Designed Conveyor wanted to create a comfortable and attractive environment for their employees. Their workspace lacked messaging to visitors about the Designed Conveyor brand.

Solutions:

Advent helped Designed Conveyor relay their brand message in the lobby with a custom, multi-dimensional interior sign and graphic prints. In the hallways, Advent chose large format graphic prints that tell the brand story. One graphic even shows the original patent drawings of the Designed Conveyor product.

When we consume products such as furniture, packaging, even elements for our trade show booth, do we think about where the materials have come from? A new term has been coined in the green movement known as Cradle to Cradle. The dictionary of sustainable management lists Cradle to Cradle as “a phrase invented by Walter R. Stahel in the 1970s and popularized by William McDonough and Michael Braungart in their 2002 book of the same name. This framework seeks to create production techniques that are not just efficient but are essentially waste free. In cradle to cradle production all material inputs and outputs are seen either as technical or biological nutrients.

Technical nutrients can be recycled or reused with no loss of quality and biological nutrients composted or consumed. By contrast cradle to grave refers to a company taking responsibility for the disposal of goods it has produced, but not necessarily putting products’ constiuent components back into service.” The place you are most likely these days to see Cradle to Cradle in action? The United States Postal Service now supplies boxes and envelopes that have been certified Cradle to Cradle, keeping 15,000 metric tons of carbon equivalent emissions a year out of the air.

At Advent, we like to practice what we call GREENmark on everything we do. When you are traveling with your custom made booth to trade shows around the world, we want to make sure that you have all of the tools you need to reduce waste, from how your booth is made and packaged for travel to reducing waste in your lobby space or at your next company event. If you are interested in our GREENmark initiative, be sure and contact us for more information on the program. We strive to offer you the best services we can while leaving as little environmental impact as possible.

Present a different approach to event marketing by employing experience as a way for brands to communicate their key message. Also, create an environment that truly encapsulates what it means to transform a space into an experiential marketing module.

Solution:

Immerse event attendees in the determining factors that make event marketing successful. Wall banners, sound and smell effects, and creative lighting transformed the show hall into a truly immersive experience.

Your message also includes not only say your trade show booth itself, but the clothes or uniforms your employees wear while working the trade show floor and down to the language they are using when talking about your company and the message you are trying to convey on a whole. When everyone is on point with the overall message of the company, your client will respond to that and know exactly who they are going into business with.

In that respect, everyone wins. You have a nice, clean, cohesive message to present that everyone in your company is aware of and comfortable with, and the client coming into your trade show space or offices immediately knows exactly who you are.

Entitled “Advent Marketing stays on message,” the article highlights Roberson strategic decisions to diversify Advent’s services and product offerings.

Nashville Biz Journal’s Turner Hutchens notes that “Advent Marketing has grown its business by breaking out of the traditional trade-show marketing mold and immersing targeted audiences with a well-crafted message.”

To download the full article, click here for page 1 and here for page 2.

World Outreach Church was launching a new building
campaign. They wanted to be able to imagine what it
would be like to worship in the new space.

SOLUTION:

A complex system of cables and outdoor-fabric panels,
suspended from the trees transformed the wooded
area into an outdoor sanctuary.

DriverTech felt like their top of the line in-cab communications system was flying under the radar, but they knew their product was ready to take off. They asked for a trade show exhibit that would mark DriverTech as a major player in the trucking industry.

Solution:

A custom exhibit that communicated the DriverTech difference by utilizing large format video that showed the DriverTech system in action. The 20x20 scalable exhibit can transform into 10x20 or 10x10 based on the footprint of the show.

From the article:

With GREENmark, Advent is incorporating recycled and environmentally friendly products into its designs that can help customers save money, says company President John Roberson.

For example, Advent recently designed a 16-foot arch made from recycled aluminum that cost a fraction of what it would have cost if it were not made from recycled materials. Roberson says the client also is saving thousands of dollars because the arch is lightweight and costs less to transport to trade shows.

To see the article in context, click here to download the PDF.

The arch written about in the article can be seen here in this case study.

The Nashville Business Journal is online here.

According to the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, there are 136,000 hotel rooms and 9.7 million square feet of meet and exhibit space in the city of Las Vegas. With so much space in such a small area, chances are that you will be shipping your custom designed exhibit there at some point in the future. The LVCVA claims there have been over 15,000 conventions and 4.5 million attendees in 2008 alone. Has that been you already this year?

There are plenty of references on the web that help you maximize your time in Vegas during the trade show. Vegas.com has information about the city itself, travel to and from, transportation within the city, as well as a comprehensive list of evening entertainment. There is also a handy FAQ regarding trade shows and conventions in Vegas. And by now I’m sure you all know, what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas. Except your trade show booth.

Announcer:

Welcome to Experiential Marketing Today.

[intro music]

Luke Flener:

Welcome to this episode of Experiential Marketing Today. This show is about the theory and practice of using experiences to engage audiences with the authentic nature of a brand or company. We believe that it may just be the most powerful tool marketers have, but it’s also something of a mystery. My name is Luke Flener. I’ll be your host for this episode.

Episode 9: Design with Heart by Robyn Waters.

The sixth stop on the 2008 Event Marketing Innovation Tour was in our backyard of Nashville, Tennessee. The venue was the Performance Hall of the Musician’s Hall of Fame. The Event Marketing Innovation Tour is a nine city tour, showcasing the latest tools in innovations and event marketing. Attendees are typically executives with some level of responsibility for marketing.

The keynote speaker for all nine stops of this tour was Robyn Waters. The following is her complete presentation from the Nashville event, which is about an hour long. We’ve also included some of the visuals from her presentation, which you will be also to see if you are listening to the enhanced version of this content. These images are also available in the show notes on our website.

We now join the event in progress as John Roberson introduces Robyn.

[music]

John Roberson:

Robyn Waters is a noted author and former Vice President of Trend, Design and Product Development for Target. She is the author of the Trendmasters Guide: Get a Jump on What Your Customer Wants Next, and the book she’ll be signing tonight, The Hummer and the Mini: Navigating the Contradictions of the New Trend Landscape.

And she’s a contributing author along with Tom Peters, Seth Godin and Malcomb Gladwell for The Big Moo from portfolio, which is a member of the Penguin Group.

Robyn has over 30 years experience tracking and translating trends into sales and profit. And as Target’s former VP, she helped a small regional discount chain become a national fashion destination.

