Adaptive Path Blog

One major new addition to next week’s MX Conference is hands-on workshops led by experts who can stretch our thinking and skills in new directions. One of these is Josh Levine, formally of Nuetron, but who has recently formed his own new practice. He regularly leads workshops to help organizations understand and manage their brand and their customer experiences strategically.

I caught up with Josh for 5 questions I’ve been dying to ask. Register for MX 2009 here (use the code BLOG for 10% off) and I’m sure you can ask him more in person. Here’s the Q&A:

[Brandon Schauer] You recently left your position as a brand coach and creative director at Neutron to start your own practice named The Matter Collaborative. You’ve read the financial section of the paper recently, right? Are you nuts?

[Josh Levine] Nope—now is exactly the time to start something new. Just because no one knows what’s going to happen, doesn’t mean there’s not tremendous opportunity. You just have to look beyond the paper panic to see it.

[BS] So now that that’s out of the way, just what is The Matter Collaborative about, what kind of problems do you solve, and how do you solve them?

[JL] For over ten years I’ve helped global brands engage consumers and empower employees through design, strategy, and marketing programs. I started Matter as a way to bring similar benefits to creative entrepreneurs with smaller businesses but just as big a vision. My goal is to help them increase their value and get the work they want through positioning, messaging, and touchpoint design.

[BS] You recently chaired an intense panel at the San Francisco chapter of the AIGA titled “Design Through the Downturn.” So what’s the answer? How do we successfully design through the downturn?

[JL] The bottom line is that in order to not only survive the downturn but grow your design-driven business over the next 10 years you have to embrace the tidal wave of change broadsiding our industry. Design is no longer about the artifacts regardless if its a product, an identity system, or even a website—these are all things that can be outsourced on the cheap or worse, slashed from budgets entirely. Today design is about applying right-brain thinking to solve problems in a left-brained world.

I suppose you could say this is what design has always been about. That’s true—but today (and this goes back to your first question) there’s a greater need for the non-linear, generative thinking designers employ to solve problems. Businesses have leveraged themselves to the gills. Cutting budgets and head count will only get you so far. Apply design as a problem-solving tool for businesses and you’ll discover where the real value is, and will continue to be over the next decade.

[BS] While at Neutron you helped to create and pilot their “steal this idea” newsletter. For people managing user experiences and UX teams in 2009, which idea would you recommend they steal?

[JL] One of my favorite ideas is Invisible Branding.

The term refers to those unseen elements which play a critical role in a customer’s experience, but are often overlooked because they don’t take a physical form; CEO vision, pricing strategy, and vendor selection are a few examples. This piece of the brand experience is so important, I predict over the next few years companies will begin to create teams dedicated to designing and managing invisibles. IX anyone?

[BS] So there’s brand and there are experiences. If you had to clarify these two amorphous overlapping concepts (like I’m now insisting you do) what’s the simplest way you can describe the differences and the relationships between them?

[JL] I explain to my clients that brand is just a synonym for reputation. So, how do you influence your reputation in the market? No matter the touchpoints you come up with (your messaging, your website, the way you answer the phone) it’s all part of the experience.

Brand is reputation, and reputation is the sum of customer experiences.

One caveat: while brand and experience are connected at the hip, there’s one important difference—the company can design the experience, but it’s the customer who decides the reputation.

The company (designs) the experience (is interpreted by) customers (determine)

the reputation (is the) brand.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 25th, 2009 at 4:18 pm and is filed under MX: Managing Experience. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.