Month: April 2020

Throwing the Lasso: A Word on Naming

Posted on by landscape

At its heart, naming is about identity. One way to think about this is as a kind of balance. Like an equation, stability occurs when dynamic expressions are in agreement. Otherwise the equation doesn’t work, it doesn’t prove what it’s supposed to prove. This metaphor is more than an illustration. When pursuing a name, a systematic approach helps us align with our partners to work through the science of building an identity. A great name is built on balance.

No one has trouble naming a pet or a plant, and new parents do not have to clear legal trademarks, or find a suitable, searchable domain for their newborn. But a brand is different. A quality brand name signals different attributes to help it succeed. Each company has its own priorities and needs, but these attributes start with the following territories:

  • Category — Does the name indicate what service or product the brand provides?
  • Community — Does the name target who the brand is for, the ideal client or customer?
  • Culture — Does the name accurately represent the attitude and values for the brand?
  • Creativity — Is the name memorable, ownable, and appropriate at scale?


    Before starting to brainstorm, identifying these principles helps set parameters around what to explore. Not only does this save time, but it helps generate strong naming directions. Because a name is the most-used element of any brand, the more dots that connect, the stronger a name can be. Clarifying the story, prioritizing values, and identifying opportunities are requirements for creating a valuable identity.



    The Right Creative Partners

The biggest difference between choosing a name by yourself or seeking the help of an agency is point of view. A creative partner can share a creative point of view, as well as objective reasoning. They can help you think through the problem, as well as the solution. For example, it can be easy to be overly critical, until all the good options are gone and you’re left with a mediocre name that only stands out for being safe. Usually, it’s easier to see the possibility of risk than the potential for success. Too loud of an inner critic and every name will have something wrong with it. Daring names risk alienation; safe names risk oblivion. And every name risks the bitter landscape of trademark threats. When Apple first explored the iPad, many people were concerned that it sounded like a hygiene product. According to The Atlantic, Apple’s agency didn’t swerve, and once people saw the product their concerns disappeared.

As in any healthy relationship, having the right partner makes or breaks the outcome. Working with the right creative partner means encouraging a diverse scope of solutions, with a safe space to work through concerns, public, and personal. The more a name can stand out (while staying on brand), the more upside it stands to have. After all, fortune favors the bold became a cliché for a reason.

Indistinguishable from Magic

Posted on by landscape


We call it design when we set out to improve an experience. We can also call this strategy. However, the quality of the strategy plays a huge role in determining how lasting and how influential a newly designed experience will be.

Frank, our Director of Strategy, shares his thoughts on brand strategy, walks through our approach, and talks about the fundamental ingredient to great design.




→ To set the scene, what are some examples of brands you look up to for their strategy?

There is a quote from the great SciFi writer, Arthur C. Clarke, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” I like to think that any sufficiently excellent brand strategy is invisible, yet intuitable. Brand strategy acts as a foundation for great branding, design, and experiences. I’m really interested in brands that lean into challenge during times of uncertainty, not just reacting with clever campaigns. 

Here are some of my favorite organizations doing extraordinary things, based on sharp business strategy and clear brand communications: 




→ How would you describe Landscape’s approach to strategy?

At Landscape, we craft lasting narratives and experiences for clients who pursue positive change. 

In this context, brand strategy serves to identify a company’s evolution opportunities and then charts the best path for the brand to manifest those opportunities via narratives and experiences. 

The emphasis for us is on “lasting,” which means that strategy provides both the foundation for and guidance toward the ideal future position for our clients’ brands. And the emphasis on “change” means that our strategy ensures that every element of our work acts as a lever to our clients’ business goals. Strategic thinking is about creating the framework for a long-term vision and charting the journey to get there. While great strategy may address a current trend, it should be able to transcend them on an ongoing basis. Perhaps even more ideally, it should generate new momentum within any given market, helping to drive growth.




→ As a strategist, what challenges do you face the most?

Articulating paradigm-shifting ideas in the right way. Many of our clients are working on scaling emergent technologies and services that don’t yet exist in their form today, whether it’s biology lab automation, AI-powered robotics, VR-Creativity, or social impact measurement. 

At the heart of this challenge is the need to craft a simple, compelling story that helps make new experiences both understandable and desirable, enough so, to engage people and drive action. Moreover, the story needs to resonate widely, from the initial commercial customers to investment and industry partners, to the talent needed to grow the company, all the way to the broader public, which needs to be supportive, if not enthusiastic, for the new idea to take hold.

Creating these narratives is one of the most interesting challenges we get to take on, and seeing the stories come to life is very fulfilling.




→ What part does strategy play in the creative design phase?

At Landscape, strategy results from a rigorous partnership between our strategists, designers, writers, and our client partners. We don’t see strategy as a manual for “paint-by-numbers” for designers. Rather than siloed disciplines, we believe good creative strategy is the result of cross-discipline collaboration.