Fast Company magazine in 2004 featured Robyn as one of the top 20 “Creative Mavericks” in their June ‘04 Masters of Design Issue. I’ve got to tell you, we searched the country for a speaker for our merchant event whose last name was Waters.

[laughter]

John:

And you are the benefactors. Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to the stage — her first time in Nashville — Robyn Waters.

[applause]

Robyn Waters:

Thank you very much. Well, good evening everyone. It is great to be here in Nashville. And this is my first visit here. I’ve been to a lot of cities and a lot of countries and I had the morning to explore and I really enjoyed it.

I’m also lucky because this is the sixth city out of nine; I have three more left to go. What I’ve been doing is traveling around talking about two of my favorite subjects. And that would be innovation and design. You know, in order to innovate, you have to do something different. You have to reframe your perspective. You have to change how you look at things.

And that’s one of the reasons why I love this visual, which was one of the promotions for the tour that I’m on, the innovation tool for the ADA. It’s this guy in this chair looking upside down. And I talk about how do you turn things upside down or inside out. And in order to innovate, you need to do that.

But then you need to convince people to change their behavior. And to convince people to make a change is very difficult. And so I’d like to quote Aristotle. He said, “You don’t persuade people through intellect; you do so through emotion.”

And that’s what the idea of this event that you’re immersed in tonight is meant to do, is to engage you emotionally. And that’s also what ‘Design” is all about, which is the title of my talk.

I want to talk to you about reframing things, first of all, and give you an example. You heard me refer to as a trendmaster. That means that I track and translate trends into sales and profit. But when I started in the trend world, trend used to be about finding the next big thing. Everybody was on this Holy Grail search for what’s next.

And what I did at Target, and what made me successful and help the company become Targt, is I turned that inside out and said… And I actually landed on Starbucks cups around the world with my quote, and I’ll share that with you in a minute. But I was Office Quote Number 110 in Starbuck’s White Cup Author Series. And I was in between Herby Hancock and Alice Hoffman, so I was in really nice company.

Not only that, that was at the time when Starbucks was pouring four million cups of coffee every single day around the world. That’s really nice marketing. And so here’s my quote: “Trends are signposts, pointing to what’s going on inside the hearts and minds of the customer. These days if you want to be on trend, it’s more important to figure out what’s important, not just what’s next.”

Now that’s a subtle reframing. Prior to my coming with this “trend from the inside out” philosophy, trend was always about what’s next, what’s out there. And I’ve turned that around, I’ve turned that inside out. And so what I’m really going to do is take you on journey into the heart, today.

And my presentation “Design with Heart” is built around the idea that in order to connect with the customer or a client or an audience, you have to engage with them in an emotional way. You have to open up your heart and you have to deliver good design.

That design can be a well-designed event, such as your enjoying tonight. It can be a beautifully designed product. It can be a fabulously designed marketing presentation. And it can also be a beautifully designed corporate mission. And I’m going to talk about all of those and how they relate to “Design with Heart.”

A couple of comments about design: Good design can make your life better. It can solve problems. It can fix things. It can deliver on your needs. But great design can truly make your life better and make you happier. And “Design with Heart” can deliver beauty, not just to a product or an event, but to the bottom line. And that’s what we’re all here for. We’re all here to make money.

And so even though I’m going to talk a lot about the soft stuff today, I’m still going to deliver ideas that will help generate a very strong bottom line.

So first, I want to talk about the state of the market. We are going to go out there and look out into the marketplace and just talk about what’s going on out there in the customer’s mind in the market. First thing I want to talk about is a claustrophobia of abundance. This is what we’re all faced with.

When you go to the mall and you have so many choices, or you go to the grocery store and have so many options, the pundents call this claustrophobia of abundance. There’s a lot of stuff out there. And where do we get that stuff? Well, we shop at a mall, we go to a store. There are big-box stores on every corner. The malls are getting bigger than ever.

In my backyard in Minneapolis, we have the Mall of America. There’s 4, 000 miles of square footage, in terms of store fronts. And it’s so big it has its own Zip Code. So we have big stores, but you know if you can’t get to a store, you don’t want to get in your car and drive? Just sit down at your desk, access the Internet.

The Internet shopping has made the whole click and mortar business really important. And it’s the idea that all you really need is a credit card and you have access to the world. And you can purchase and select from just about anything.

To give you an idea of what I mean by “claustrophobia of abundance, ” let’s say that you woke up this morning and you decided you wanted a new breakfast cereal. You were tired of the one you’ve been eating for the last several years or months.

So you go to the grocery store. How many options would you think that your average grocery store you have in order to select from, to select a new breakfast cereal? Any thoughts in the audience? How many options?

Audience:

70.

Robyn:

70.

Audience:

50.

Robyn:

50. 300; 300 and that’s your average supermarket. That’s not your big-box supermarkets. So let’s say you’re this woman and you’re standing there and you’re looking at 300 options of breakfast cereal. How do you decide what you’re going to buy?

What happens for a lot of people is they look at all those options and they freeze. They freeze because there’s too many options and they’re worried that they’re going to make the wrong choice, so they decide not to decide. And they walk away.

And that’s a missed opportunity and a missed sell. And it’s the idea; it’s called “paradox of choice.” Too many things to choose from, don’t want to make the wrong choice, so I’ll just stick with my usual.

How do you get people to make a change? How do you get them to innovate? You reach to them, to their hearts. And I’m going to talk about that in a minute.

But first I want to talk about the contradictory consumer. Who is this customer that we’re talking about? My book is called “The Hummer and the Mini: Navigating the Contradictions of the New Trend Landscape.” And here’s what I mean by contradictions.

I have a girlfriend, Lori. She wears Prada shoes and she drives a Mercedes, but she goes to Costco every other week to buy her bulk paper goods. That’s considered normal consumer behavior.

Here’s another example of the contradictory behavior, and this might be someone that you know. I have neighbors that are passionate about recycling. Every week they take their recycle carts down to the end of the driveway, and they are all neatly sorted. Then, when it’s been picked up they push the carts back up, open the garage doors, and there are two gas guzzling SUVs sitting there in the driveway. That’s contradictory, but it is also human behavior. We are dealing with the very contradictory consumer with contradictory needs, and we are dealing with a marketplace full of abundance.

Now, I am going to take a look at the state of innovation, the state of innovation in business and in the world today. I am sure you have all been following the news and all of the very tough economic times that we are dealing with. I think that there’s not a time in our country’s history when we could use innovation more than right now. We need to innovate a lot of new systems and structures.

It turns out that every five years there is a meeting at Harvard. It is an innovation meeting, and leaders from the top Fortune 500 companies are invited to attend. It is polling them and asking them about innovation.

