The numbers have been tallied. The spreadsheets all rolled up and put away for another year. And this year’s Best Global Brand is (insert dramatic pause and drum roll here) Coca Cola! The numbers tell us that out of all the brands that meet Interbrand’s global criteria, Coke again comes out on top.

Everyone knows two things about designers. One, we can’t spell. Two, complex math confounds the majority of us. As chief creative officer, no one trusts me with a calculator, so the massive amount of analysis behind the annual BGB report falls to others. But as I look at the league table, it’s easy to see that design makes a considerable contribution to the brands that have risen to the top this year. To prove my point, look no further than number one on our list.

Coke has an incredible assortment of visual assets. The shape of the bottle is recognized worldwide, and Coke leverages that shape to a spectacular degree. At my local grocery, a quick count produced no fewer than six physical executions of the bottle shape, in both glass and plastic, as well as two visual executions where the bottle shape was graphically depicted on the cans. There is the signature type, recognized globally whether it’s in English or other languages and alphabets. There is the classic Coke swoosh, and even, arguably, the color. All of these assets and I haven’t left the product yet! We need to count the polar bears, the Classic Santas and a newer ‘tattoo’ graphic the brand has used recently. When you have such a rich portfolio of visual brand assets to use as tools to communicate what you’re about, getting to number one and staying there seems a whole lot easier.

Ahhh, it’s football season again. A bit of a chill in the air, the leaves around Southwestern Ohio on the verge of changing. Good football weather. While not everyone is a fan, football is a great analogy when looking at your brand through the lens of “team.”

Scoring against your competition isn’t always as easy as it might seem to be. Sure the Tom Bradys of the world make it seem effortless, but a lot of planning, work and details go into making a game plan come to life. Your brand is no different.

Let’s take a single play. The coach evaluates the scenario and picks from a host of plays designed to move the ball down the field, be it a short gain or a big play. The play gets sent in by the players most capable of executing it for the best results. The quarterback huddles up and gives everyone the play to ensure the players all know the plan. They line up, and everyone does their job. They block who they are supposed to block, the receivers run the correct routes, the quarterback gets the protection he needs and makes a good throw. The receiver makes a spectacular catch and outruns the defense to score a quick six points. When everyone works as a team and does what they are supposed to do against a plan, it looks easy. I think some brands get this and unfortunately, some brands don’t.

This is great video from Au Bon Pain describing where the brand is headed. We partnered with the bakery café to create an engaging and differentiating “marketplace” concept with a focus on giving the store more personality, distinction and improving the ease of shopping. Au Bon pain’s CEO, Sue Morelli describes the company’s focus on their three brand pillars and the importance of the environment and service to the brand experience.

The new concept gives the brand credit for the things that it does really well. We’ve created destinations for core competencies and we’ve made it easier for customers to navigate the experience, inviting them to buy more.

The new design is bright, welcoming and energized with color and comfort.Communication zones clarify the offer and enable customers to build their order with speed and convenience. The old pencil-and-paper sandwich ordering method is replaced with wireless devices. This new efficient system allows customers to maximize their dwell time in the space and explore the complete Au Bon Pain offering. New, deeper trays with handles enable customers to build their orders easily.

Today I met a new client client for the first time, and it’s an encounter that I doubt I’ll soon forget. I looked across the table and saw unbridled courage looking right back. Not long into our meeting, the CEO stood proudly on his soapbox and proclaimed that “Wowing the customer is a moving target,” and then proceeded to give us complete freedom to explore what his brand could be, not what it should be. No implementation parameters. No site conditions. No “handcuffs” as he put it. What a terrific feeling, what a terrific opportunity for our company, but more importantly, what a terrific opportunity for his brand.

When I thought about it, it took great courage to hand over the very successful brand he has built by years of hard work and determination. He explained that it didn’t matter if he liked it at all, the only thing that mattered was that the customers whose hearts he had won over in the past would be reinvigorated and that he would attract new customers by giving them something worthy of their attention. The people, the bullet-proof operations, the care that had been baked into the brand would take it from there. Unbridled courage, coupled with the faith of doing things right and for the right reasons. Wow.

