A few weeks ago I was invited to participate in an ideation session by a Park City-based strategy and innovation-consulting group. The purpose of the all day session was to develop innovative ideas for a major manufacturer of ready-to-eat breakfast cereals. Together with nine other individuals, some in marketing-related businesses, some not, we gathered in small groups of three or four and brainstormed ideas about improving the product or packaging, promotional and merchandising ideas and new product possibilities.

The ideation sessions were led by one of the partners who used different activities to stimulate thinking. (If Apple Computer were to develop a breakfast cereal, what would it be like? If Beyonce were to endorse a breakfast cereal, what kind of cereal might it be?) We would slide quickly from topic to topic, recording our thoughts in rapid-fire succession on sheets of paper and note cards. At times it seemed rather chaotic, but it was broken up with plenty of food (expected), as well as interactive games. At one point we broke up into teams and shot at each other kid-style with dart guns (unexpected).

At the end of the day we had amassed some 500 random ideas for the client. Some ideas were clearly out there. (What if there was a breakfast cereal concierge in the grocery store aisle who loaded up my cart with everything I wanted?) But some ideas were clearly something new and significant—and something that no one of us would have ever likely thought of on our own.

The concept of an ideation session in behalf of a client is an element of “design thinking”, the emerging acknowledgement in the business world that using the standard processes of the designer to solve business problems is an important tool in innovation.

I’m currently reading the book by IDEO president, Tim Brown, Change by Design. The book promotes the idea that innovation is a system of overlapping spaces rather than a sequence of orderly steps, of which ideation is the middle space. Much as the ideation session I experienced, innovation is an iterative, non-linear journey—fundamentally an exploratory process. In the words of Tim Brown, “Design thinking will feel chaotic to those experiencing it for the first time. But over the life of a project, it invariably comes to make sense and achieves results that differ markedly from the linear, milestone-based processes that define traditional business practices.”

We all think of ourselves as different, but most people think artists and designers are categorically different. If it’s not appearance issues, such as clothes or hair, then it’s a designer’s outlook, personality or the way they think.

So what are the personality traits of a designer? Michael Roller looked into that. He administered the well-known Myers Briggs personality test to a group of designers and published the result. The test compares things like introversion vs. extraversion and feeling vs. thinking. Two big trends are clear: Nearly 70% of the respondents were “judging” types and 85% were “intuiting” types. That’s exactly the opposite of the general public, who skew towards “sensing” and “perceiving”.

As Fast Company magazine blogger Cliff Kuang says, “According to the test, those that “intuit” rather than “sense”, tend to focus on context and future developments, rather than simply the data at hand. Meanwhile, those that “judge” rather than “perceive”, tend to see the world in terms of discrete problems that can be structured and cracked, rather than as a series of casual, open-ended possibilities.”

We were all artists as kids. Not only did we create art, we were also proud of it. We primarily thought in a visual way. But somewhere in the middle of elementary school our focus began to shift from visual, spatial thinking to verbal, linear thinking. The end result is a very left-brain dominant society. Kit Hinrichs, partner, (until recently), at the international design firm Pentagram, said designers keep looking at the whole picture. “I think this is the reason why designers are so welcome in the boardrooms of corporations. Businesspeople have been kind of brainwashed out of solving problems in anything other than a linear approach. But sometimes, we need both sides of the brain to solve problems. Which is why I find that there are times I can go into a boardroom with guys who have degrees from 12 universities I could never get into, and help them look at a problem in a new way. Once the problem is described, the designer is more likely to say, ‘Well, did you look at this? How about doing it this way?’ It’s about not adhering to a set of restrictions that have defined how you think in business.”

Design Thinking is a methodology that takes the designers’ whole brain approach to problem solving into a proven and repeatable form that anybody can employ. You may normally think of design in terms of the completed object: the Web site, the chair, the building. But design has always been a process. It’s what you do—the action, not the end result.

Here’s how you can apply the designers’ process, even if you don’t have the personality of a designer.

• Define the problem. Make sure you’ve defined the correct problem that needs to be to solved.
• Research. Become an anthropologist. Get out of the office to observe and learn.
• Ideate. Brainstorm about lots of options. Don’t pre-judge suitability.
• Prototype. Design always involves iteration. Try it one way, try it another. Evaluate and refine until you think you’ve got a solution.
• Implement. Plan it and execute it, but don’t plan on perfection. Better to have something than nothing.
• Learn. Gather feedback, measure success and keep innovating.

