Qumu’s identity was developed years ago, before the company was a leader in their space. The identity was overly complex, integrating both a “speech bubble” and a video “play” button. The colors, maroon and gray, were conservative and retro looking. Perhaps most importantly, the font did not have a strong, clear “Q”, a problem which exacerbated the fact that the company’s name was odd, making it difficult to read.

Positioning Idea

The company’s positioning was indistinct from their competitor’s: they were all offering technology “solutions” to the problem of supporting video bandwidth across the enterprise. As we studied the company’s products and interviewed their customers, two key insights emerged: 1) Qumu was very focused on the reliable end-to-end delivery of video to every point in the organization, without excuses or interruptions. 2) Qumu was committed to using video to deliver significant business impact for their customers, not just flashy screen and graphics.
We synthesized these two ideas into the tagline “video that delivers.”

Visual Brand

Visually, everyone in the space was using highly technical diagrams, video production symbols, and flashy screens to tell their stories. While they may have gotten the facts straight, the blur of details and technologies failed to capture the “feeling” of video; they just sat there on the page. We set as our goal the creation of a conceptual look and feel for the company which captured the fluidity, the power, the beauty of ideas in motion. We were looking for a symbol, not of the technology (which was rapidly changing) but of the freedom and simplicity gained by communicating with video.

We designed the new company logo to use only the company name, in a clear, simple and strong font, with no extraneous graphic symbols. We then added a dramatic water wave as an identity element on all of the company’s communication. There are actually a variety of different wave styles and orientations used depending on the type of collateral, but each is clearly a member of the same family: simple, dynamic, light teal blue.

Results

The new identity was embraced by both internal audiences and customers. It provides a strong, consistent platform for articulating the benefits of Qumu’s video solutions. Plus, the conceptual nature of the identity has lead the company’s marketing communications in new directions that would not have been possible with a more static identity. For example, 3D animations of the wave have added pizazz to the company’s information signage product and promotional videos, the wave has inspired giving away bottles of branded water at trade show events, and the fluid motion of water has inspired the navigation of the company’s website.

In the quarter after the rollout of their new image, Qumu announced its successful acquisition by a large full-service digital content firm.

Tagging Air Force One

A friend of mine told me he was shooting a video for a client in LA. “How’s it going,” I asked.

“It’s awful,” he replied. “You know how I can tell it’s awful? Because the client loves it!”

The purpose of management is to reduce risk. That’s why managers write plans, prepare budgets, implement procedures and create reporting structures. On the assembly line, anything unexpected that happens is often expensive and probably bad, so companies take great pains to prevent anything unexpected or new from happening. That’s why large organizations are such terrible bores to work at, and why they have to create small “skunkworks” projects to get anything new built.

Marketing, like many human endeavors, operates on a risk/reward curve; nothing ventured, nothing gained. By the time everyone in the company has approved the advertising, you can bet they have snuffed out every glimmer of distinctiveness, every spark of creativity, any hint of risk and all likelihood that someone seeing the ad will be amused, surprised or endeared.

As viewers, we forward links that are shocking, surprising, insane, unexpected, sexy and (less often) genuinely useful (like coupons). We talk about ideas and images that touch us emotionally, but emotional content is risky. It provokes controversy and sometimes outrage or, put another way, audience engagement. The very fact that people are talking about something means that they have differences of opinion. You can’t spark a discussion by saying that the earth is round, but you can create a social media firestorm about a swimsuit made out of an American flag or a live fish dropped into a blender.

By the time you have sucked all of the controversy out of your message, it looks like “We care” or “Go with the original.” Nobody will ever remember those messages. Great advertising looks like this:

• Volkswagen, “Think small” and “Lemon.” These were messages that everyone “knew” American car buyers wouldn’t listen to.
• Avis, “We try harder.” This was the first time in American advertising that anyone had ever admitted they were not number one at something.
• Maidenform, “I dreamed I went shopping in my Maidenform bra.” Imagine this in 1950!
• Benson & Hedges 100s, “The disadvantages…” This cigarette ad totally made fun of the product being too long.
• Sunsweet Prunes, “Today the pits, tomorrow the wrinkles, Sunsweet marches on.” How do you get people to watch a prune ad without sniggering? You don’t. You take advantage of it.

The next time you are reviewing an ad concept for your company (or presenting one to your client), take a look around the room. If everyone likes it, drop it quietly into the trash and move on.

NASA shows how they use the iPad for launch control. Photo by Andreas Schepers.

One of the biggest headaches that corporate IT has to deal with these days is “consumerization.” The consumerization of IT happens in two ways. First of all, consumers are using more and more IT in their personal lives. Consumer user-interfaces and product capabilities are in general more advanced than their enterprise equivalents; they employ better interfaces and more advanced data models. They work on mobile devices and are social media enabled. The technology, capabilities, and ease of use or consumer products are causing dissatisfaction with corporate IT infrastructure. Having used MINT.COM to manage their personal finances, users are no longer satisfied with a primitive text-based interface to the SAP financial modeling package at work.