An ad that seems to be making ripples around the water cooler recently is the new Nissan Leaf ad that ends with the Leaf owner hugging a polar bear. The first time I saw it, I thought, “Ugh, cliché.”

But after seeing it a few more times it really has struck me, and I think others too, as a powerful and effective advertisement. What makes it so powerful?

I don’t think it’s the obvious, cliché, preachy, environmentalist message. Sure, that aspect has an impact, and as an “idea on a napkin” it’s cute. But if the ad were just that, a polar bear hugging a Leaf owner, I think it would be unremarkable.

Rather, I think what makes this ad such a powerful one is the subtle storytelling and extra moments of silence and set-up at the beginning of the piece. The carefully crafted and lonely vignettes of the polar bear exploring the unfamiliar urban landscape is a situation all too familiar to so many of us today. We have all found ourselves at one time or another aimlessly wondering about in an unfamiliar place, feeling like a tiny spec of dust floating on the breeze blowing through time. This anthropomorphic projection of loneliness and doubt we give to the polar bear provides a powerful empathetic connection and relationship to the bear as a character.

It’s this subtle novella like arc of the story that makes this otherwise cliché idea for an ad, a true winner.

As a way to usher in a new year and not engage in the typical year-in-review post, I think it’s a prudent time to look at one major trend of the past year that has the legs to continue on into the next year and hopefully on into the infinite trajectory of time.

No, this trend is not plaid shirts, though I am enjoying the current Elmer Fudd flannel shirt revival because my plaid shirts from the Seattle grunge days can finally be put back into rotation. No, the trend I see that will hopefully last for a long, long time is the blossoming micro-artisan trend, the craftsman or woman in the home shop or garage making things and selling them.

I am amazed and indeed thrilled that artisans are putting their hands to work making useful everyday items that are typically mass produced and were thought to be all but gone, having long ago been out-sourced to foreign factories. The brands being founded—every minute, every day, across the globe—are the brands that could one day be the next Nike, Coca-cola or Gibson Guitars. True, many of them will fail and their founders will get sick of sitting at a sewing machine or hand-planing wood all day. But most of these people do it for love, for the passion of creation. When people have the passion and the focus to create beautiful, useful works of art, we all benefit. And brands are born.

As we know, these trends trickle in from the fringes of society and are only cultivated and nurtured by advocates and ambassadors willing to sacrifice for something they truly believe in. Two of these for me are fly-fishing and acoustic instruments. Both have have a long, steady history of hand craftsmanship and their niche markets have supported thriving cottage industries of bamboo rod makers and luthiers for a long time.

But right now we are seeing this cottage approach extend from specialty items like custom rods and mandolins into the world of mass marketed everyday items, like hand bags, jewelry, scarves, sweaters, denim, wallets, etc. Take a look at

Do you remember your first iPod? I bet you do. I bet you remember the feel of the box in your hand. How it looked. I bet you remember cracking it open Like a book! I bet the minimalist feel, crisp white look, and flawless shiny iPod was an experience burnt into your brain. That is power of delivering big in the opening ceremony. In fact if you had trouble connecting it to your computer I bet you never think about that. You only remember that first moment of joy.

The opening ceremony is one of the most under-utilized opportunities to delight your customer. Whether you’re talking about packaging, retail, or online, brands that make a memorable impact in the up-front can disproportionately win emotional attachment from their customers.

Target is a great example of how simple things executed well can create an exciting “opening ceremony” experience. Who doesn’t look forward to walking into Target to see what the new promotional theme is? It’s never just a sign hanging. It’s a fleet of visual eye-candy that tells a story and creates a sense of energy and change.

The other day I felt like the Mayor of Imitation-ville. I sat there at lunch reading the Daily Beast on my Android phone, while eating a foil wrapped burrito from Qdoba.

