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Marty Neumeier from Neutron LLC.-a San Francisco-based firm specializing in brand collaboration —the “glue” that holds integrated marketing teams together.

Marty began his career as a designer and copywriter in southern California in the early ’70s, then moved to northern California in the early ’80s to focus on brand design for technology clients, including Apple and Netscape.

In 1996 he launched CRITIQUE, the magazine of graphic design thinking. In editing CRITIQUE, Marty joined the conversation about how to bridge the gap between strategy and design, which led to the formation of Neutron and the ideas in his book THE BRAND GAP. Marty has just released “Zag: The Number One Strategy of High-Performance Brands.”

For a quick peek inside ZAG, go to www.zagbook.com.

Listen to the interview: .

Below is a transcript of the interview with Marty Neumeier:

TDc: Good afternoon, Marty. I wanted to start off by asking you, Craig Frazier once said that companies that asked you to be an image maker are companies that have no image. Is that true with branding?

Marty Neumeier: I don’t know what Craig meant but he’s really sure. He probably knows what he meant. I think every company has an image and every company has a brand. That’s one thing that they don’t really realize. Even if they haven’t put an investment into branding or brand building, they have a brand. A brand is the outside world’s view of the company or the product or the service. It’s not what you think, it’s what they think.

TDc: Right.

Marty Neumeier: That’s the big shift that people have to get used to.

TDc: So really, companies like yours, like Neutron, what you really do is cultivate that brand. Would that be a correct statement?

Mart Neumeier: No. I think there’s two parts of Neutron. Our tagline is “Think and Do.” One part – the Think part – is about learning about writing articles, about giving talks, about training people, giving workshops. We’re developing new ideas and learning about new things all the time. Then we apply that to engagements with clients, so that’s the Do part. They get the benefit of all this thinking and learning. We learn from the engagements what we have to learn about next in the thinking part. You could just refer to it as a circle. It’s like a little perpetual motion machine.

How we apply that is, if we have an engagement, we try to get in the middle of the brand building process and help everyone understand what the brand is trying to do, what the strategic content of the company is and then cut everybody loose to do their best work after they know, basically, where they’re going, Get everybody to start to collaborate and work together, which of course doesn’t happen very much now. People are working in silos and we always wonder why it never comes together at the end because they’re not sharing their ideas. We help the sharing process. We don’t actually compete with anybody out there. We don’t compete with other designers or agencies or anybody. We’re a layer apart from that where we just basically glue everybody together.

TDc: Do you see yourself sitting in the middle of that or on the periphery, pushing people in the right direction?

Marty Neumeier: Kind of in the middle but not everywhere. We’ll be put in to do some specific thing, perhaps. We’ll work with the management of the company to set a strategic selection as to be implemented with branding because, often, strategies are difficult to implement in branding because they’re not strong enough or bold enough or differentiated. We want to work with them to make that happen. We might work with them to create a corporate story. What’s the story of this brand that we’re all going to execute? Depending on where the most need is, that’s where we’ll go. We act as a bridge between creative people and leadership between internal and external groups. It can really go anywhere. The main thing is
that our intention is to make the brand holistic and healthy and clear to everybody without getting in the way of anybody’s work. In fact, we want to set the bar higher and help people get over it. That’s really our goal.

TDc: Okay. One of the questions I wrote earlier was can a brand be fake? After what you’ve just said, it sounds like a company trying to influence a personality to portray that is not whole to the company itself.

Marty Neumeier: I think it’s a great question. I know that in the AIGA, there’s a negative feeling about branding because the equate it with advertising or with somehow being fake. That’s really a misunderstanding of what branding’s about because if a brand is how people see you – in other words, it’s not what you say, it’s what they say it is – you can almost just say, “Look, a brand is a company’s reputation or product reputation.” If you try to fake a reputation, what happens?

TDc: You get caught.

Marty Neumeier: You get caught. And so that undermines the brand. Since branding is a long term exercise, that’s not branding. That would be unbranding. That would be the worst thing you could do. Authenticity and doing what you say you’re going to do are really important to branding.

This is actually a new concept for designers and companies. They think that, maybe, a brand is an image or a false front that you can hold up. We actually went through a stage like that in the late 90’s and see what happened there.

The false front just crumbled, right? It just crashed to the ground. There was nothing real behind those companies.

TDc: That kind of leads me to the next question. Today we see almost instant access to social networks on the internet. First there was Friendster, now mySpace. Both are essentially the same but mySpace seems to have a better personality and possibly, therefore, a better defined brand. Can somebody build a brand quickly?

Marty Neumeier: I think you can. That’s really one of the things that Neutron wants to do. We’d like to stick with brands that are ‘broken,’ big and complex brands but also help startups get off the block quicker by doing it right so that they don’t have to do it again later. It’s like the carpenter thing – measure twice, cut once.