Allen Weber, who is the founder of Fast Company, attended one of the meetings. This was a couple of years ago. This was the last time the economy was crunching, and he came away a little disillusioned. What he said was, “When it comes to American business, the visionaries are the ones who are dying or, at least, losing their jobs. We are entering the season of the bean counter”.

To many people that might feel like what we are entering right now. It’s time to cut back. It’s time to hold back, but as you just heard John say, it might be an opportunity to really move ahead. It’s the idea that you have to be a visionary to get us out of the times that we’re in.

At this conference of business leaders they were asked, “How do you feel about innovation?” And they said, “Absolutely. Innovation is to be encouraged but only if it pays off in six months”. Well, most lead times are a little longer than six months.

The next question the leaders answered was, “Yep. Yep. We value profits but not ideas”. Well, where does innovation come from? Where does the next opportunity come from? They come from ideas. If you don’t value ideas and innovation, you are not going to get to the next level of profits.

One of the reasons that I saw things change a lot out there in the corporate land is Sic Sigma. In my book, “The Hummer and the Mini”, I talk about trends and counter trends. We have innovation and moving forward, and then we have Sic Sigma in cutting back.

For those of you that may not be familiar with what Sic Sigma is, it is a military term. It has to do with cutting out defects, and it has to do with the left brain analytical side of things. It’s the idea that you measure, you analyze, you look for a best method or process and then that’s how you do something.

That works really well in run-of-the-mill assembly line procedures, but it doesn’t work so good in creative businesses or in a market where you really need to get creative and really need to innovate. What Sic Sigma does, this emphasis on left brain measurement and analysis, is it leaves us something that I call analysis paralysis.

You know, when I was at Target we had all of these studies, market basket reports, statistics, data that we could look at, and we would pore over the numbers. We would try to determine what business decisions we should make. Who are we designing a product for? What should it look like? How many should we make? What should we charge?

Oftentimes, I used to feel that by looking at the numbers so closely we got so out of touch with the customer that we couldn’t use our intuition and use our gut. That was something that wasn’t often valued in the corporate world, and I am seeing that change. I’ll talk about that a little bit.

What this led to, all of this emphasis on left brain and Sic Sigma, was something that experts call analexia. It is a term you may not have heard. It is a societal disease according to experts, and it means if it can’t be counted it doesn’t count.

What does that look like, and what does that mean? Well, it means that if you can’t give somebody a definitive, numerical answer or reason to make a decision or buy something, then you are not going to make the decision and innovation is going to be cut. So, if it can’t be counted it doesn’t count, but I really like the way that Albert Einstein said this a little better. He said, “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted”.

A lot of the experiential aspects of an event can’t be counted. They can be measured, but there are things that go even deeper that you can’t really explain with numbers or measurement and analysis.

I love this example of this ad of a chocolate chip cookie. It was for a consulting company. It was about the optimization of chocolate chip cookies in the 21st century. If you were using numbers and measurement and you were trying to explain how good this chocolate chip cookie was and why somebody should buy it, what would you be able to tell them?

Well, you could tell them how many calories were in the chocolate chip cookie; how many chocolate chips were in it; how much it weighed; how many were in a bag. What the ingredients weighed; how long it was cooked; what it cost, but none of those things could compare to the experience of smelling that chocolate chip cookie as it came out of the oven; tasting it as the chocolate chips were still melting in your mouth. It is really the experience and the optimization of that that will encourage and convince people to try that chocolate chip cookie. You have to immerse them in the experience.

Sometimes, this was a tough sell at Target. When we were trying to promote a new idea, invariably a merchant would say, “Yeah but show me the numbers. Show me the numbers. Explain to me why this would work”. You can always give some data. You can always show some analysis. That’s like a baseline, but you have to go beyond that, and that was what I became a cheerleader for.

Sometimes, I tried to inject a little bit of humor into my presentations where I was trying to convince them to try a new idea, and I gave them this quote. It’s from W. C. Fields. He said, “Statistics are like bikinis. What they reveal is important, but what they hide is vital”.

So, think of that the next time you go to the beach, but think of that the next time you are sitting in your office and you are looking at a report. You are looking at numbers. You are looking at data, and you are trying to figure out, what do I do. What decision should I make? How do I know what direction to go in?

Look at the numbers, absolutely. They will help you make a decision, but then look further. Ask yourself what they are not telling you. What are the numbers hiding? What are they not revealing about what’s really important in their insight to the customer? I think that’s where you’ll really be able to immerse yourself and find some innovative solutions and get to design with heart.

What I’m going to talk about now is the idea that we have two sides of the brain. I’ll talk about analytical left brain measurement analysis, and then talk about the right brain which is the heart and the gut and the instinct. That’s our senses, and that’s our creativity. The other side is our logic and our rationale and our reasoning.

What you really need is to bring both together, but in truth in the business world this is how things are valued. The left brain has been very much valued. MBA’s coming out of school tend to be hired at higher salaries. The creative world has not fared so well, but thankfully that’s beginning to change. I feel that I was on the cutting edge of that at Target, and what we’re really getting to is that we have to use both sides of the brain. You have to even things out.

Now, we’re going to do an interactive test, and this is called the F test. This is a little glimpse of a test of observation. I want you to read the sentence in the box quietly to yourself and count how many F’s are in that sentence in the box. Then, just kind of keep that number to yourself. Maybe, look at it again. How many F’s are inside that sentence in the box?

OK, show of hands. How many people found three F’s? Raise your hand. At least, half the audience. How many found four F’s? Raise your hand. Eight to 10 people. How many people found five F’s? Raise your hand. Five or six people. How many people found six F’s? Raise your hand. Seven, eight. We are all looking at the same thing. It’s right there in black and white. It’s a sentence.

Why did we all see something different, and most people didn’t find all six of the F’s. Here they are. What happened? What happened was you were moving pretty fast, and your left brain weighed in, and it listened to o-f and it heard o-v, even though it’s o-f.. This is just a great example of how we observe things. We are all looking at the same thing.

Remember this the next time you are at a meeting, and you are discussing options or trying to convince somebody of something, and you all really see something different. That’s what happens when the left brain is too heavily valued. You miss some of the things surrounding it, and you jump to conclusions.

This is what I want to advocate for. This is where the design with heart begins to play in because you have to put some of that intuition and sensory and feeling into the business decisions beyond the measurement, the analysis and the logic.