The second way in which IT becomes consumerized is by consumer devices invading the corporate IT network. Inside the enterprise, the IT department makes the decisions about what types of devices and technologies they will purchase and support. But outside the enterprise, users make these decisions for themselves. And, when they find something that they like and that works for them, they bring it to work. The IT department pushes back using arguments like compatibility, data security, and support, but in the end, the users win because the productivity gains from these devices are too great to ignore. Eventually, IT departments adopt the technologies and the vendors adapt the technologies to their new corporate environments.

This happened with cell phones. Enterprises initially ignored cellular technology, then banned the devices fearing loss of control and reduced user productivity. Users did an end-run by purchasing them personally and expensing them. Eventually enterprises created cell phone policies, then company cell phone purchase plans, and cell phone vendors created corporate plans to meet the purchasing and administrative needs of organizations.

It happened with the Macintosh. IT departments didn’t want to support a foreign operating system and incompatible software (especially after they had been slapped in the face with IBM-bashing commercials). But users brought them in anyway. Apple both won and lost that battle, changing the way the world works (their stated goal), but failing to gain market share as PC vendors coopted the visual interface for their own products. Now Apple has another chance with the iPad.

Similar stories could be told about Skype, Facebook, USB drives, and even WiFi. Note that it isn’t just hardware that’s being pulled into the organization. Consumer applications and services like social media are also being coopted for organization use. Is someone on Facebook actually working? Well, yes and no.

There are a couple of reasons why this story keeps repeating itself. First of all, the rate of innovation in consumer IT far exceeds the rate of innovation in enterprise IT. That’s because the risk/reward ratio favors the consumer space. The IT department is a monopoly inside the organization and an oligopoly outside the organization. Their objectives are to create an environment that is safe, secure and reliable at a low cost. They have to support everything they deploy, so innovation is not a priority. Mint.Com, on the other hand, provides personal financial management to over a million users using a cloud-bases SaaS model with an advanced Ajax interface. This is technology that many enterprises are just now evaluating. The Mint.Com development team spent several months designing and iterating the “accounts” page, a luxury that enterprises cannot often afford. But Mint.Com wasn’t going to get to a million users by providing an interface that users could live with, it had to be smart, different and dramatically better.

All of this innovation drives the capabilities of consumer products to improve so fast that consumer markets can’t even absorb all of them. Eventually, consumer products like digital cameras and inkjet printers which were once considered “toys” become so powerful and sophisticated that they break into the professional/enterprise space suddenly and disruptively (Christensen at Harvard describes this phenomenon in his book The Innovator’s Dilemma). This causes enterprises to scramble to absorb and manage these shockwaves.

There can be, however, a good side to all of this. For one thing, IT organizations need to start thinking about user-supplied IT devices like iPads and smartphones as “off-balance sheet assets.” They do have to support these devices to enable them to coexist in their environments, but they don’t have to buy them. They become a platform through which the enterprise can deliver more and better services to their stakeholders, and the benefits are exciting; mobility, productivity, data sharing and collaboration.

Secondly, IT organizations should be challenging their developers to produce applications that behave and feel like the Web 2.0 services that are being delivered to consumers. They should be using use leading edge technologies, newer data models, and creating better user interfaces and experiences. The results will be happier, more productive users that are using these tools to unleash their productivity rather than just functioning as a cog in a well-oiled machine. Great models exist in the consumer space for how to better present data, interact with information, reduce data entry, and anticipate user needs. All they need to do is spend some time on Google or Mint.Com.

Related Links:

Eight months later, CNN writes about this phenomenon as the bizumer effect. Read their article here.

Situation:

Biz360 invented marketing analytics, which enables the quantitative measurement of corporate communications activities. But as with many innovations, successful selling it required a time-consuming education process. And like all start-ups, time was a luxury Biz360 could not afford.

Strategic Insight:
Selling Biz360′s product required strong positioning, and education at multiple levels inside the prospect’s organization. To meet this need, we developed a multi-tiered direct mail methodology matching low-cost pieces to unqualified lists, medium-cost pieces to qualified lists, and high impact pieces to key gatekeepers and influencers. Combining this approach with a strong, appropriate call to action for each phase of the sales cycle produced remarkable results.

Click for larger view

• Our programs generated 70% of Biz360′s sales leads for a 2.5 year period
• We achieved 175% of goal for our campaigns to the life sciences market
• A postcard campaign to the high tech market generated an 11.33% response rate, versus the typical 1%

“They did a fantastic job of helping us establish the right messaging and communication strategy, and delivering effective, top-notch creative that hits the target. They play a key role in the growth and success of Biz360.”
- Robyn Forman , Director of IMC, Biz360

We helped Cisco make their website more effective by organizing key site areas around industry solutions. In the process we simplified navigation by reducing the density of unrelated links while increasing the density of related ones. We also gave it more impact by eliminating decorative images and ensuring that every picture told a part of the story. Our approach and revised UI conventions were later adopted site-wide.

