth, “Nothing but perfection here. The Beach Boys’ first million-selling #1 hit…was a major technical breakthrough…the record that showed that anything was possible in the studio.”

Brian Wilson’s innovative use of previously existing instruments, musical theory and recording techniques was radically non-traditional. He took enormous liberties with budget and schedule that put his relationship with his “bosses” in jeopardy. He risked alienating his co-workers, colleagues and vendors throughout the process. And his efforts resulted in an amazing product that was bought by millions of customers.

How did Wilson know to create a completely new sound that would be a commercial success? There were no precedents or “best practices” to guide this kind of production. Did he simply trust that the sound in his head would be something that the world would love as much as he did? Or was his genius that he had a innate “sympathetic resonance” with his target market?

What revolutionary new techniques and instruments are you using in your products and services? Are your customers picking up good vibrations? Are you giving them “excitations”? Ooh, bop bop.

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• Category: VIBE BLOG

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The Creative Priority: Putting Innovation to Work in Your Business

• BY Gary Buck
• November 3rd, 2009

The Creative Priority: Putting Innovation to Work in Your Business
[Author: Jerry Hirshberg]

I re-read this old favorite when while developing the new VIBE process. It is tremendously interesting to see connections between Hirshberg’s stories about Nissan and recent conversations I’ve had with Nike Lean Sensei Tom Young. These concepts about “creativity” are powerful and universal, crossing industries and disciplines and geographical borders. Read it now.

Author Jerry Hirshberg tells his story as “a firsthand account of an ongoing enterprise, one that began by identifying idea-making as the centermost concern of a business.” In 1979, Hirshberg is lured away from his safe job as chief designer for Buick to be the founder and president of Nissan Design International (NDI). From the beginning, he designs NDI to be something very different from the stifling, staid, stuffy and “that’s the way it’s always been done” atmosphere of Detroit. This new firm, located in sunny, energetic San Diego, becomes an example of how creative and innovative a design firm could—and SHOULD—be. Hirshberg describes the principles and strategies upon which he bases NDI as what he calls “the creative priority”.

Read this text with an open mind and you will certainly find at least a couple—but probably dozens—of ideas that will make your company, department or next project dramatically better through increased and improved creativity. As Hirshberg quotes from Silvano Arieti, “Another requirement for the creative person which is even more difficult to accept: gullibility … a willingness to explore everything: to be open, innocent and naive before rejecting anything.”

The first element of Hirshberg’s “creative priority” is “Polarity”, which encompasses a wide variety of “thinking opposite” concepts. He details stories of working with the Japan-based Nissan corporate managers, whose mindset is quite different from the American viewpoint, especially those of old-school Detroit automakers. These stories are even more interesting in light of my experience with other books I’ve been reading, including Jeffrey Liker’s “The Toyota Way” and James Womack’s “Lean Thinking”, as well as recent conversations with Nike Lean Sensei Tom Young, who explained to me how Nike is using Lean Thinking techniques in their Asian production facilities.

Polarity includes “Creative Abrasion”, the concept of creating project teams of people with diverse and even conflicting viewpoints. The friction caused by these combinations often sparks innovative ideas that would never have been generated by like-minded teammates. Hirshberg on the traditional strategies of compromising, diluting or aligning positions: “That’s a fine procedure for rowing a boat; not so fine for creating one.”

“Embracing the Dragon” is another “Polarity concept” that is described as creating “a dramatic shift in perspective, revealing new angles, previously unseen patterns, and unimagined possibilities” by flipping your position to that of a “threatening” party. In other words, take your opponent’s point of view and debate against your own to see the problem from a completely opposite direction.

Hirshberg calls the second creative priority “Unprecendented Thinking”, which holds a special place in my heart as it relates to our new methodologies of creative problem solving. His story of designing children’s furniture for daycare centers (NDI designs much more than cars) is a favorite of mine that I’ve used time and again with my clients. Only by asking the right questions (“What’s a kid?”) does NDI arrive at the right answer (not “a little adult”, but “a misshapen adult!”) and thus be able to design the correct solution.

Another “Unprecedented Thinking” concept is “Stepping Back From the Canvas”, described as the need to physically and mentally move away from a particularly difficult problem. Another is “Failure, Cheating and Play”, which entails idea-sharing and interplay within a group and the overarching thought that “two heads are better than one.” Interdisciplinary group brainstorming in Creative Problem Solving sessions, anyone?

Next, Hirshberg lists “Beyond the Edges” as his third creative priority. NDI takes advantage of their breadth of skillsets in “The Blurring of Disciplinary Boundaries” between their marketing, design and engineering departments. How many times has a project of your suffered because the various departments wouldn’t play well together? Hirshberg tells a number of stories about NDI staffers not only wanting to share and work in areas outside their own, but actually revel in the innovation that it generates.