I attended our client Mercato Partners’ Sales Summit last week (an event for which we created the identity, Web site and signage) where I heard a number of great presentations, and connected with others. Among the presenters was Mark Hurst, a long-term business associate, who I’ve known since the early ‘80s. Mark talked about the relationship between brand strategies and sales strategies. After dispelling common brand misconceptions, showed a slide listing seven branding definitions—really more like branding attributes. Here they are, with my own elaborations and thoughts about each attribute.

A promise; an inviolate contract. Every brand should have a brand promise, the “take away” you should get from every engagement with the brand. Sometimes expressed as a tagline, or as the brand message on the home page of your Web site, but always understood as the promise delivered to you, the customer, from the brand owner.

Preemptive ownership of enduring benefits. If you’re the first brand in a new category, there is no competition. You preempt them. But “first to mind” is what counts. Many successful brands have not literally been first. Duryea built the first automobile in America, but Ford was the first brand to own a share of the mind (and the only American brand that’s doing well today).

Measureable value of trust with audience. Trust is the foundation upon which a brand is built. Customers trust your brand when their experiences consistently meet or beat their expectations.

A cluster of experiences. No single experience defines your brand in the mind of your customer. It’s a cluster of all the touchpoints they experience, from the way you answer the phone, to the way you solve a complaint, from your business card to your Web site, and from the appearance of your product to the appearance of your facility.

The thread that weaves into user fabric. Become the brand for which your customer believes there is no other substitute—the choice that happens by default. It’s natural, because you’re always there, because you are part of their lives.

An emotional connection with the users. You can’t win the hearts and minds of your customer with strategy. It requires an emotional connection. And that happens with implementation, not strategy. Design is where the rubber meets the road. Without great creative, there is no emotional connection.

A feeling you have about a product or service. We’re not as rational and pragmatic as we think we are. In fact, we’re predictably irrational. We base our buying decisions more on symbolic cues, like feelings, image and looks. We often buy to feel like we belong.

I recently read in the paper that the thing a visiting rock star was most looking forward to when in Salt Lake, was going to dinner at the local restaurant, the Red Iguana. And it wasn’t the first time I’ve heard a similar story. Sure, the Red Iguana is highly rated on Zaggat, but as one reviewer said, “It’s a real ‘hole-in-the-wall‘, and be prepared for a wait.”

Of course, the line out the door certainly indicates it’s popular. But do locals and rock stars like the Red Iguana because it’s truly good or simply because everyone else likes it—so hey, it must be good.

In 1949, Robert Merton, a Columbia University professor, coined the phrase “self-fulfilling prophecy”, the explanation for how a belief or an expectation, correct or incorrect, affects the outcome of a situation and the way a person behaves.

In an article titled “Group Think” in the current issue of Wired magazine, Clive Thompson describes how recent studies, (also from Columbia), tested the theories of the self-fulfilling-prophecy in pop culture. His conclusion? We’re often just sheep. If we think others like something, we do too.

The implications for brand and marketing managers are numerous: Testimonials are an obvious way of saying “others like us, so will you.” Social Media provide opportunities for building consensus.

And lastly, the expectation and belief of a potential customer can be influenced significantly in the buying process by their perception before the sale. That perception comes frequently through intangibles like design, look and feel, but also—as in the case of the Red Iguana, because of the line out the front door. Would the Red Iguana experience be the same if the “horrible décor” described by one reviewer, was upgraded to something more hip and modern? Maybe not—because design, I hate to admit, is not the always the answer.

This spring I bought a road bike and spent the summer pedaling my way to health and happiness all around the valley. I tested several different makes and models before reaching a buying decision. Different factors played into the final selection. I had never actually heard of the bike brand before (Time, made in France), so I strongly relied on the opinion of the retailer, but I was already familiar with the manufacturer of the bike’s major components—Shimano.

The Japanese company Shimano, is known for supplying the cycling components to many of the finest bike makers in the world and is an excellent example of ingredient branding, i.e. an essential ingredient or component of a product that has its own brand identity. Chevron’s Techron, NutraSweet and Dolby are other examples of ingredient branding. Each are essential ingredients of the end product and each possess its own independent identity, marked by its own logo.

Because of its unmatched achievement, the most well-known example of a successful branded ingredient originated with an ad agency in Salt Lake City. Before Dahlin Smith White suggested the tagline, “Intel Inside”, no one knew—or for that matter, even cared what kind of microprocessor was inside their computer. With the help of DSW, Intel became the first PC component manufacturer to communicate directly to the computer buyer and eventually became one of the top ten known brands in the world, in a class with Coke, Disney and McDonalds.