Their challenge was delivering the complex message of outsourced web hosting to a non-technical audience while staying ahead of the competition that was sure to follow. Their CMO, Steve Umberger, engaged us to tell their story to the media and drive demand from customers.

Today that company is Verio, the world’s largest web hoster, serving more than 400,000 websites in 170 countries.

Not only was their identity weak, but none of the materials matched, leaving them with a disorganized and chaotic image. In order to rise above the noise, all of their materials would need to be coherently reinforcing each other.There were also problems with the messaging. TrueData’s brochure and tradeshow graphics delivered a common theme in this business segment: technology. But the message of “technology leader” was not only over used, it wasn’t particularly credible coming from this upstart.

Brochure Website Tradeshow Graphics

Our first step was to lead TrueData through an identity development process. The final design which emerged played on the technical nature of the company’s services, much of which had to do with extracting data bits from hard drives.

With the identity complete, we began the process of creating messaging and positioning for the firm that would enable it to compete in a rapidly-growing market where they were a much smaller and newer entrant.Our key insight with the messaging was that technology, without the right people behind it, was nothing. This enabled us to create an effective defense to the technology claims of our bigger competitors. Our position became “Technology is Everything. Technology is Nothing.” To reinforce the message, we capitalized on as asset that TrueData had that its competitors didn’t: TrueData’s people. We would make heroes of them. This gave us a sustainable competitive advantage because the people of TrueData were heavily invested in the firm, whereas the people in competitive firms were merely employees. We identified the hobbies of key employees, from scuba diving to bicycling. We took photos of them in their gear with all of their equipment and talked about the fact that all of this equipment was nothing without its operator. We used these photos and stories on the website, in the brochure, and in giant tradeshow banners and booth graphics.

Brochure Website Advertising

The results were sudden and dramatic. Soon after launching the new identity at the LegalTech trade show in Los Angeles, the firm was acquired by services giant FirstAdvantage in a lucrative buyout. Today, TrueData Partners is a part of the Litigation Consulting practice of FirstAdvantage, and the partners of TrueData are scuba diving and skiing.

The recent revolution in telephone pricing and capability is the result of a technical innovation called VoIP that made it possible to place calls over the Internet, bypassing phone companies altogether.

With thousands of VoIP start-ups offering a dizzying array of hardware, software, and hybrid products, start-up i2Telecom knew it had to differentiate. CEO Tony Zalenski, a former Motorola executive, hired us to help. Despite working with budgets one thousandth the size of our largest competitors, we used product innovation and PR strategy to turn i2Telecom into the second most covered VoIP company in the country, behind only Vonage.

Links:

• Inter4m, Designers of the MG-3 VoIP adapter

Our team identified 50 different types of communications documents produced by seven groups within the organization. Each type had a variety of sub-types and each corporate group had a distinctive style. This caused a branding disconnect when a customer used products from more than one group.

Once we had developed a new brand look and feel, the ordinary stationary documents were easy to unify (letterhead, business card, thank you cards, mailing labels). The real challenge came in unifying the look and feel of all of the various divisions “information containers,” the research products that were purchased by customers. What was the minimal set of documents IDC needed to produce? How did customers use them? How should they be organized for consistency while remaining flexible?

Our analysis revealed that customers turned to research out of four motivations:

Observe - What is it? What’s going on?

Predict - Where will it go? What does it mean?

Act - What are my options? What should I do?

Support - How do you know?

To these four functions we added one more, necessary for every document:

Identify - What is contained in this document?

With these functions in mind, we reduced the dozens and dozens of document types produced by the company to only nine (14 including sub-types) which would contain all of the company’s prolific output.

Each of the document types followed a consistent outline, and shared a common graphical look and feel. Standards for color palettes, fonts, photographic imagery and chart types were developed and implemented.

Creating a consistent identity for all of IDC’s content containers strengthened the IDC brand by providing a unified image that could be used as a primary client communication foundation across all groups and offices. This new branding  supported IDC’s diverse capabilities, worked with its organizational structure and supported both existing and future product groups and markets.

So, what’s it all look like when it’s done? Here are a couple examples of the new identity system, together with some sample pages from one of the report types. (We could have picked any one because they all go together.)

In addition to helping IDC look and feel consistent across all of its products, this work produced cost savings by consolidating the number of products offered, reduced customer confusion by making it easy to decide which products to select, and improved the focus of the products because each was now driven towards fulfilling a particular set of customer motivations. Oh, and it’s beautiful.