How do you do that? My new book, Zag, has the whole process – a 17-step process – in it. It goes pretty deeply into how you do that. It starts with getting together inside the company and deciding who you are. Who are you? What do you do? What does it matter? Finding that out for your own is on the same page. Where does your credibility come from? How are you going to be different? What value are you delivering to the world? Once you can agree on that, you know you have a differentiated offering. Then you craft all of your touch points – all the places where the brand touches the customer – to pay off on that image or that vision. That’s what they’re doing. They just have a very clear idea of who they are and how they’re going to deliver that message.

TDc: They defined themselves very well therefore it shows through.

Marty Neumeier: Clarity is of the essence.

TDc: Clarity is an important word.

Marty Neumeier: It is.

TDc: What are some of the steps for designing difference into your brand?

Marty Neumeier: That’s part of our 17-step process. Once you get Zag, you’ll see it. There are some good tricks to doing that. First of all, don’t follow anyone else. You can’t be a leader by following a leader – that’s one of my mantras. You really have to go find the brand white space, the space that nobody else is seeing. We designers have an advantage. We’re actually trained to see white space. We see positive space and negative space at the same time. This is what makes us, potentially, good branders. What you do is you make a list of who you think your competitors are then you look at each competitor and you look at the key success factors of each of those.

In other words, what are the ways that they’re competing with everybody else? You make a list of six or seven of those and then you see what everybody’s doing. Typically all the companies will be competing on the same success factors, which means they’re investing heavily into those success factors. You imagine which factors are not even being addressed like no one’s even thought of those? You make a list of those. You say, “If we move our resources into those areas and not even compete in the other areas, can we succeed? Can we be different?” That’s the process of doing it. It’s more like a mindset. The designers out there who really are always trying to be different and fresh and new get this immediately.

But they often don’t have the power to influence an entire company to think that way, especially strategically. What we’ve done is take that ability and taken it up to the management level.

TDc: Then that’s where you come in and set up the collaboration through all the stakeholders?

Marty Neumeier: Yeah, but we start with, “What’s the big bang that’s going to make you successful? What’s the difference, the differentiation?”

Often, that’s the sticking point for companies because difference scares them. If it’s different, it must be a failure, right? That’s what they’re thinking. We actually try to get leaders to think about it differently so when they get an idea and they get feedback on it, how do they evaluate those comments that say, “Hmm. This brand, this product, whatever. It’s kind of weird. People aren’t totally on board for this. Let’s play it safe and do something that’s like what everybody else is doing, maybe just a little bit better or with a few more features.” Those are the temptations.

So we showed them a little chart we use called the Good Different chart that, when you get comments that are “Hmm. Boy, this is weird,” or “Hmm.

This is different,” but it’s combined with others, they can see the value of this. That could be a huge success. You just have to power through

those problems. Good example is the Air-On Chair. As that came out, when they were designing it, there was feedback like, “It’s weird,” “It’s ugly,” “It doesn’t look like a chair.” Yeah, but sit on it. “Oh, it’s comfortable. I kind of like this.” Basically, what they did was they equated difference with comfort, eventually, and difference with high style. But it took a while; it took some effort. Those are the areas where you get the huge successes. Herman Miller just lived off the Air-On Chair for five years.

That was where all their profits came from. That’s what I’m hoping to bring to this world – some courage, basically, to do something that’s different and make the world safe for design.

TDc: Or like how Volvo took the safety aspect and really pushed that.

Marty Neumeier: Yeah, that’s right. Who wanted that attribute? Who wanted to own that? Nobody, right? Because it wasn’t sexy. But it turned out that it was valuable to people. I think they’re actually making a mistake now by making their cars look sexy and making them faster because it’s dividing the tribe into different factors. I know what they were thinking. They were thinking, “Oh, we’ve got safety. Let’s add sex appeal and speed to it, and then we’ve got it all.” Well, you can’t be everything to everybody and succeed.

TDc: What dangers do you see being faced by brand portfolios?

Marty Neumeier: I covered this in Zag, actually. Basically there are dangers like contagion – if one brand in the portfolio starts to fail or gets a bad reputation, it can affect the other brand. You can delude the meaning of the brand by extendin it. This skips into the whole question of brand extension. The seduction of extension is for companies to say, “Oh, wow. We’ve got this Product A that’s selling really well. Let’s add Product B with the same name and we can capture a different audience” or a different segment or whatever they’re trying to capture without investing in a second brand. That’s the idea. They just save some money. ‘Leverage’ is the word.

The magic word is leverage.