None of these were an original idea. Tina Brown didn’t invent the 24-hour social media news blog fronted by a middle-aged woman with an accent, Ariana Huffington owns that claim to fame. The iPhone, not Android, was the original app-driven super-powered touch-screen do-everything smartphone. Even though Chipotle didn’t “invent” the foil wrapped burrito they were the first to roll out the model on a massive scale and hit a nationwide home run with the concept.

When I was growing up if you had a dragon instead of the alligator on your shirt, or the embroidered horse on your shirt didn’t have a polo rider, or you soccer shoes had four stripes instead of three, you were not cool, because you didn’t have the real thing.

On a recent trip to Tel Aviv Israel I ran across something that totally stopped me in my tracks. Just before entering the Duty Free shops area of the airport (after making it successfully through the 12 security checkpoints) at the end of a long hallway was a huge three-dimensional display from Diesel shouting “BE STUPID.”

It’s not often that something–a brand for that matter–tells us to “be stupid” so I stopped and read copy-laden display further, and was INSPIRED!! The idea (as you can see from the image) is that some people let their brains decide for them, and some let their hearts decide.

“Creativity happens when you bump things together, connect the unconnected, see relationships others don’t see. When you have a lot of things going on in your life–different interests, you travel, you try new techniques, you expose yourself to different cultures and disciplines–you’ve got more of these points of intersection.”

I stumbled upon the quote above, not from the writings of the latest business guru, but from, of all things, a book called The Knitting Experience, Book 1, The Knit Stitch, by Sally Melville. By nature of working at an agency, variety is part and parcel of my job. Partnering with different clients who have unique challenges offers me constant opportunity to find points of intersection.

Melville, whose book was one of my first, articulates what lived experience has shown me to be true: more doing equals more thinking, more creating. However, I find that the workday world is not sufficient to foster these meaningful connections. So in addition to knitting, I’ve recently started wheel pottery classes, and as a result, a connection has come to light: the importance of being able to find the balance between rigid process and interpretation.

It started in pottery class. Every Saturday morning, I am reminded of the patience, focus, and humility required to learn something completely new, not to mention the perseverance necessary to keep trying in the absence of rapid progress!

Pottery, in turn, reminds me of when I was learning to drive a standard shift or learning to knit–for both, my learning curve was long. Someone could tell and show me a hundred times, but knowing and doing were hopelessly distinct until one day when it just came together–when my feet and hands just knew what to do.

In the world of shopper sciences and retail design, we enjoy many in-depth discussions about strategic adjacencies, cross promotion opportunities, complimentarity studies and the like. We spend our time pouring through data and observing how shoppers are pairing items together in store. Our aim, of course, is to simplify the shopper’s experience–and drive sales, obviously!

Today, I saw the mother of all product pairings in one fixture. That’s right, Dove chocolates has paired up with Gallo wines to produce the ultimate in-store one-stop shop. I am salivating just looking at the picture! For those of you who have never experienced the glory of a good wine and chocolate pairing, you are in for a treat.

This program is a fantastic example of two brands coming together to compliment the other’s product portfolio. Knowing that today’s busy shopper is looking for solutions in-store, a program of this nature helps her quickly and easily supplement dinner (or after-dinner) plans.

Several years ago, the concept of ‘ideating’ was given much notoriety by a television commercial that showed a group of people lying on the floor doing what appeared to be a whole lot of absolutely nothing.

“We’re ideating,” I remember the young lady in the commercial saying to someone who apparently stumbled upon the session. After that, the use of the word “ideating” was met with muffled snickering and if you used it in a meeting you ran the risk of being subjected to many unsavory references to that commercial. For good reason. It resonated with folks who had actually been in ideation sessions where little was accomplished. A common thing, perhaps, but it doesn’t have to be that way.

As I write this, I am fresh off a very successful “ideation” meeting where new thoughts were flying. People were allowing themselves the freedom to act and think differently than they had in the past. The devil’s advocate–who has a nasty habit of throwing monkey wrenches into so many good ideas before they germinate–was nowhere to be seen.

Ideas, good ideas, were flowing and it made for a session that was terrifically fruitful. It was so energizing!