That’s a lot of what drove Target’s success. If you think about it, prior to Target becoming the upscale discounter, you had two forms of shopping basically. You had a department store which was high end, and you had the discounter that was low end and budget. There was really not a whole lot in the middle.

What Target decided to do was carve out, reframe the retail landscape. I will tell you that Target, Wal-Mart and Kmart were all started in the same year. When I came to Target in 1992 it was a three billion dollar retailer, and Wal-Mart was 10 times bigger and Kmart was three times bigger. So, we were the small, unnoticed, regional retailer out there.

What happened at this time in ‘92 was a really big reframing of the opportunity, and it was the idea that the CEO said, “We have to create a different kind of retailing experience”, so it became about the experience. We are going to create this world in between what we call the upscale discounter space. If you think of the brand promise at Target which is ‘expect more, pay less’ that’s a disconnect in many ways although they managed to make it a connect. It’s the idea that you can expect more trend, more design, more quality, more fashion at Target, but you are going to pay less for it than you would at not just a discounter like Wal-Mart or Kmart but if you were buying the same thing at a Gap or a Banana Republic or a Crate & Barrel.

People often ask me, “How did that bulls-eye become the love mark?” That’s the highest thing a brand can aspire to. How did the Target bulls-eye become a love mark, and how did Target become Tarjay? It was really pretty simple, and it’s no secret formula.

There were three legs to the stool that really was the foundation of Target becoming Tarjay. The first is that they decided they would be trend right, not trend forward but trend right. We had teams of people that traveled the world tracking trends. But the second was that they would be guest focused. This came out of the Disney tradition. It was about focusing on the customers in the store as though they were guests in your home.

The idea was to track the trends but translate them for the guests, and then design became the secret sauce. Design was the tool. It was the pencil. It was the colored crayon that we usde to differentiate and create a unique product that helped an upscale discounter become as well known as Target and drove a lot of sales.

During my years there I hired the first designer. I hired the hundredth designer. Many more have been hired. These are product designers, people that design all that cool stuff when you see, when you go into a Target. We hired a lot of young people fresh out of school, and we needed to instill in them the idea that we want their passion. We want their love of design to come through because when a young designer comes out of design school, they just want to light the world on fire with all of their great ideas.

At the same time we had to get across the idea that you have to sell a lot of this. We are a discounter. We need to sell a lot. This is a mass merchandiser, so I came up with this philosophy that ultimately in-house became known as Robyn’s 3H Design Theory. The idea behind this is that we would talk about what would bring people into Target to buy something. What would motivate a shopper to come to Target on any given day?

The 3H’s stood for Head, Handbag and Heart. The first H was for Head, and it was about need. You wake up, and the toothpaste tube is empty so you have to run out and buy new toothpaste at Target. The Handbag was about value. It was about, “Oh, it’s in the circular. It’s on sale”. Maybe, you push that red cart by a price cut sign and it was a great value so in the shopping cart it went.

The third H was for Heart. That was about — you see something that you didn’t know existed that you don’t need but you see it and you look at it and you go, “Oh, look at that. I love that. I have to have that. I want that”. That’s falling in love with a product.

People often, in my years of travel, that I’ve traveled around the country when I was at Target, people would say, “Why is it that when I go to Target and I have three things on my list and I’m planning to spend 10 dollars, and I walk into the store and I go around all those nicely lighted, clean, broad aisles. Why is it when I get to the checkout I’ve spent — what, average hundred dollars, right?” Ten dollars, planned to spend; a hundred dollars in the cart when you check out. What is that? What is the magic? How does that happen?

Well, how that happened is that Target created this incredible experience built around design with heart. It connected on an emotional level with customers about things that they didn’t even know they needed and never even knew before that they existed. So, it’s this design with heart: the 3H, Head, Hand and Heart theory that literally brought me to this idea, this concept that I am talking about tonight which is design with heart. Again, it is an emotional connection with the customer.

I am going to talk about several categories: how you can design a product with heart; how you can design a service, an experience, a marketing message and a social mission with heart. And I am going to give you some examples from my history and from just looking at the general world of trends out there.

Tom Peters is a management guru. He is one of my heroes, and in his latest book, “Re-imagination”, he said design is the fundamental soul of a man-made object. It’s why we love something.

This was my favorite object in the 10 and a half years I worked at Target., my favorite product that we designed. This is a Sippy cup from Philippe Starck. If you notice, it is on a pedestal, and it looks like it is made out of cut crystal, and it has loving cup handles. I will tell you that innovation-wise this was pretty out there because Sippy cups don’t come on pedestals; they are not clear; and they don’t look like that.

When Philippe Starck recommended this product to the Target buyers, they were totally negative on the idea. They just, you know, the eyelids went down. They were, like, “No, no way. We’re not doing that product”. But, he was very passionate about this.

So, he created a prototype, and he filled it with grape juice. He put it on the table in front of the buyers at Target, and then he accidentally spilled it over. He created an experience for them. What happened was the grape juice didn’t spill. The buyers pushed away from the table afraid that the grape juice would spill, and nothing happened. He looked at them and he said, “See it’s functional. It works. The Sippy cup didn’t spill, but that’s not why you should buy this”.

Then, he took a picture out of his pocket of his little girl, a daughter who was two years old, and he says, “This is why you should buy this”. He said, “Every little girl should feel like a princess. When she drinks her apple juice out of a Philippe Starck Sippy cup she should feel just like mom and dad do when they drink their Vous Le Coq champagne out of a cut crystal, Waterford champagne flute. It’s how you feel. It’s not what the product is or what it does. It is the experience that she has drinking this apple juice.

Well, a little bit of history behind this product; it retailed for $3.49. We unveiled this product in Milan at a major international design show. There were no Targets in Europe. There were no international Targets. Actually, there still are not today, and we really had no business being here at this very high end design show, but we wanted to show the world how we felt about design.

We created this box. It’s a very simple plywood box, and it sat in the middle of the fairgrounds at the Fiera where if you got out of a taxi or came out of the mass transportation system you had to walk by this box in order to get into the entrance hall where this big international design fair was playing.

You can see the question. Is design an elitist exercise or a democratic statement? That stopped a lot of the designers and a lot of the press immediately in their tracks. The little window that you see there had a slide show, and all 50 products of the Philippe Starck design program were shown on the screen with a price point.

The Sippy cup was one of 50 items in that show, and the last slide said, “Visit our booth at such-and-such station in order to get a press kit”. We still knew even with that great box it wasn’t all that attractive. It was meant to be very low key that we had to attract people.

