Each discipline I’ve worked in has had proprietary tools and frameworks. What’s been astonishing is not how uniformly these tools are considered proprietary to the discipline, but how close they are to the tools and frameworks from neighboring disciplines.
I’m committed to create frameworks that are universal. Because I have the feeling that we’re all saying the same thing, discovering the same patterns, but the language we use is preventing us from understanding each other.
The Customer Journey is an established framework that pulls together two sub frameworks, one from marketing (the consumer funnel) and one from Interaction Design (the user journey). It has been deeply valuable but it is still vastly misunderstood.
When we use frameworks and tools that are common, we find more ways to work together to a common cause.
Of course more tools and frameworks are made each and every day, so I encourage you all to take each that is useful to you and invite people from other disciplines to work on a version which is universal. Send them to me and I will feature them here.
By adopting similar frameworks we can create better synergy and better understanding.
I offer these frameworks freely and will be doing a talk on each. If you’d like a PDF copy of the frameworks email me here.
FRAMEWORK 00 –
BRAND CONTINUUM
This framework came from several conversations with Nick Law while I was founding the Brand Development Group.
A brand is defined by both the corporation that founded it and the customers and partners that engage with it. Branding companies tend to focus on what’s True and try to make that legible. Digital design companies try to take what’s valuable and make it relevant to the needs of the user. Advertising agencies tend to try and make something that’s interesting or attention grabbing.
The truth is that we need to make something that’s True, legible, relevant and interesting. The end user or viewer only care’s that it’s interesting, they build value when it’s presented in a relevant way, that’s legible, the create an ongoing relationship if what’s interesting is also true – this builds trust.
I find this tool valuable when trying to unify teams, or to bring siloed thinking together to form a better end to end experience.
Thanks Nick
FRAMEWORK 01 –
COMMON PERFORMANCE INDICATORS
Many of the Artifacts, Behaviors and Concepts created for Brands are subjective. Gaining agreement on subjective things is almost impossible.
By agreeing and sticking to common decision criteria at the beginning of any process it’s possible to almost remove subjective bias. Gary Friedman taught me that it takes many hours of hard work to make sure people are aligned. Most will say they are aligned, and agree, but if pushed, that agreement will be revealed as vague and friendly. True alignment comes only after hard work and constant challenge.
Align before beginning anything.
FRAMEWORK 02 – BRAND / INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE
I owe this framework to my dear friend and Brand legend Paul Valerio. I’ve adapted it many times, but Brand Architecture is something that many people struggle with. Brand Architecture is the transit system around your company.
Brand Architecture and Information Architecture are close cousins. If Brand Architecture is done poorly it will often show up on the home page of your site. ‘Showing our org chart’ is how some people refer to it, I like to say it’s showing your (lack of) business strategy.
Paul and I added network to the architecture types, a relatively new phenomenon that has arisen from layers of services within companies. A network is a way of distributing the cost of non-essential overhead between Brands that would normally compete.
FRAMEWORK 03 –
SHARED BELIEF
The shared belief is a push back on the idea of Brand Mission. A mission is a monolog, a belief can be a shared dialog.
In the dialog between what a Company believes and what a Customer or User believes we can find a Shared belief. Something that both parties can participate in achieving.
Also, it’s key to understand that as a Brand sits at the point of interface, the user behaviors can push-in into the Company in the same way that Artifacts and Concepts can be pushed-out to the Customer.
One can also choose the level of permeability of the interface. Can the customer push through the interface to ‘take part’ in the Brand, are the artifacts let out into the open to be changed by the Customer?
Brands that have an impermeable interface are inelastic, they represent a continuum that is unchanging, for example Shell. Brands that have permeable interfaces are elastic and adapt, an example being Off White.
FRAMEWORK 04 –
RELATIVE POSITIONING
Positioning is an old framework synonymous with Branding. But in dynamic markets positioning is almost futile. In the time it takes to plot a static point on a 2x2 the market has changed.
Instead, if we look at mariners, we need to plot the change in the frame work as a factor. Any position inside the 2x2 also depends on the positioning and relative change in the frame of reference of the 2x2.