Ingredient branding is most useful when it is aimed beyond your immediate customer to a downstream stage of the value channel. For example, Intel’s immediate customer may be Dell Computer, but by communicating directly to the computer buyer, Intel can pull their product through the distribution channel.

A more limited application of ingredient branding is seen in any product or service named, identified and marketed as a distinctive part of a larger brand. modern8 asserts the trademark on its own strategic methodology, the Perception Branding 5D Process™, to bring attention to, and distinguish the service from our competition. Shimano, Intel and even modern8 enhance the value proposition and points of differentiation for all products and services using ingredient branding.

Recently modern8 has been experimenting with social media networks Twitter and Facebook. (Subscribe/join below.) From a brand strategy point of view, the most valuable aspect of these new media is the interaction between the brand and the customer. Successful brands maintain a dialogue with their customer and social media make it easier.

Good brands have always listened to their customers, but instead of a top-down system where the brand solely determines what to provide, the customer is now helping shape the products and services.

Nike has involved the consumer in a phenomenally successful integration of running gear and technology in their Nike+ communities, where thousands of runners track and post their running statistics using their smart phones and connected Nike products.

Tucker Viemeister says the field of brand strategy needs to change, because the customer is changing. “Branding is no longer about internal focus for consistent product broadcasting—now brands are a team effort. Future brands will be more like ‘cloud computing’,… or ‘open source’, using a concurrent input of different agendas, approaches and priorities—with little centralized decision making. Brands of the future will be both more personalized and more communal. New brands will be virtual clouds of symbols, products and places, with customers using digital technology to build open source experiences.”

Innovation has been recognized as survival strategy in today’s business climate. In the newest issue of Business Week magazine, an excerpt from a book by the CEO of the design firm IDEO, points out that the need to innovate is nothing new—but how to accomplish it, is new—design thinking. When I started my design business nearly 30 years ago we didn’t talk about design thinking. (In fact, we didn’t talk about much of anything outside of the arcane methods that were required to get something created and printed at the time.) Since then, the influence of design in the business world has grown dramatically.

The methodologies of the designer: brainstorming, mock-ups, user observations, storytelling and scenario building are all useful in building innovation. Tim Brown of IDEO says it is time for this type of thinking—design thinking—to migrate outward and upward into the highest levels of corporate leadership. Business leaders seeking innovation need to adopt the methods of the designer, just as designers are broadening their scope from just creating “things”, to the shaping of services, experiences and organizations.

Designers typically approach problem-solving somewhat differently. They’re more intuitive and emotional, and less logical and analytical. Instead of going A > B > C > D, designers may start at Q > D > K and end up at P. The logical thinker hires market researchers to describe how the world is; design thinking describes how the world could be.

David Butler, Coca-Cola’s vice president of global design, applies design thinking way beyond the design of Coke’s brand. “I love big, giant, enormous systems, no matter what they are,” he says. “In the past, design had been focused on straight forward problems: Come up with a drinking vessel, say. But now it was being asked so solve multipronged problems: How do we get clean drinking water? We’re moving from linear problems to wicked problems.”

Brown concludes by saying, “The design thinkers I have described here are not minimalist, esoteric members of an elite priesthood. They are creative innovators who can bridge the chasm between thinking and doing because they are passionately committed.”

What Trout and Reis pioneered 20 or 30 years ago is now a universally accepted (and most would say, the most important) discipline in brand strategy. Brand positioning literally means to “position” your brand in your customer’s mind. The spot you want to find is the strongest position you can claim relative to your competitors. Finding that position means you must, of course, understand who your customer is—your target market—and how they behave.

In business-to-business marketing, it can be difficult for a large, complex, multi-product, multi-service company to find a common denominator. It’s easy to find companies that failed the effort. Just read their position on the home page of their Web site. Is it more than empty phrases? Is it just a lot of “hot air”? Even more enlightening may be to read the position of one of your competitors. Does it sound a lot like your own?

In Marty Neumeier’s book, Zag, he asks “What makes you the only…”. He says complete this sentence: Our brand is the only _____________ that ____________. In the first blank, put the name of your category (sign company, reading glass distributor, medical clinic). In the second blank, describe what makes you different (that has multiple offices in the West, that combines fashion with function, that is locally owned). If you can’t keep it brief and use the word “only”, then you don’t have a “zag”, or a defendable position.