Everyone on the team starts with the same shared intention of charting the ideal path forward, and our designers are just as involved in the discovery phase and holistic formation of strategy as I am. We immerse ourselves in the clients’ business, culture, their customers’ mindsets, and the trends shaping the category ecosystem. This phase yields the positioning opportunities and guiding principles for the brand. We then prototype options for possible brand futures, composed of the relevant visual, verbal, and experiential touchpoints. 




→ How does brand strategy connect the brand promise, positioning, and design principles?

We work with our clients to create clarity around where they want their business to go and which values should guide them there. Naturally, language plays a big role in starting and stimulating the process. Together, we explore positioning opportunities and guiding principles based on the true advantages of the brand’s offering. With that as a working setup, we can explore the key elements for the brand platform: 

  • Why — do we exist as an organization? 

  • How — do we create ongoing value? 

  • What — do we offer our customers that’s unique? 

“Brand strategy” in this context is not the ultimate deliverable, but the successful process of identifying, articulating, and aligning around key opportunities and charting the path to realize them. How do we know what we think until we write it down? In this process, good writing is a critical tool for exploring new ways of thinking about one’s brand and how those ideas shape perceptions in the world. 




→ Can you share any tricks you use to generate or visualize your thinking?

I spent my first ten years as a strategist in a global brand consultancy collecting and creating new brand frameworks and models: onions, pyramids, matrices, nine-ups, and even 3D frameworks from Japan. Eventually, I threw them away. I started simplifying and using more of my experience to start guiding strategy and design work toward what’s needed, when it’s needed. No single framework is suitable for any single situation, which means we often create new ways of framing good thinking together with our clients.

That being said, one of my favorite and most simple tools are Venn diagrams. They’re great for nudging our thinking to be more holistic and inclusive, help us identify those elements that, when convened, create new opportunities for ideas, stories, experiences — or sometimes even a new category. What business models are you converging, what cultural trends can you thread together, what technologies are you integrating in never-before-done ways? But there are many other useful tools and frameworks that we can use or create based on what’s needed.




→ What type of branding does Landscape specialize in? 

We don’t specialize in any particular type of brand or industry. From fashion, art, and cultural organizations to new technologies, our client set reflects a curiosity in shaping change, across the spectrum. I think many of our clients seek us out for that capability.

The exposure to visionary people with emergent ideas across all categories allows us to think about the world and its many possible futures more broadly. It helps us to connect the dots, share alternative perspectives from unexpected angles, and find storytelling opportunities that stand out and stand the test of time. It’s very rewarding to help our clients create, shape, and articulate these new ideas at critical moments in their evolution, inception, or scaling — something that we have gotten good and fast at.

Clients don’t come to Landscape for a style; they come for the thinking. They trust that based on the diversity of the work we have done, we can execute bespoke solutions through the lens of a specific business strategy.




→ What’s your advice for brands that are looking to find the right design partner?

  • Diversity is the key ingredient to the best and most robust ideas. If you want to stand out, don’t hire a brand partner for the same technical expertise in your business (that’s your job). Hire them for their creative capability. Find the most diverse, talented, curious, empathetic, and holistically-thinking people you can.

  • Collaborative energy. Set your team, partner, and process up so that shared optimism, clarity, and urgency can guide you to push beyond the expected together. 

  • Defining success. The outcome is not just an evolved brand with a couple of hard-working artifacts but also the learning journey that you and your design partner will have completed together.



Interested in learning more?
Say Hello





🌎

A creative strategist known for channeling optimism and clarity for over 19 years, Frank H Vial has worked with many of the world’s best-known brands including Chevron, Electronic Arts, Hyundai, Panasonic, PepsiCo, and Taj Hotels. He has helped to shape and position startups and challenger brands in Europe, Asia-Pacific, and the U.S.

Frank joined Landscape after spending several years consulting with San Francisco’s most innovative design firms and startups, shaping strategy for clients in wearables, gaming, analytics, clean energy, robotics, nutrition, and hyperspeed mobility.

Previously, Frank was Strategy Director at Landor, a leading global brand consultancy.

An endurance runner and proud dad, Frank is interested in good conversations and articulating creative strategies to help shape a better world.

Design Week + Tokyo 2020

Posted on by landscape

“Crisis can breed opportunity”: should Tokyo 2020 rebrand?
Original article by Henry Wong April 7, 2020


As COVID-19 changes the events landscape, with delays to events as big as the Olympics, designers discuss how brands like Tokyo 2020 can adapt – and possibly even thrive.

Design Week interviewed Landscape Founder & Creative Director Adam Weiss alongside other global branding experts. They were asked to consider two questions.



First: Though the ceremony has been postponed until 2021, the International Olympic Committee announced that the Games would keep its name as Olympic and Paralympic Games Tokyo 2020. Is keeping the branding the same the right decision?