The cadence of repotting needs to be increased to accommodate the shift, and the general direction of the Brand needs to adapt accordingly. In this way, positioning is more mapping and direction than absolute point.
The competitors which are plotted on a dynamic positioning chart are also different. We have to think about direct competitors, adjacent competitors and indirect. I’ve learned too many times that the most indirect competitors are the most dangerous, they see your market as growth but are not weighed down by the context of static understanding.
FRAMEWORK 05 –
ATTRIBUTES
The building blocks of a pattern are attributes. We used to thinking about attribute in Brand building, but they tend to be vague, collective descriptions that no-one can disagree with.
Instead we need to adopt multiple specific attributes can be employed at different moments to correct course in the positioning.
Attributes should be thought of in the context of your Brand’s products and services, not abstractly in the board room. By making attributes part of the experiences we can connect together Brand, Product and Experience.
Building specific attributes into behaviors is particularly valuable in mediums that have motion, affordance or invite interaction. By doing this the end user, or customer can understand how an attribute feels as well as think what an attribute means.
FRAMEWORK 06 –
DYNAMIC ATTRIBUTES
Once the attributes have been agreed upon, it’s important to write a plan to how the attributes should be used over time. Orchestrating the Brand is based done through tools, not rules. Building the attributes in to the fabric of peoples everyday work means that they can be effective phased in and out.
We can create moments of loud, soft, fast, slow, big or small which are necessary responses in changes to the market, context or even moment of use. This is akin to tone of voice, but across all output not just verbal.
FRAMEWORK 07 –
BRAND ENGINE / FLYWHEEL
This adapted two frameworks, the Customer Journey, which is a linear line from Awareness to Post Purchase and Brand Pillars which supported literal Greek Temple of Brand strategy.
I created a loop out of the customer journey (which is really a loop) and placed the Pillars as active check points in the journey. It is similar to the flywheel created by Jim Collins in 2001. But the combination of Pillars and Customer journey creates deeper reasoning to how a company achieves success while staying on Brand.
FRAMEWORK 08 –
BRAND FREQUENCY / CADENCE
Brand frequency has grown to be very useful. Many of my roles have been leading parallel roadmapping in product and technology teams. I noticed how similar this process was to the calendars of marketing teams. But the technology roadmap was 18months, and the marketing team were quarter to quarter. If you factor in finical planning you get three contrasting measures. Add the cadence of media it can become cacophonous.
Using the framework of a step sequencer that has a unit that is adaptable to the organization. Product, technology, finance, marketing can all add tent pole moments building synergy.
I use thisframework to show how Apple used chronomatic synergy to sell the iPhone.
FRAMEWORK 09 –
DATA ARCHITECTURE
This framework comes straight from the mind of Andrew Chee. He used a block system to show the system architecture of a product. I was struck by how this related to a Brand’s architecture, but in a more concrete way.
I applied this at eBay. Looking at the Data, it was clear that eBay represented Products, but this wasn’t largest amount of data, Exchange between people saw outweighed the number of products. If People, Products and Exchanges we the underlying architecture of the company we were running a social network, not an ecommerce site.
FRAMEWORK 10 –
UPGRADED CUSTOMER JOURNEY MAP
The customer journey is well understood by User Experience practitioners. But by adding Brand Drivers (from the Brand Engine) and attributes we can use the customer journey as a score from which to Orchestrate the Brand.
Many management consultant has spelled out the demise of the Customer Journey Framework because true journeys aren’t linear. But I think they miss the point. We’re not really mapping the customer journey with this framework, we’re mapping the organizations ability to deliver against the customers journey.
I have found that mapping this framework to the departments responsible for delivering against the user need is a great way of identifying gaps.
One last point of the Customer Journey, it is different and somewhat similar to the User Journey (understood by many technology teams) because it includes off product experience as well as on product. When engineering teams say end-to-end, most mean, beginning of product experience to end of product experience. But with the advent of service design, the product has no end and no true beginning. We must map beyond our product to understand the business drivers.