Once you’ve figured out your position, you don’t change it. It’s not like an advertising campaign or even a tagline that might change every few years. In the words of Philip Kotler, in B2B Brand Management, “A brand can only have one true position. An effectively positioned brand communicates its core values to all stakeholders, internally and externally. Positioning a brand is not a tactical activity but rather a strategic process aimed at creating a sustainable competitive advantage.”

I was reading tweets in modern8′s new twitter account, when a link caught my attention regarding the city of Melbourne’s adoption of a new brand identity. The article indicated that the Melbourne brand suffered compared to Sydney’s, the better-recognized Australian city. The effort to raise public perception of Melbourne was reflected in a new logo for the city.

Of course, the whole of idea of cities branding themselves would have seemed preposterous 10 or 15 years ago. Not that cities haven’t always had a brand–because brands exist whether you manage them or not–but now we’ve got cities applying the principles of brand strategy, once reserved for commercial products and services, to the very neighborhood in which you live.

It may seem odd at first, yet cities are competitive just like that brand of cereal you had for breakfast. Cities compete for residents, tourist dollars and corporate location decisions. It only makes sense to manage municipal perception so you can affect the behavior of your target audience.

Salt Lake City’s new mayor, Ralph Becker, dumped the logo his predecessor, Rocky Anderson, had used on everything from business cards to meter maid vehicles. Becker returned to a previous seal-like identity featuring an image of the historic City and County building–in my mind, a vast improvement over the amateurish skyline logo used by Rocky.

I suspect neither Rocky’s or Becker’s identity was implemented with any strategy behind it–that is, asking what kind of message the city wants to send with its identity. Clearly Melbourne was striving for progressive modernity in its mark, rather than traditional, homespun values. For Salt Lake, it would be an interesting exercise to do the research and strategy and reflect it in a new city identity. It might be a challenge though, because the city is often divided along cultural and religious lines.

Other local municipalities have sought to improve their brand. South Salt Lake has recently engaged a firm to help the image of their city and distinguish it from their neighbor to the north. The shared name in fact, led to discussion on whether South Salt Lake should consider a name change. I’ve always liked the look of Murray City’s logo, created a few years ago, though it references smoke stacks that are now gone and I can’t help but wonder about the appropriateness of the reference.

While we have yet to be asked to brand a city, we’re confident we can.

The thought of public speaking makes them weak in the knees. They prefer to stay in the background to avoid having to risk embarrassment. They don’t like going out of their comfort zone. Sound like anyone you know? Or perhaps a brand you know?

Brands, like people, can suffer from social anxiety disorder. Unfortunately, by their very nature, brands are supposed to be in the spotlight, speaking to the public everyday. Every chance a brand gets to show its personality is vitally important, yet many brands waste the opportunity by hiding who they are behind boring facts.

In contrast, the very best brands let their unique personalities shine through. They get out in front of the crowd unashamed and unafraid of how others will judge them. They understand that all of their weaknesses will be on display, but they also have unwavering confidence that their strengths will completely overshadow their deficiencies. Most importantly, they are prepared with a brand story to tell; one that is much more substantial than their most current advertising campaign.

A story is not only the best way of earning an audience’s attention, but its heart as well. It breaks down barriers, allowing people to understand you and forgive your weaknesses because they can see how your story relates to them. More than this, an established story is memorable and should encapsulate what the brand ideals are, and should be the blueprint for how the brand is marketed.

The real secret is choosing the right story for your brand. Just like any person, a brand can have any number of stories that defines it. These stories can range from seemingly insignificant, to monumental. Last year we were engaged by the School Improvement Network for strategic and creative services. During the 5d Process we realized that they had the perfect story to tell, and suggested they place it front and center on the new Web site we created. Their simple story of how two teachers started what would become a very successful company makes a powerful connection with their target audience, the education community.

The reason this story is important is because it’s sticky. Those who read it will come away with an impression of the company based on that story, and will bring that perspective to all other communications with that brand.

Chip and Dan Heath, authors and columnists for Fast Company magazine, expounded on what makes an idea (or story) sticky, and it’s a lesson that all brands can benefit from: Like School Improvement Network’s story, it is simple (current training wasn’t effective), unexpected (the need was filled by two public school teachers), concrete (they fixed it by taking matters into their own hands), credible (supported by research-based best practice), and emotional (the results are better teachers, and a better education for children). Not all stories have all these elements, but the more they have, the more effective they are.

Admittedly, finding that “sticky story” to stand out and connect with your audience amid so much clutter, may be daunting. For every good story out there, there are dozens of completely forgettable ones. All the more reason to put the extra effort into finding and telling a good story. If good brand story is worth having, it is worth working for.