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What is an authentic brand? How can Design Thinking help your organization tackle wicked problems ? This brief presentation is from a talk Keith Gerr gave at the University of Oregon's Digital Arts and Product Design Program. The class is taught by Zara Logue, Adj Asst Professor/Design Community Liaison
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Authentic Brands, Design Thinking and Wicked Problems
University of Oregon: Contemporary Design TalkKeith Gerr, Director of Strategy – Opus Creative
4.15.09
What is an Authentic Brand?
• Value Delivery– Does what it is supposed to do– When it doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do, the company fixes it
• Values Resonance– Company consistently acts in accordance with a value system that is identifiable to you
– New Social Contract vs. Old Social Contract
“Products without aesthetics are uncompelling; brands without
meaning are undesirable; and business without ethics is unsustainable.”
Marty Neumeier, President Neutron LLC
Brand is behavior – it is not logos, color palettes and slogans
The definition of authentic is personal
What are your expectations of quality ?What is your tolerance for shenanigans?
Are you willing to forgive?What’s the threshold between preference and loyalty?
How open are you to change?
So how does a brand attempt to be authentic?
Companies and the brands they promote must fundamentally give a shit about it’s employees, customers, partners, shareholders and the rest of
the world
Stay true to the origin story
Promote defensible attributes
Act in accordance to a stated values system
Have open dialogue with the world
Understand the role your brand playsin a persons pursuit of self‐identity
Respect the head, Touch the heart, Satisfy the gut
Don’t be afraid to repel audiences
Value design thinking
“The premise is that if you tap a designer, or a designers’s problem‐solving approach, to tackle standard business problems, you will get game‐
changing results.”
Design Thinking
“With their emphasis on charts and data, marketers often practice inductive thinking (if X, then Y). Design thinking, by contrast, is more a case of abductive
thinking – more a creative leap that attempts to solve a problem in previously unforeseen ways ”
Source: Thinking By Design, Brandweek
We need more Design Thinking people
People who are not afraid of jumping to solutions before the problem has been completely defined
People that embrace rapid proto‐typing and the spirit of iteration
People who recognize the inter‐connectedness of all things
People who use multiple mediums to elucidate an idea
The world is full of wicked problems
“Varied as they are, these problems share some key characteristics: each is unique, difficult to define, and often linked to other issues” Roger Martin, Dean Rotman School of Management
How do we solve world hunger?How do we reverse global warming?
Can the internet be made safe for kids?Would we all benefit from a global currency?
“Design contains the skills to identify possible futures, invent exciting products, build bridges to customers, crack wicked problems, and more. The fact is, if you wanna innovate, you gotta design.”
“Design is rapidlymoving from ‘posters and toasters’ to include processes, systems, and organizations”
Ilya Prokopoff and Fred Dust, Partners, IDEO
Let’s use Design Thinking to solvewicked problems
Hand‐shakes are nice but collaborationis more meaningful
The Law of Requisite Variety: Only variety absorbs variety
“So when dealing with high‐variety – with complex challenges – we can only hope to address them by bringing to bear an equal
amount of variety in the form of people, information, knowledge, experience, relationships and their influence.”
David Komlos, CEO Syntergrity
Let’s value each others contribution during the design journey
