AN INTERVIEW WITH MARTY NEUMEIER
by Brian Alvey

Excerpted from Meet the Makers, April 20, 2003
http://www.meet-the-makers.com

Marty Neumeier is president of Neutron LLC, a San Francisco
based firm specializing in brand collaboration. Before launching Neutron in 2002, Neumeier was editor and publisher of Critique, the "magazine of graphic design thinking", which had quickly become the leading forum for improving design effectiveness. In editing Critique, Neumeier joined the conversation about how to bridge the gap between strategy and design, which led directly to the formation of Neutron and the ideas in his new book, The Brand Gap. The Brand Gap is "a whiteboard overview" that presents his unified theory of branding in a clear, direct, and visually entertaining format.

In this conversation, Neumeier gives his definition of a brand and tips on creating a successful brand. We also discuss his popular magazine Critique, and how this impacted his current career as a brand consultant.

Alvey: How did you become a brand expert?

Neumeier: My goal with Critique was to raise the bar on design by exploring how aesthetics could be applied to business. When designers get involved in brand-building, they're actually helping to design a business, not just a logo, an annual report, an advertising campaign, a website. Designing a business is important stuff. What I came to realize is that designing a business, i.e., a brand, requires the talents of a lot of different people. I bring one skill to the table, you bring another, she brings another; it takes a village to build a brand. Neutron's role is to help the people in that village work together, sharing ideas, adding strength to strength, presenting the brand as a clearly differentiated proposition.

Alvey: What skills do you personally bring to Neutron and your clients?

Neumeier: It turns out that designers are natural differentiators, because our aesthetic training is all about creating focus and hierarchy. We always ask, "What's the one point I need to dramatize? How do I arrange the secondary information to support the main point? How can I make this company or that product stand out from the crowd?"

So, of course, I bring design and communication skills. But I also bring collaboration skills. I like people, and I know if I can get them to work together that they'll do the best work they've ever done. Neutron's role is to design the collaboration. The collaborators design the stuff that the customers see.

Alvey: What are some of the most important projects you've worked on, and what did you learn from them?

Neumeier: A watershed project for me was the identity and packaging for Netscape Navigator in 1996, just before the launch of Critique. The Netscape project was the first time I'd been a part of a meta-team of brand-builders. The brand had to be launched in something like six weeks, so all the collaborators had to work in parallel instead of in sequence.

In other words, while the product team was developing the Navigator software, my firm was designing the brand icon and the packaging, a Netscape team was building the website, the advertising agency was developing the ad campaign, the exhibit firm was building the tradeshow booth, the PR firm was creating the messaging, and so on. Everyone had to share their work with everyone else on the fly so that it could all come together with some semblance of cohesion at the end.

From this experience I learned that brand-building can be more like jazz than classical music. I learned that the sort of military consistency you get from identity manuals is overrated. It started me thinking about ways to transform brand jazz into good brand jazz, not just noise for the sake of a deadline. They key, I believe, is getting talented people together and 1) giving them the information they need to do their best work, and 2) creating a process that lets them share ideas.

Alvey: You created award-winning brand designs long before you launched your magazine or wrote The Brand Gap. What have you created that I might have seen? What are you most proud of?

Neumeier: I'm still proud of the identity and packaging we did for Apple's Claris unit. You might remember the loosely drawn icons for FileMaker, Claris Draw, MacWrite, and others. We took the Apple aesthetic of simplicity and fun and extended it to the Claris brand. The results went totally against the "look du jour" of software packaging, which is one of the reasons why the project was so successful. It changed the company's fortunes overnight by increasing sales 40% across the line.

What enabled the Claris management to take what had seemed like a huge risk was the testing we did in stores. We were able to map the thought processes of shoppers as they browsed the shelves. Faced with a choice of designs, they consistently chose the most radical design, i.e., the most differentiated one. The Claris project then became the template on which we built a terrific packaging business. We kept testing and improving our template until we were getting sales increases of 300% and 500% on some of our packages. It was a great lesson in the power of deep specialization.

Alvey: What is a brand?

Neumeier: A brand is a person's gut feeling about a product, service, or organization. That's my short definition. The brand isn't what you say it is. It's what they say it is.

Alvey: What is a "brand gap"?

Neumeier: The brand gap is the distance between business strategy (what the company wants to be) and customer experience (how people actually perceive it). The brand gap has its origins in the way our brains work. Strategic thinkers favor the left side of the brain (the logic), while creative thinkers favor the right side (the magic). Since these two ways of thinking reside in different people, there's always a gap between brand logic and brand magic.

Alvey: How do you fix a brand gap?

Neumeier: Clearly, the biggest influence over a brand, and therefore over the brand gap, is design—the design of trademarks, messaging, advertising, product nomenclatures, the products themselves. In brand-building, design is where the rubber meets the road. The only way to close the gap is by aligning the design of these customer touchpoints with the business strategy. And the only way to create alignment is by asking for collaboration among all the specialists working on the brand.

Alvey: What are some brands that people might not think of as brands?

Neumeier: Well, the United States is a brand, for example. We're differentiated by our emphasis on personal freedom. Our core values include the ideas of fairness and equality, which is why there's so much consternation over the war in Iraq. The administration is seen by some as making choices that could undermine our brand.