I think it’s a dangerous word. Whenever I hear that word, I say, “Are you leveraging it or are you borrowing against it?” Are you undermining the value of that brand and eventually suck all the meaning out of it? Looking at that in the cold light of day is really important. I tried to cover that in my book because it’s something we run into all the time. There are people overextending their brands and just saying, “Well, it’s a brand portfolio so it must be the best way to do it.”

There are several other dangers which have escaped my memory right now. You have a lot of questions here so why don’t we just move?

TDc: What is the state of design?

Marty Neumeier: Well, it’s really an interesting time for design. All the designers are feeling it now that we’re really going through a huge change. I almost want to say it’s a revolution because we’re going from an era where companies ran there businesses from the top down – they just dictated the way they were going to work – to an era where customers are actually running companies. Really, without customers, none of us would exist. That requires a whole new way of looking at everything. It just turns the model upside down. What happens to the design is, now, design’s becoming more important because if customers are running the world and the customer experience is how they choose between a lot of options in a cluttered market, design becomes really important.

TDc: Right. Differentiating facility.

Marty Neumeier: Especially as a differentiator, but also just as an experienced delivery mechanism. If you can excite people to win them over, you can win hearts and minds. That’s what you need to do when you’re building a brand tribe, which is the way we think of it, as tribes of people that talk to each other and want to be like each other are determining the shape of a brand. Design is really important to that. Companies now are realizing that, “Wow, we want design. Where do I get that design? That’s fabulous design. In here, now.” Problem is that, at the same time as they were realizing the importance of design and the value of it, they’re wondering designers especially once it comes from the old Bauhaus school of design as aesthetics, design as art. They’re thinking, “Can we trust this important work to designers?”

They’re thinking of design as a way to influence the bottom line and designers out there are thinking, “How do I make it cool? How do I make it look good?” or “How do I have fun?”

Looking at those designers and saying, “I don’t know if we can trust this important work to them.” We’re at a stage where designers need to learn a lot more about business. It’s not enough to say, “We educate our clients about design.” They don’t want to be educated about design, not very much. They want you to understand what they’re doing so that you can help them do it. When you can do that, the value of design increases dramatically. The scope for the increase of the value of design is an exciting part, I think. We’ve gone through a hundred years wherein design was relegated to a fringe activity and now it’s becoming central to the success of a company because of the need to brand things. I think that’s huge.

The other thing that I want to say – I know you’ve got other questions but this has been on my mind lately – is that schools have caught on to design because they can make money by graduating designers. They’re graduating about ten times as many designers as there are positions. What is that doing to us? It’s commoditizing design. Having design skills is no longer enough. Saying you can do it all or being a jack-of-all-trades or saying, “I love variety in my work,” from a business standpoint is a dead end.

Because design, by itself, is not enough. Now, design combined with the knowledge of an industry or design where you’re the most famous person in that area and everyone knows it, that’s great. That’s a specialty. Designs of a certain type of designer, designing a certain type of thing – those are all ways you can attach the skill of design to something else that you can understand, own and defend against competition. That’s where you get the real success. It’s no longer enough to just do everything. I just think those days are over.

TDc: Long may they live.

Marty Neumeier: Yeah. The one thing that we did in the last hundred years is establish the high level of quality and aesthetics for design; we set the bar really high. AIGA and all these great people in New York in the 30’s, 40’s and 50’s, and still today there’s just amazing quality of design. What we need to do is hold on to that as we start to apply that to real world problems – big problems, big complex problems – and not just forget about that connection between the design and the audience. That’s what we do really well as we grab people by the heart. We really have that emotional part down. That’s really going to be our value but we need to connect that with an understanding of strategy.

TDc: Great, this has been wonderful. I’m going to end up. What will you be reading or listening to on your flight down to Austin next week?

Marty Neumeier: I think I’m going to grab a bunch of Harvard Business Reviews but I don’t have the patience to read while I’m doing my work here in the office to sort of bore through those. If you want to know how businesses are thinking and what the latest business theory is, that is the magazine, I think. Harvard Business Review. It’s a hundred dollars a year. They don’t talk much about design yet but I think you’re going to see that happen. What you can do, if you’re thoughtful, is to look at what the CEOs are concerned with and see what design can help that thing out.

TDc: Help facilitate that or push that or illustrate that.

Marty Neumeier: Yeah. Inform it or come up with a new way of doing it that the CEOs wouldn’t have thought up because they don’t think like designers. We really do think in a different way that’s extremely valuable. We need to find out what’s valuable about that and pump it up

TDc: Right. Marty, I appreciate your time with us today. We look forward to hearing from you next week at the AIGA meeting and the conference.

Thank you very much!

Marty Neumeier: Thank you. My pleasure.