My kid will tell you that I make a mean chocolate chip pancake, but that’s only due to my ability to follow the directions on the box. I’m not much of a cook, I’m afraid. I think the most difficult part of cooking a meal is the timing. I admire the planning that goes into starting one thing while thawing another all the while mixing something else and like magic, they all come to the table at the same time. I tried baking a layer cake once and didn’t make it out of the frosting phase unscathed. I ended up with a sticky mess and a birthday promise that went unfulfilled. Thankfully, the local bakery bailed me out.

Evolving a brand into a new, more engaging incarnation can be just as magic, or if improperly handled, just as messy, resulting in a brand promise that goes unfulfilled. Expectations are always high when we embark on the path that leads to transforming a brand, from both our friends on the client side as well as ourselves. Designers inherently embrace a challenge, and we see every project as an opportunity to make a brand all and the very best that it can be. A lot of teamwork goes into executing a brand—that is, following the recipe we’ve created for an engaging shopping experience. If the recipe isn’t followed, your outcome can suffer.

So it’s that time of year again. Over the next three months, you can find me at my kid’s high school athletic field, watching his soccer team practice four nights a week. I rather enjoy those days. They’re a combination of fresh air and pride watching my kid trying to be the next great Springboro High goalkeeper.

As I sit here this evening, there is a slight wind that keeps the flag flying, pulling its cable against the flagpole, creating that hollow metal pinging sound. At the far end of the bleachers, a runner is doing some stair work. Her shoes make a sharp pop, I can feel the vibrations down my row as she hustles up and back down again. The evening sun is warm and the smell of freshly cut grass fills the stadium. Based on these sensations, you could blindfold me and I’d still know where I was.

A few retail brands stand out when I think of sensorial experiences. How many times have you smelled a Cinnabon before you saw it? You can smell and usually hear an Abercrombie before you come across one in the local mall. A similar volume of music (not to mention the genre) somehow seems very out of place in an Orvis store. Bath and Body Shop does a nice job of seasonal scents to grab your attention.

As retail designers, we rely a lot on the visual sense to communicate to consumers. But let’s not forget that those brands that engage all of the senses create the most memorable experiences.

On June 18, Pixar Animation Studios released the third installment in their flagship franchise, simply titled “Toy Story 3.” Now that the reviews are in, Pixar just missed the mark in producing the first movie trilogy to receive 100% fresh ratings on the popular movie rating site Rotten Tomatoes. A 100% rating is near impossible for any individual movie, considering the ratings on Rotten Tomatoes are not a single opinion but an aggregate of hundreds of movie critics’ ratings. Doing so for all three movies in a trilogy, or even coming this close, would seem to be an impossible task. And yet, they came within inches.

Also, this eleventh feature-length offering from Pixar has all the indications of another smashing financial success. While any individual moviegoer may have some negative opinions about some of Pixar’s movies, it’s hard to argue against the overall universal acclaim and the respective worldwide box office returns.

So how does Pixar do it? Three simple words: Story is king.

We are all students of brand in one way or another, and I believe we begin that learning early, in our formative years. I remember sitting with an Etch A Sketch for hours and being completely engrossed in little lines drawn in a field of silver dust. A few shakes and I got a completely new canvas. Amazing. Maybe that helped shape my future as a designer and if so, thank you Etch A Sketch. But I suspect there is another brand that, at the very least, helped shape my love and fascination for the automobile. Could there be a cooler brand than Hot Wheels?

I admit to still having my very first Hot Wheels car, a red ‘68 Custom Mustang that is my sole prized possession. It is missing a hood, a bunch of paint, the wheels in the back are curled up like many did back then and it has some original dirt that I happily applied as a kid. It never lost a race. Somewhere, playing with that car flipped a switch in my brain and I’ve loved the automobile ever since.

I could get philosophical about the Hot Wheels brand and how I think it mirrors many aspects of the time in which we live. About how the graphics on the packaging can be seen as an indication of trend and how it becomes a miniature testament to the actual car brands themselves. About how the proprietary designs from the Hot Wheels design studio draw from many aspects of modern culture. Ask any young child what you call the little tiny cars and I’ll bet that you’ll get the correct answer 9 times out of 10. The folks at Mattel have done a great job over the (40!) years of providing a consistent message, keeping true to their calling while managing to leverage their asset across a vast array of other products, from PJ’s to fruit snacks and Saturday morning cartoons. It’s a great historical brand case study and one that continues to be relevant.