So, the designers did something very interesting. They injected sound into the experience. When you got out of your taxi and you were walking towards the Fiera you heard this ‘ba-boom, ba-boom’. It was a heartbeat, and it literally worked like a magnet. It just drew people over to the window. Then, you hoped they would stay long enough to see the whole slide show, see all the products and then go to the booth to pick up the press kit.

How did that work? What were the results? How did we measure that? Well, when I got home from my two-week trip overseas I was inundated with emails from around the world. I had emails from New Zealand. I had them from Denmark, from the UK, from Vancouver, from all over the world — people that had seen the slide show, stayed to watch the end, gone in, gotten a press kit and found my name buried in the back of the kit.

They emailed me and they said, “Dear Miss Waters, I have to have one of those Philippe Starck Sippy cups. Now, Target.com wasn’t up and running. We were just a brick-and-mortar retailer. We weren’t in the Internet business. Even if we were, logically, you take a $3.49 item, convert it to Euros or Deutschmark, or British Pounds, and then charge somebody $20.00 or ship it overseas? That makes no logical, numerical, analytical sense.

So what I did, since we weren’t set up for international retail, was I went out with my assistant and I bought samples for as many people as I had gotten emails from and I sent them a sippy cup.

And I wrote them a handwritten note on really cool Target bull’s eye stationary and I said, “Dear ‘so and so, ’ thank you for your love of Target and your interest in great design. I hope your niece, nephew, daughter, granddaughter - fill in the blank - will enjoy this little gift from Target. And maybe someday there will be a Target in your part of the world.” And I sent them off.

What’s interesting is that I used to have a sample that I would bring to my talks around the country and I used to put it on the podium. And a couple months ago I finished a talk, and it was a very large audience in an auditorium, and I went down off the stage afterwards to talk to people in the audience. And ten minutes later I went back up to get my laptop and it was still there, but my sippy cup had disappeared. It was stolen.

Somebody had to have that so bad, they fell in love with that so much that they stole it off the podium. Now I’ve since been told I can go on eBay and I can find…I can replace it if I’m willing to spend at least $50.00. So I think $3.49 to $50.00, that’s the value of design with heart.

So what would that look like for other products? This is one of the reasons why I named my book “The Hummer and the Mini.” I’m just infatuated with, not only the product, but the marketing behind this.

I shot this photograph in Times Square the year that the Mini Cooper announced…brought to the U.S. And you may remember that when they were first brought to our country, there weren’t a lot of dealerships where you could go to a Mini Cooper, pay your money, and ride one out of the store - drive one out of the store.

Instead, you went online and you custom-designed your own car. You chose from 150 different options. What the Mini Cooper company did was they created a virtual connection through the Internet with you where you could create your own car and make it unique, make it totally for you.

But in order to do that, you had to wait eight to 12 weeks to get your custom-designed car. And you all know in America we don’t like to wait for anything. We don’t like to wait an extra two minutes for a cup of coffee. So the company created an online program where the guest, the customer, could go and anytime of the day or night, find out where their car was. They could see the new paint job. They could see when it was being put on the ship to be sent overseas. They could see when it rolled into the dealership.

I have a girlfriend who is awaiting the arrival of her new Mini Cooper. She got an email last week from her car. Her car emailed her from the ship with a photograph saying, “I’m here on board. We’re partying. Having a great time. Can’t wait to meet you.”

[laughter]

Robyn:

Can you imagine how that made her feel? And what’s cool is that now when you order a Mini Cooper, the last email you get is a jpeg of your car and birth announcements so you can send out birth announcements to all your friends to announce the new arrival in your garage.

What’s interesting is that now they call this program “Where’s My Baby?” because the research afterward showed that when they polled the people that ordered the Mini Coopers, they found out that over half of them, during this eight to 12 week birth canal process, ended up giving their car a first name. Is there a better way to create an emotional connection or bond with a product than to be able to give it a name?

And so I think it’s just a stellar example of a company that took the design of a product and the marketing of it and the interactive aspect of it to create a product that had great heart.

This is Stan the Singing Starfish. This is a toothbrush holder that a young designer at Target created. It was her first design project. And when she came up with the idea, most bathroom collections were made out of wicker or stainless steel, chrome, maybe bamboo.

And she came up with the idea to make it out of plastic and she called the whole collection “Below the Bubbles.” This was long before SpongeBob Squarepants or The Little Mermaid. And so she gave each one of them a name. And this was Stan.

And the buyers, when she unveiled this idea, were sort of like, “Oh, I don’t know. That’s kind of crazy.” But she had the numbers. She had the left brain satisfied. She had done research that showed that over half the homes in America have bathrooms that are dedicated just for children. And so she had some numbers to support it.

And then she did something really interesting: she demonstrated the product and she had the buyer push the button in the tummy of the singing starfish and Stan started to sing. And it sang, “Brush, brush, brush your teeth. Brush them every day.” And it was a little song that Jill had composed and it went for one minute, which is the length of time the American Dental Association suggests that kids spend brushing their teeth.

And when she pressed that button and the sound came out, the buyers’ faces lit up in a big smile and that’s…I think right at that moment that they decided, “Yeah, we’ll take a risk. We’ll do something innovative. We’ll try something different.” And that product retailed for under $8.00 and it was some of the best “grandma bait” that we ever had at Target. It flew off the shelves.

A quick example about the power of packaging. You’re in a beautiful room environment that’s been packaged for every aspect of your comfort and your delight. But how you package a product can provide that same experience. This is a perfume designed by Prada. Prada is a very fashion-forward, cutting edge, designer line for men and women.

And when they came out with their first fragrance, they decided to put it in this heavy, rectangular, clear, iconic glass bottle. But they went to the additional expense to put out this old fashioned atomizer. It was just like the perfumes from the Hollywood glamour era of the ’30s and ’40s.

And, of course, the perfume was a lovely scent and was researched well. But what’s interesting is that the message it was giving to the woman who bought this was “you can be cutting edge and modern, but you can still be nostalgic and glamorous. You can have both.” It’s the contradictions it played to.

The fragrance went on to become one of the top five sellers in the country and around the world. It still is in the top ranking. And this is at a time when 99 of the top 100 of the fragrances that are launched every single year disappear a year later. It’s like the celebrity dujour - they just fall off the radar. And this has become an icon, just like Coco Chanel or Chanel No. 5.

And I’m not saying it’s exclusively because of the packaging, but the experience that the packaging created had a lot to do with the emotional connection of the woman to that fragrance and it kept her coming back.