“Intercultural Creativity” continues this theme by bringing the Japan-USA connection back into the story as Hirshberg talks more about assumptions and cultural differences and how initial problems were turned into dramatic revelations. He describes the use of a profiling test called “Personalysis” to help NDI co-workers understand and work through their differences in the same way the Basadur problem-solving profile has worked so incredibly well with our clients and their teams. His last concept in this area is “Drinking from Diverse Wells”, described through stories about how NDI learns new ideas, thought processes and techniques by working on non-automotive projects such as yachts, vacuum cleaners and desktop computers.

Finally, “Synthesis” is defined as the fourth creative priority as the uniting, categorizing and combining of ideas and solutions. This strategy also seems to correspond to our new methodology in the way both encourage and value the need to find connections between ideas and rationally unite them rather than merely brainstorming then jumping to action. The components of this priority are described as “Informed Intuition”, which discusses facts and how they should be gathered and utilized, and “Porous Planning”, which encompasses the need for plans to be flexible and adaptable as solutions are formed.

This is one of my favorite books about creativity because it uses real-world examples to describe specific techniques for the creative workplace. Rather than the usual text that speaks in broad brushstrokes about “thinking outside of the box” and “empowering” and “innovation”, Hirshberg actually uses these strategies at NDI and tells you what happens as a result. The author is wonderfully candid and forthright, even about his own shortcomings as a manager and how he has struggled to create a continuously improving company. I cannot recommend this book highly enough for anyone who wants their teams to be more creative, more effective and more efficient. And isn’t that all of us?

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Applied Materials

• BY Gary Buck
• November 2nd, 2009

In 2006, Deloitte hired me as their user experience (UX) lead for their Human Capital project with Applied Materials (AMAT) in Santa Clara, CA. Deloitte was engaged to facilitate a large-scale restructuring of Applied Materials’ Human Resources (HR) department, encompassed dramatic changes to organizational structure, governance, policies and procedures, messaging and all related interactive systems. The target audience was the global employees of AMAT, distributed across dozens of business entities in countries around the world.

The first questions we asked addressed the current state of affairs. What was the existing “brand” of the AMAT HR department as perceived by employees? Were their products and services considered good, bad or indifferent by their customers? Were the current global systems actually “global” or were there dramatic differences from one country to another?

Per my process, I asked the basic questions: What are you selling? Who are your customers? What do they want, need, desire? What do you want them to do? How are you currently communicating with them along the customer journey? Why, why and why? These questions proved difficult for the client to answer as they had not approached HR in this manner, viewing their constituency—AMAT employees—as a target audience to whom they were marketing their services.

We quickly discovered that AMAT, as with many companies of this size, had become so large partly by acquisition and partly by organic growth. Again, as is typical in these organizations, the acquired companies brought with them a completely different internal brand, attitude and set of HR products and services for their employees. We also learned that even at the organically-grown locations, the HR brand, products and services were perceived and used in very different ways from country to country. This was not surprising, as employees in various countries experience work and compensation in ways as different as their national cultures and legal systems. What was a bit surprising was how little AMAT had done previously to make their HR brand consistent and positive across these divisions and borders.

I conducted discovery sessions at AMAT headquarters in California and Texas and gathered as many facts as possible about target audiences. I also performed usability reviews of the disparate paper documents and electronic systems that made up the existing intranet.

This revealed only the “American” view, which was consistent with other single-country intranet portals we had previously developed. These sessions and reviews did reveal one disturbing fact about the global HR attitude, shown on the very first page of the intranet system. To navigate to a specific country’s HR policies, an employee would have to choose between two equally weighted buttons: “USA” or “Global”.

We explained to the corporate HR team that dividing the planet into “USA” and “Global” was not only an error of geography, but sent a profoundly meaningful message to every employee: “Corporate headquarters are in the USA and if you work in a different country, you are considered to be an outsider.” Another disturbing finding was that the content on over 98% of the global HR portal pages was available only in English, reinforcing the message that “AMAT is an American company, and we speak English here.”

So we took our act on the road, armed with a list of questions, talking points, existing assumptions, brainstorming ideas, and preliminary prototypes. Our goal was to discover if the corporate, USA-centric attitude was as damaging to the success of the global organization as we intuitively felt it was. I traveled east, to Ireland, France, Germany and Israel. I briefed a team of Deloitte consultants on our research objectives, and they headed west to China, Korea, Taiwan, Japan, Singapore and India.

We talked at length with HR professionals and employees, both individually and in focus group sessions. Nearly every employee was grateful for the opportunity to speak their mind about what it meant to work for AMAT and how they interacted with the HR department.

Many of the facts we gathered were very complimentary of the AMAT HR staff around the world in terms of their professionalism, knowledge, competency and strong desire to help all employees. Unfortunately, the systems that existed to support these HR professionals were judged to be extremely poor. Employees had their own strong desire to be able to find information and take actions themselves rather than waiting for an HR staffer to help them, but were completely unable to do so with the existing intranet portals. Even more employees reported not being able to find the information they needed to make vital decisions on a wide range of compensation, benefits or legal issues.