Having read the article about the half-mile-long beaver dam in Alberta, Canada, it occurred to me that those beavers exemplify something frequently overlooked in the retail design business, the idea that it’s okay to fail.

You would have to imagine that over the reported 2800 linear feet of dam in what is basically a flat terrain, there’s the likelihood that sometimes it just doesn’t work the way they intended. The colony has to react quickly to failure to ensure the safety of their habitat. If any of you beavers are reading this post and would like to broaden your portfolio, by all means, give us a call. Failure is an option in design as long as it’s smart failure and failing for the right reason. If it helps the idea move forward, then it might just net out the absolute best result.

In today’s market, retail brands developing a new design concept rarely have the luxury of time. Business pressure demands short design-and-build timeframes, followed by testing and refining.

Recently, I had the opportunity to spend some time in our Madrid office collaborating with a cross disciplinary team to brainstorm and develop a cultural food destination concept that would be a reference point for the city of Madrid. So far project and our ideas are having great success with the client and we are really excited about the potential of the concept.

The experience of working abroad, for however long a period of time, in another office is fantastic! If you ever get the chance to work in another office, especially globally, drop what you are doing and go! It’s a great way to get a fresh perspective on what we do by seeing how other offices/cultures work and engage with each other and their clients. Anytime you can get exposed to new people and fresh processes and ideas it’s really energizing! This is true from both parties perspectives as well. The creative tools I brought were greatly appreciated by everyone, since it was a fresh way of working for them. So, the door swings both ways. I conducted a brainstorming/ideation session with the internal team only, and it was great to see everyone get excited by this “new” way of digging through ideas to discover the concept. By the end, our brains hurt, we were a little sweaty and tired, so we went off to the bar to refresh our creative minds.

Stay ahead of rapid expansion
Singapore, Seoul, and Mumbai are cutting edge markets and this means high expectations. Going into a project as a designer in these cities is intimidating. Shoppers live in aesthetic cultures where every imaginable design has been popularized. These cities are changing organically. It almost seems instantaneous. Within 3 months of being away from Singapore three new malls have opened. It’s all about knowing past/ present memes and looking toward ways of either (1) creating a new twist or (2) breaking the boundaries all together.

Stand out
In most cases Western design tends to fit in with its surroundings. Success in Asia is all about being bold. Whether it be a silly chewing gum commercial or neon signage that puts Times Square to shame, there is always something screaming for your attention. When you consider how busy people are in cities like Beijing and Tokyo, getting someone’s attention takes a strong effort. In my opinion, the solution to this is a simple design that allows for a detox from all the noise.

Once. Twice. Yes, starting very soon, Apple will have done it for a third time: changed the way we buy and listen to music. Apple acquired digital music startup Lala in December and shut the site down in May, leading tech pundits to speculate on the coming of “an iTunes in the cloud,” once the streaming music service is incorporated into Apple’s business model.

Although Apple won’t comment on its plans, as a loyal Lala.com user and Apple fan, I’m fully expecting to enjoy a cloud-based iTunes experience in the near future, and I think it’s great that Apple continues to advance their retail strategy and break paradigms of the industry by sourcing great ideas, making them profitable and bringing them to a larger audience.

The “All-you-can-eat Buffet of Food for Thought.” IdeaFestival 2010 is what this statement is referring to. I just received my ‘personal invitation’ to attend the yearly conference held in Louisville, KY, and I couldn’t be more excited about it. I feel more creative just thinking about it.

IdeaFestival is “a world-class event that attracts leading global innovators and thinkers to discuss and celebrate imagination, new perspectives and transformational ideas. It explores the cross-cutting nature of innovation over a range of diverse disciplines.” I should say so! As descriptive as that is, until you experience the event yourself it is very hard to get across just how great it is.