I’m going to talk briefly about designing a service with heart. And I thought about all different kinds of services I could talk about: I could talk about banking. I could talk about car washes. I could talk about…well, how about a hospital? So this is an interesting article from Fast Company Magazine. You may have heard the term “medical tourism.” It’s something you’ll be hearing more about. It’s the idea that your next heart surgery could well be in Bangkok, but don’t worry, it may well be in network.

So what is this all about? Imagine the service you go to get. Your health is on the line when you go to a hospital. This is a hospital in Bangkok, Thailand. It’s called Bumrund [sp] Grand Hospital. It was featured on 60 Minutes last year. On the left is the lobby. The lobby looks like an upscale mall or a five star hotel when you walk in. And on the right is the waiting room. Not too many hospital waiting rooms look like that. And I’m told that the outpatient clinic is ritzier, even, than the bar at your local five star hotel.

So here’s a hospital experience that has all the outward rigging of a great experience, but inward, it’s also stellar because what happens is people come from around the world to have a treatment - it could be anything from a hip replacement to open heart surgery - and I’m sure that’s sounding a little bit crazy to you. So here’s a hospital that’s built around that. They were the first hospital in the world to convert all of their records online so that any doctor had instantaneous training.

In this hospital are doctors that were trained in the U.S., did their residency in the U.S., and are dealing with the tip notch medical equipment that is created around the world. And I’m betting that you’re still thinking, “Yeah, but I’m going to go to Bangkok for a procedure?” Well, here are some statistics for you: a colonoscopy, the average cost in the U.S. is $3, 500.00. At this hospital, which is one of the top ranked in the world, it’s $750.00.

If you think about the difference and you think about what you could do with that difference…you could add a trip to Phuket on to the backend of your surgery or your procedure. And it’s the whole idea of reinventing, reframing the world of healthcare. This is globalized healthcare.

And if you’re sitting in the audience saying, “You know, I’m not ever getting on a plane to go to Bangkok to have a procedure done, ” I’ll tell you two things: One is that our hospital system in the U.S. is ranked number 37 by the WHO, World Health Organization.. Singapore and Costa Rica are the top two. There are other places in the world that have great health care.

First of all this might inspire us to deliver better health care, but beyond that, I’m sure that, again, there are people saying, I still wouldn’t go out of the country to have this done. I would be that many of your parents when they were driving Fords and Chevys never thought they’d be owning a car made in Japan or Korea or any other place around the world.

So, it’s the service built around this hospital, and the patients rave about the bedside manner. They also rave about the entire experience. It’s a service as well as an experience that’s been delivered.

Moving into an experience, I want to talk a little bit about Steve Jobs and Apple. Of course, any time you are talking about design, Apple as a brand is at the top of the list. There are a lot of Steve Jobs’ stories out there that you’ve probably heard, but I’m betting you haven’t heard this one.

When Steve introduced the Apple OS10 Operating System at MacWorld in San Francisco, he was asked by a reporter, “So Steve, what makes using this OS10 Operating System a better experience than Windows or anything else?” And He said, ” What did you tell your designers when you were thinking about designing this?” Steve said, “I told them to make the buttons on the screen look so good that you’d want to lick them.”

Interesting. Look at the iPhone. It looks like a box of fine, high-end European chocolates. The term on the bottom of the screen is French. It’s literal translation is “lick the window, ” but the French translation means “Window Shopping.” The idea of window shopping is about desire. You’re walking along and you see something in the window. You stop, and you practically drool; because you desire it. You want it. That’s the essence of what he was communication about the design behind the experience he wanted the user to have when they used the OS10 Operating System.

Some of you may know about Apple’s One to One program. For $99 you get an hour instruction each week of the year. This could be at any Apple store around the world. A couple of weeks ago I wanted to learn Keynote. I’ve been using PowerPoint, and I went for my one on one hour demonstration where you sit right next to an instructor. You bring your laptop, and you learn this new system on your computer.

At one point my instructor was trying to show me something to do that I couldn’t do on my laptop. He went right to the big screen right next door - this is a right there interactive experience - and with one click of the mouse he showed me this incredible shortcut that was so cool and so snazzy that I just looked at him. I go, “How can I do that?” He said, “Well, you have iWork ‘06 and this is iWork ‘08.” It was like, “How do I get that?”

Two minutes later it was off the shelf, installed in my computer. They’d swiped my credit card, and the receipt had been emailed to my email address. The whole idea is that if I hadn’t been sitting there he could have told me… I could have read about it, but seeing it there right in front of my eyes, knowing that I could have it instantly was probably the best use of that $99 that I’m still enjoying the learning from. Creating that interactive one on one experience has a lot to do with the polish behind the Apple brand.

Some of you may have gone to Build-A-Bear. Anybody taken kids, grandkids? Build-A-Bear? It’s the idea that a child can go in and select, stuff, stitch, and wardrobe their very own Teddy Bear. What’s the last thing, those of you that have done it, that happens when you do this? You select a name, and you insert the heart.

It’s that whole idea - Maxine Clark, the founder of Build-A-Bear, said it’s that interactive experience of going to the store and customizing it and inserting the heart and watching the bear being sewn up and the name being given to it - that makes that company such a powerful brand. It is in fact one of the most profitable per-square-foot mall anchors in the country. It’s just a little toy store.

I want to tell you an example now from your back yard here. This is a project that was actually done by Advent for HealthWay. HealthWay asked Advent to create a total experience just like John was talking about. They wanted the trade show exhibit. They wanted the brand space, and they wanted the event. What they were doing was marketing, unveiling a new Gallup-HealthWays Well-Being index that I will tell you a little bit more about in a moment.

What the company HealthWays was trying to do was to promote the culture and values of their company and their brand not just the product that they delivered. Here are some of the things that were done. This is the front entry, the brand space that John talked about when you walk in. By the way, I should tell you that HealthWays is known as one of the top 100, in the Fortune 100, places to work in the country. So they have a very excellent working teammate culture.

When you walk in this is what you see. You see this inspiring space with a person on the top of the hill. It’s about possibilities, about all the endless possibilities and bringing your entire self to work and giving your all to the company and what they will deliver back. You can see on the right-hand side there’s a wall that’s lit up.

What that is is this is that Tom Sigerun [sp] award for value and culture. It’s about the employee-of-the-year award in essence. It embodies the values of the company. The idea that the Chairman and CEO wanted to give behind this is they wanted to make this really big. This wasn’t a small plaque on a wall in a lobby or a front entry.