A critical finding from our global discovery effort was that employees outside of the USA were united and outspoken on one topic. They felt that they were treated as “second-class employees” because they weren’t in the USA and, in many cases, did not speak or read English well enough to comprehend HR content on the intranet portals. They felt distanced from their employer because the customer experiences that they had on a daily basis were not what they expected from their “Applied Materials family.” Our intuitive evaluation of the USA-centric corporate viewpoint was proven to be true, but only by gathering concrete evidence could we learn the complete truth and convince our client to make significant organizational changes.

We returned to California and reported our discovery findings to a surprised, yet wonderfully open-minded and receptive, audience at AMAT headquarters. My subsequent intranet designs made sweeping changes in how content should be organized, catalogued, written, translated, positioned and presented to all employees. We created new prototypes that addressed these issues, allowing for an appropriate amount of globalized content as well as dramatically improved opportunities for localization and customization of the intranet portal interface, content and language usage. Upon presentation to the global audience, we received an overwhelmingly positive response and the new intranet portal designs and transition strategy were approved for development.

• tagged: Deloitte
• Category: CASE STUDIES

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Aimco

• BY Gary Buck
• November 1st, 2009

In 2007, the market for apartment rentals was not yet the hot ticket it became in the aftermath of the home mortgage crisis. Aimco, a $1.4B real estate investment trust headquartered in Denver, desperately needed a complete overhaul of their websites to alleviate significant problems their prospective customers were having finding and renting their apartments online. As one of the largest owners and operators of apartment communities in the United States with over 950 community properties, Aimco had over 150,000 apartments to manage, market and rent on an daily basis.

Their existing online presence consisted of a main corporate website with a rudimentary search tool, linked in a wide variety of ways to over 400 websites managed by either the properties themselves or one of several third-party apartment rental portals. All of the sites looked significantly different from each other with little or no regard for consistency of the overarching Aimco brand or customer experience. Worse yet, the digital data to support these sites—descriptions, prices, promotions, sizes, features, floorplans, amenities and community maps—was woefully incomplete, inconsistent and spread across disparate, unconnected systems throughout the organization.

Aimco hired Deloitte Consulting to approach the problem from both the back end (systems, databases, integration) and front end (user experience (UX), branding, visual design). Deloitte handled the technology side of the project and subcontracted the front end effort to one of the large, national interactive agencies. In turn, Deloitte hired me to liaise between the technology, creative and client factions.

After only a few weeks, it became painfully clear to all parties that Deloitte’s partnership with the large, national interactive agency was not made in heaven. At the client’s strong urging, Deloitte severed ties with their subcontractor and handed the entire front-end effort to me. I immediately contacted one of my favorite design agencies, Ingredient, and dragged them into the fray to create the visual branding for the site.

Suddenly, the challenge became learning enough about the target audiences—in a very short period of time—to create an experience that would be a fundamental leap beyond all previous apartment rental company websites. Unbeknownst to our project team, Aimco had recently initiated an internal rebranding project focused on a potential overhaul of the Aimco brand, adding yet another timing issue to an already accelerated project.

The internal rebranding project, weeks behind schedule, proved to be the solution rather than merely a timing nightmare. We quickly synthesized the market research they had performed into personas and customer insights that would indicate the UX design of the website. We also had an instant source of customers and prospects with whom we could interview, discuss and test our evolving design prototypes. (In the end, we provided a significant portion of the rebranding solution via our website designs.)

The insights gleaned from these customer groups, and from property managers who had been marketing and selling their products to these customers, led to a breakthrough design for this industry. We carefully selected content and functionality that brought the best of shopping research, location-based tools, feature search, online sales communications and social/viral enablers to the apartment rental world, satisfying the NEEDS of the target audience rather than merely their stated WANTS. This difference delighted our testing group, providing them with solutions that matched what they were feeling during their apartment search rather than what they thought they wanted.

As quickly as possible, I directed the development of scenarios, storyboards, user flow diagrams and site maps for the new site. By working closely with Ingredient’s visual design team and the client’s ongoing rebranding effort, we were able to rapidly develop user interface designs that addressed the diverse customer segmentation as well as accomodate the customization needs of hundreds of property managers around the country. Additionally, we developed a content strategy that directed Aimco to collect, refine and recreate digital content across the enterprise, including apartment data, floor/site plan diagrams and extensive photography assets.

Because we no longer had time to perform final customer testing, Deloitte commissioned a rapid usability review from Forrester Research. Forrester judged the pre-existing Aimco websites to be very poor, scoring -22 on a scale from -50 to +50. Forrester then reviewed our new beta site as +25, ranking Aimco in the top 3% among the 1000+ websites they’ve reviewed. We made additional modifications based on their final report and launched. Forrester’s summary report included these comments:

• “…redesign of 400+ sites in 10 months is a heroic achievement.”
• “…huge improvements in content and function.”
• “…expect to see significant lift in metrics in 6-12 months.”

In the end, the happy client launched—on time and on budget—a dramatically improved set of corporate, regional and community websites that both delight and satisfy the needs of prospective renters. During the first three months post-launch, sales increased by 16% and customer service costs decreased by 45% due to the greatly improved site usability and online self-service functionality. Both the quantity and quality of leads dramatically improved.

• tagged: Deloitte, Ingredient
• Category: CASE STUDIES

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