› If you’re defining the “branding” as the emblems for the games, then I think enough is changing fast enough in the world as is. The two emblems, which speak to diversity, stability, equality and human connection, honestly couldn’t be more relevant. For many, stability and predictably are hard to find right now.

Moreover, I appreciate that the symbols are complex — this complexity feels more honest to the era that we live in. The world’s current arena is science, who’s complexity (channeling Neil Degrasse Tyson) challenges the perimeter of our understanding on an ongoing basis. Additionally, the interconnected structure of both emblems alludes to the global team-effort to keep our communities safe. 

The world has been in need of new — universally positive symbols for a long time. A modern peace sign? A non-corporate, team-oriented swoosh?

Lovely.



Second: As global events like the Olympics are being postponed — and the expensive campaigns invested in them — what are the challenges and opportunities for brands?

› If your product isn’t a necessity you’d better hope your brand is. A scenario to consider: What brands would you actually miss were they to vanish tomorrow. If you couldn’t have their product could it be replaced or duplicated — could the center of gravity shift platforms? I think it’s likely. But if they’re gone — whose story do you miss? 

Top of mind:
Whole Earth 
Leica 
Patagonia 
Teenage Engineering
Apple
The New York Times
Samovar
Nike
LOT

A few big expected ones, but these brands stick to their values and challenge us as people to be optimistic about our potential on the other side of challenge. They are delivering the goods and going big on their cultural vision. That is, they are invested deeply in our cultural health. Apple led me to Carl Sagan, and Carl to my current philosophy regarding the importance of design. As COVID-19 solidified its presence in the U.S. Nike asked the world to stay inside on their landing page, a billboard worth god-knows how much, while Adidas tried to sell me Yeezys. Levis, maybe time to digitize your workshops… until you can open them and bring a now-shuttered favorite restaurant back to cater the spaces… Necessity is the mother of invention.

People are paying attention now. They will probably have to start making more choices and they will cut the fat. 

There are products I use and appreciate, but their brands, vacant. I spend hours a week on Instagram but what’s their story? What does Twitter stand for? Both should take a page from The New York Times. Sonos is all over my home, but has no space in my heart (as I struggle through the UI while my two-year old clamors for Baby Shark). 

Function + vision will rule. How are you helping your customers navigate the most stressful moments of their lives? How do you make life better? I’ll buy what I need — I’ll align with who makes me care.


Read the whole article on Design Week


Vicarious Featured in Wired

Posted on by landscape

At the offices of startup Vicarious in Union City, where the San Francisco Bay Area’s sprawl abuts rolling hills, 10 robot arms tirelessly place travel-sized beauty products into bins on a conveyor belt. Each gray arm ends in a suction-cup-tipped finger that makes a high-pitched whine as it plucks items such as antiperspirant or hand lotion from crowded boxes.

Vicarious buys standard industrial robots, enhances them with its software, and contracts them out the way a temp agency does workers—charging per task completed or at an hourly rate. In Baltimore, Vicarious robots assemble sampler packs for makeup company Sephora, work previously done exclusively by humans. Vicarious CEO and cofounder D. Scott Phoenix says the deal demonstrates his business model: Create artificial intelligence software that makes industrial robots smart enough to perform jobs previously done only by people.

Vicarious hasn’t previously discussed its customers or robots publicly but has earned itself an air of mystery among AI and robot experts since its founding in 2010. The startup has raised more than $130 million, according to data service PitchBook. Its investors include some of Silicon Valley’s most famous names and deepest pockets—venture firm Founders Fund, cofounded by early Facebook investor Peter Thiel, and billionaire entrepreneurs Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos.

The startup is pursuing its own path in artificial intelligence, looking beyond the technology driving high-profile projects such as content moderation at Facebook and automated driving at Tesla. Phoenix says only a fresh approach to AI can resolve what he calls a paradox of modern society. Robot arms and grippers have been around for a long time, and components such as motors, sensors, and microcontrollers have never been so cheap or capable. But even inside factories and warehouses, robots are restricted to certain tightly controlled tasks because their software must be specifically programmed for every situation and can’t adapt to unexpected variability.

“We’re paying people trillions of dollars a year to do stuff that robots have been physically capable of doing for the last 30 or 40 years,” Phoenix says. Anyone who can make industrial robots more adept—and Vicarious is not the only one trying—could transform the economy by shifting the balance of labor between people and machines.

Deep Learning and Its Limits

When you hear a CEO or politician talk of the growing power of artificial intelligence, they are generally referring, even if they don’t know it, to a technique called deep learning. Since 2012, when researchers showed it could make computers much better at interpreting images and text, the technique has rewired the technology industry. Deep learning powers face-swapping photo filters and self-driving cars; it is why Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai opined at Davos this year that AI is “more profound than fire or electricity.”


Full Article on Wired

Learn about the collaboration with Landscape