What makes a brand? Is it a company’s products? The way it communicates? Does it exist in really great design or a positive user experience? A brand, according to Todd Waterbury, chief creative officer at Target, is none of these things. Because it is all of them.
Waterbury says that a brand exists in the space between its belief, or what it says, and its behaviour, or what it does. “People talk about brand all the time. Some people use it as a noun, some as a verb, some people use it to describe the jurisdiction that people have in a company,” he explains.
“But for me it’s really about one definition: a brand is the connection that exists between a company’s belief and its behaviour. It shows up in the experience of the consumer. The brand is the cumulative experience you have over time. That says that the brand is incredibly powerful, but also that it’s incredibly fragile. And it’s a constant state of being built and being taken down. So it’s an important thing to be thinking about and measuring.”
Waterbury, in Toronto recently to deliver a talk called Belief to Behaviour, shared a number of stories — based on favoured quotes he’d encountered in his career — as a way of articulating how brands can think more creatively and more effectively demonstrate their beliefs through their actions. Here are three of those stories.
On how to truly think creatively, or… “Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing that one sees”
Experience is necessary to advance in a career. But with experience comes pre-existing bias. Waterbury talked about how true innovation and creativity often comes from completely rethinking a situation. In doing so he evoked the title of a favoured book on artist Robert Irwin, Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees. This sentiment, he said, is essential to creativity.
To illustrate, Waterbury pointed to make-up designer Grace Choi, a young woman being lauded for disrupting the beauty industry. Her startup, Mink, employs 3D printing technology that allows consumers to print their makeup to whatever colour specifications they like from their home computer, using Mink’s colourless powers and creams as a base.
“What Grace Choi did is look at something in a way that didn’t bring her bias or assumptions. She actually saw something from a perspective that unlocked a new form of potential, a new way to create it. That discipline is what undermines the best creative thinking in my mind.”
On the importance of inevitability and unexpectedness, or… “De-familiarize the ordinary”
Often the most ordinary objects — or aspects of a business — are taken for granted. They’re merely the basis on which greater ideas are built. Waterbury made a point of challenging that notion when he quoted American modernist Paul Rand.
“I remember reading the book that Paul Rand wrote, A Designer’s Art, when I was in school. And the one quote that stuck with me is ‘de-familiarize the ordinary’, said Waterbury. “The process of being able to look at an object and understand a behaviour, a ritual, and be able to step back and see it for the first time, and what that allows, is really the beginning of honoring creativity.”
He brought up an inspiring example to demonstrate the point. It was a door handle designed specifically for sight-challenged people. The brilliant design feature: Braille instructions were placed on the back side of the lever handle, so that when someone grabbed the device the relevant information was literally at their fingertips.
“Think about the question that might have generated this. It might have been, ‘How do you design a signage system for sight-challenged individuals?’ As people we tend to go immediately to what we know. We bring our bias, our history, and our assumption, which is, where do you put the signage plaque? But when you actually think about it from the perspective of the users, you really start to think about what that experience needs to be. You get to a place that’s very much about connection and empathy and you can get to a solution that has inevitability and at the same time is unexpected.”
On creating presence and persistence, or … “One sees great things from the valley, only small things from the peak”
The task of creatively demonstrating belief through behaviour is the single biggest challenge for brands. No matter how well a brand articulates what it believes, if its intended target doesn’t believe its behaviour then the battle is lost.
A perfect example of this came from Waterbury’s pre-Target career, when he was creative director at Wieden+Kennedy. The agency was working with ESPN and had created some famously hilarious work for the sports network. Then, ESPN acquired the rights to NASCAR. The network, said Waterbury, faced the challenge that it would undermine the culture; the passionate fans worried that ESPN didn’t “get” NASCAR. Waterbury says the goal was to create something that had presence and persistence.
“It really was a question about how to we make a statement that ESPN understood NASCAR. We thought about earning attention through the idea of presence with purpose. NASCAR is very much about the social event. How do we show up in that environment in a meaningful way?”
The solution was to design a cup – but not just any old cup. This one focused on what was really important to fans: being able to see every second of the action while still being able to guzzle their favourite drink. The Cup, as it was dubbed, was designed not as a circle but with cutouts for fans’ eyes.
“What The Cup said was ‘we get you’ but it also honoured the truth of ESPN, which is they take sports seriously, but they don’t take themselves seriously. What I love about this solution is that it had presence and persistence. You walked away with that cup and every time you put it in the dishwasher, you’re reminded of that moment. That’s not something that regular advertising can often do. It doesn’t have that presence,” said Waterbury.
“I love that sometimes the simplest solutions come from getting down off the mountain top and getting up close to the user and understanding what it feels like, what could it be.”