So you can see this is taller than a person, and the names are literally up in lights. They are signifying how much they value the contributions of the individual team members, the people that were selected. That this is a company dedicated to the whole idea and philosophy behind giving your best and being inspiring.

Speaking of inspiring this is a conference room. I would have given my eye teeth to have a conference room like this at Target. Each of the conference rooms has a different theme and is named after a different value that the culture of HealthWays wants to promote, in this case inspiration.

You can see everything from the materials to the colors, the lighting, the screens that are over the window give you an atmosphere that is meant to be conducive, innovative. I love the quote on the wall. It’s from John Adams. It says, “If your actions inspire others to dream more, to learn more, to do more and become more then you are a leader.” What this company is saying is that anybody can be a leader if you can inspire others. I think that that’s… I can just imagine what it would be like to come to work in a place where those were the values.

The other leg of what Advent provided for HealthWays is the interactive booth at the tradeshow. It was the AHIP, the American Health Insurance Plan conference. The booth was meant to convey an outdoor feel with the carpeting that looked like grass. On the right you see trees that were provided by the Arbor Day foundation, little Evergreen trees.

What this did was make the display more interactive. Because the people that were manning the tradeshow exhibit for HealthWays would give one of the trees to the people that entered the booth and talk about how we have to take care of our bodies and nurture them just like we have to nurture a tree in order for it to grow strong and become mature. So they had something to take away that then they had to nurture and care for. They had to take it home and plant.

You can see this whole immersed interactive experience is being built, but this was the ultimate event. They wanted to announce the Gallup-HealthWays Well-Being Index. If you’re not familiar with that I’ll do my best to explain it. It’s called the “Dow Jones” of Health Index for the country. It was a project that HealthWays and Gallup sponsored where 1, 000 people are interviewed everyday, seven days a week about the state of their health.

Health is defined not just as lack of problems or disease, but are you happy? Are you living a good life. So this is a way for companies and the country literally to monitor their well-being. This was a big concept to get your arms around. It needed a really big event to promote it, so they did a red carpet event. It was build around the idea of when Harry Winston delivered the Hope Diamond to the Smithsonian.

They wanted a big event, red carpet. This was in San Francisco at the conference. So they had a movie premiere night. They had red carpeting with fabulous lighting, and then they had clips from old movies that were being played on the wall. I think this is a little bit of the experience you’re going to have tonight afterwards when you get to interact in all the fun things that are planned here.

What’s cool is that they also had intimate spaces for cocktail where people could meet and talk. They had people that were look-alikes of celebrities that would interact. They had people drawing caricatures, and they had this interactive element where they literally let you participate and be polled in this Gallup-HealthWays Index. It is a big idea, as I said, to get your arm around, and it was a big memorable event that people are still talking about.

I think it is a great example of this total package of the brand space, the tradeshow exhibit and the event, the memorable event that pulls everything together and delivers a big message that connects right to the heart.

I am going to talk about designing a marketing message. For those of you that are interested in design or the power of creativity in business, this is a great book I recommend from Dan Pink called “A Whole New Mind”. It’s about the left brain and the right brain working together. He said, “A new conceptual age is dawning. We’ve entered the age of art and heart”.

Here’s a great example. This is a Starbucks marketing campaign for their holiday drinks. It came out a couple of years ago. On the cup down the side, familiar Starbucks cup in red has the white boxes that say Shots, Syrup, Decaf. But, the one that is checked says “One moment to myself’.

Starbucks isn’t selling you coffee. They are not selling you premium, fair trade, expensive, environmentally friendly coffee. They are giving you a five minute vacation. They are delivering an experience, a coffeehouse experience, that they want you to feel is a little bit of peace of mind.

There is a great book by Melinda Davis. It is called “The New Culture of Desire” as in desiring things with your heart. She says that if you are a marketer these days you are not just selling something, you need to be healing. You are a healer, and that’s the idea. It’s by giving somebody this one moment to yourself, that is contributing to the well-being of this individual. That is a much bigger marketing promise than just a great cup of coffee.

This is an ad that I just found this week from my home town. Gabberts, it’s a furniture store. What is furniture? It is a couch to sit on. It is a television to watch. It is a new bed. What I think Gabberts did here was reframe it, and I’ll read it. It says, “Invest in your nest in time for the holidays. Make your home a warm, entertaining and nurturing refuge for your company”.

It’s the whole idea that it’s not the stuff in it. It’s how that stuff makes you feel and how, literally, you are in a nest and you’re protected and you’re nurtured. And you invite people into your home and you open your heart to them. That’s a subtle communication that is not just about rush in and buy a couch today but more about create a world that appeals to you and connects to your heart.

This is a very interesting campaign for Harley-Davidson. Any Harley riders, any Harley-Davidson riders? A couple. Great. You may have seen this ad. When I first heard about it — so screw it; let’s ride — I was like, oh? I don’t know about that, but I want to read this to you. You can read along with me because I changed my mind after I got the essence of the message.

“We don’t do fear. Over the last 105 years in the saddle we’ve seen wars, conflicts, depression, recession, resistance and revolutions. We have watched a thousand hand-wringing pundits disappear in the rear view mirror, but every time this country has come out stronger than before. Boy, do we need to hear that right now, editorial, because chrome and asphalt put distance between you and whatever the world can throw at you. Freedom and wind outlast hard times, and the rumble of an engine drowns out the spin on the evening news. If 105 years have proved one thing, it’s that fear sucks and it doesn’t last long”.

So, I’d ask you. Do you think they are selling motorcycles here? Is that what they are selling? Are they healing? They are offering hope. This is a message about hope. It’s in a different way. If you think about who their audience is, they have the rubbies, the richer than bikers, and they have the rebels, you know, the guys with the long hair and the tattoos. And they are all part of this Harley world. It’s very inclusive. How do you deliver a message that both ends will resonate with? You go right to the heart, and you deliver hope, not just the idea of c’mon in and buy a new bike.

This example is a fun one. This is an example of a brand that is a market leader because they own the marketplace. They are first to market. Pampers, a P&G product, came out with the first disposable diaper, and they owned the market for two years. That was the only brand on the market. Their marketing campaign was ‘Pampers makes mom happy’. It was about convenience, and it was about making her life easier, and it was a well designed product.

Two years later Huggies is introduced by Kimberly-Clark, so this is a competitor entering a market totally owned and dominated by an existing brand. They are going to try to make some head roads. They created a better product. It had elastic legs. It had Velcro tab closures. It had better absorbency, but they were smart enough to know that those were only incremental design improvements.