The fascinating thing is, the more you understand the concept of brand, the more you realize that every person, place, or thing can be a brand. I'm a brand and you're a brand (I'm the artistic brand guy and you're the online creativity and technology guy), cities are brands (Paris is the food capital, with a big metal tower for an icon), and the Buddhist religion is a brand (with a half-naked fat man for an icon). A thing doesn't need a circle-R to be a brand. It just needs to be differentiated in a way that has meaning in somebody's life.

Alvey: What are some things that people think are brands, but really aren't?

Neumeier: A company like Columbia Pictures, despite its often-seen Statue of Liberty icon, doesn't have much meaning for people. Can you tell the difference between a Columbia Pictures movie and a Universal movie? On the other hand, Miramax is a fairly strong brand because you have a feeling about what kind of movies they make.

Alvey: What are the best examples of brands that succeed?
Neumeier: Brands that succeed are those that can charge a premium over competing brands, or that can dominate a category by virtue of the brand. Morton Salt is a good example. Salt is a commodity, it would seem, except that most people prefer Morton. Why? Because of the "story" of the little girl walking home from the store in the rain, with salt pouring out of the container. "When it rains, it pours", is the tagline, meaning that Morton salt doesn't stick in the container in wet weather. Today, nobody's salt sticks, but we still prefer Morton. That's a successful brand.

Alvey: Thanks. I had no idea what that phrase meant. What are some examples of brands that fail?

Neumeier: Brands that fail are those without any special meaning for people. It doesn't mean that people don't buy them, but that people don't especially value them. A lot of the dot-com branding in the late nineties was not really branding at all, but a failure of branding. Companies tried to use brand communication as a false front, hoping to make it solid later. Some people refer to that as "sock-puppet" marketing.

Alvey: What are the biggest mistakes people make in branding?

Neumeier: Sounds like a good idea for a book: "The 13 Biggest Mistakes in Branding". Probably the most common mistake is to think of branding as corporate identity, something you stick on products and materials to identify the maker, like the now-famous swoosh. The second most common mistake is to think of the brand as something you can create and control. You can only really discover your brand, because it exists in the minds and hearts of your customers. After you discover it, you can only influence it—never totally control it.

Alvey: Everybody knows what the company the swoosh represents and which company wants you to "Just do it". Are you saying that the swoosh swucks?

Neumeier: The Nike swoosh is actually a huge success, which explains why so many companies have copied it and so many people complain about it. Its success isn't because of a great trademark design, but because Nike knew how to exploit a trademark. They used it relentlessly, and gave it meaning through a bold and brilliant use of posters, ads, product design, and a differentiated message.

Alvey: How does online branding differ from offline branding?
Neumeier: Online branding is still in its infancy, so practitioners are still groping for the answer to that question. Of course, the experience we have with a website will contribute to how we feel about a company. But what's missing in most web design is an understanding of the role differentiation plays in branding.

Since most web designers are throwing the kitchen sink into their sites, many sites tend to look alike. When designers start grappling with how to simplify their sites, they'll come face to face with brand. Once you simplify a design, everything that's left has to work harder. The Google site is a great example of simplification and differentiation.

Alvey: How important is the name of a brand? What are some of the worst brand names you've heard?

Neumeier: Accenture is pretty bad. It's so bad, in fact, that it's gained a certain fame from its badness. Pets.com was a bad name while it lasted, because it's too generic. People who name brands often think that the best name is one that's descriptive. The main problem with descriptive names is that a dozen other companies are busy giving their brands similar names. So you had PetSmart, PetMart, PetMax, Pet Depot, Petco, Petarama—I'm just making some of these up, but you get the idea.

Names become important brand assets when they play out well in graphics, messaging, ads, and so on. They usually suggest the meaning of the brand without describing it. Over time, good names become synonomous with what they represent. Stay away from anything generic, unless you want your brand to become a commodity.

Alvey: Your book talks about brand valuation. Can you really measure the dollar value of a brand?

Neumeier: Yes, and the valuations can be astonishing. The Coca-Cola brand has been valued at about $70 billion—more than half of their market cap. The director of marketing recently said that if all of Coca-Cola's hard assets disappeared overnight, he could walk into a bank the next morning and get a loan to rebuild the whole company.

Alvey: How did they arrive at that valuation?

Neumeier: That figure came from Interbrand's annual survey. Interbrand brought attention to brand valuation with a top-100 list they publish each year in Business Week. Their valuations are based on a proprietary formula, but there are also some standard formulas for brand valuation.

Alvey: How did you keep The Brand Gap so simple, clear, and easy-to-read?

Neumeier: I'm a relentless simplifier. A book is a kind of product, and I think the author should so most of the work so the "user" doesn't have to. Whenever I see a complex presentation of anything, I wonder if the presenter is either lazy or afraid of being exposed as a fraud. Good design and good writing have a lot to do with clarity and courage, and with letting the viewers or readers bring some of their own experience to it. It's not a brain dump.

Alvey: Which people were the most influential in becoming a designer and brand specialist?

Neumeier: My early influences were Paul Rand, Helmut Krone, George Lois, Milton Glaser—a combination of design and advertising guys. Before long, though, I wanted to peek behind the curtain to see the marketing strategy, so I adopted John Caples, David Ogilvy, Rosser Reeves, Trout and Ries, and David Aaker.

Alvey: Finally, where do you find inspiration and creativity?

Neumeier: I'm naturally curious and ambitious, so I just need to be rested to get the creative itch. I'm especially inventive in my morning shower, or on plane flights. Must be the blue sky.