Eventually, P&G’s designers and engineers would go to work and create a product just as good, maybe a little better, so Huggies and Kimberly-Clark knew they had to create more behind the brand. Their marketing campaign became ‘Huggies makes babies happy’.

What happens when babies are happy? Moms are happy, too. The whole idea of — even the idea of a hug and putting your arms around somebody; the brand came from nowhere and beyond and went on to dominate the marketplace. Now, they play back and forth, but whenever Kimberly-Clark goes back to making the babies happy and the product is equal, the brands accelerate. It’s the whole idea of being very careful how you craft your marketing message. How can you connect it to the heart?

This is my favorite example, though; the London Underground. For years London had been a city with a premier mass transportation system, but right after 9/11 the ridership was falling off. Everybody that had a vehicle was driving into London. The parking spaces were full. The air was polluted. The roads were congested, and the city fathers said, “You know, we need to dust off and polish up our transportation system. We need more people to take mass transportation”.

They spent a lot of money. They cleaned up the cars. They cleaned off the graffiti. They put new upholstery in. They installed wireless on the commuter cars that came in from the outlying towns. They took the old coffee and plastic cups away and established an espresso bar in the dining car. They did everything they could to raise the level of the experience of commuting mass transportation into London.

When they were done, they came out with this new marketing campaign. It said, “The new London Underground. We get you to work faster” and nothing happened. Ridership stayed the same. They had spent all of this money, and they had no improvement in ridership. So, they had a little bit of a problem.

Somebody said, “Maybe, we should talk to the customer. We just did all this. Let’s find out what’s important to them”. They hired teams of ethnographers, ethnographic researchers and cultural anthropologists, who just go out and talk to people.

A couple of months later they came out with a new marketing campaign. Nothing else changed. The marketing campaign was this: “The new London Underground. We get you home faster”. Ridership soared; same cars on the same track, going back and forth every day. What mattered was not getting to work. That’s going to happen anyway.

What mattered was getting home, and what that really was was a nod to the rider, connecting to the customer, the rider, and saying, “We know what’s important and we’re going to help you take care of that. We’re going to get you home faster”. I think it’s just a great testament to the subtle power that a marketing message with heart can have to do in terms of measurable results.

The last section is talking about designing a corporate mission, and I want to talk about something called social capitalism. It is a term you probably are familiar with. It’s the last chapter in my book, “The Hummer and the Mini”, that you are all being given tonight. It is a term that I didn’t make up. It has been coined by Fortune, Forbes, Fast Company, all the business magazines talk about it but it is a new idea, a fairly new idea. It is the idea that you can do good and make money. It is about bringing goodness into a corporation, not just profits out of it.

This is a visual from Fortune Magazine, and I love the visual because it shows a heart at every place in the board room. This is the board room, and the article went on to talk about, “We brought everything else into the board room. We brought cultural diversity. We brought efficiencies. We brought Sarbanes Oxley. We brought all of these aspects into the board room, but now maybe it’s time to bring heart”.

How do you bring heart into a board room? How do you bring heart to work every day? How do you create a great experience for your employees and your customers?

The example that I write about in my book is Paul Dolan who was the fourth generation in a family of wine makers. Fetzer Vineyards, who you may be familiar with from California. Paul converted early to all natural organic winemaking methods. He had biodiesel tractors and everything was all natural. What he did was, he wanted to run his company in a different way.

And so, he used and leveraged something called the triple bottom line. You may or may have heard of this. It’s also called E3 or E^3. E3 stood for Economics, “can we make a profit?”, Environment, “Can we leave the environment as good as we found it or maybe even better?” and Equity. Equity was about paying people a fair wage, giving them great benefits, and giving them a reason beyond a paycheck to come to work, “Can we make this a great experience for everybody?”

I just tell from all the people I’ve met at Advent how great it is to work for a company like this. It’s the idea of taking care of their employees. Every question he makes, every marketing decision he looks at, every cost analysis that he has to make a decision around he puts against these three questions. And if he can say yes to all of them, he goes ahead and make the decision.

The E3 or triple bottom line is now being taught at Kellogg, at Stanford, at the London School of Business. It’s now part of the MBA program. I think that that’s an amazing testament to the fact that we have entered the age of art and heart.

Just a couple of last quick examples: Anita Roddick founded The Body Shop. Horst Rechelbacher founded Aveda. Roxanne Quimby founded Burt’s Bees. Ten years ago, when the business press talked about these guys they referred to them as eccentric herbalist hippies. Today, L’Oreal owns The Body Shop, Estee Lauder has bought Aveda and Chlorox just bought Burt’s Bees.

Now the big guys are buying these little maverick rebels who had a different way of doing business. Do you know what the business press now calls each of these three companies? They call them savvy business marketers.

These were the companies that were first to understand about caring for the employee, about fair trade, about taking care of the environment, and about giving people a great place to work, not just a paycheck. So, I think it’s a great testament to social capitalism hard at work in our economy.

Howard Schultz, when he founded Starbucks, it was a two-store startup, and he’s going to venture capital and needs a lot of money to grow it into the powerhouse that it has become today. In the first page of his business plan, he said, “I want to make a profit in a benevolent manner.” That was unheard of in business plan lingo.

Here was his rationale. It was about making money. It wasn’t just about being altruistic. He said, “There will come a time in our world when the customer goes to choose cup of coffee X, Y, Z.” So, in my neck of the words that would be Dunn Bros, Caribou and Starbucks. Maybe the fourth option is a local restaurant or diner.

When the customer is walking down a street and they decide they want a cup of coffee, how do they decide where they’ll to buy that cup of coffee? He said, “All the coffees are good, all the ambiances are good. What will prompt their decision?” And he said that it will come down to a cultural audit.

By “cultural audit”, he meant that before the decision is made where to buy that cup of coffee, the customer will ask themselves three questions: how does the company treat their employees, how do they give back to the community and how do they take care of the environment. And based on those questions, that cultural audit, that’s how they’ll decide where to buy their cup of coffee.

I think Starbucks has grown tremendously. They’re struggling now, as they’ve grown a little too big. But the foundation of the company and the principles it was founded on are intact.

So, I’ve given you a lot of food for thought and a lot of examples from all different aspects. And these are the three questions I’d like you to take back in your mind with you when you go back to work tomorrow or Monday.

Every time you have a project, you can ask yourself not just “How do I sell more of this?”, or “How do I make this better?”, but how do you inspire desire, how do you deliver something that people just have to have, because they’ve fallen in love with it.

The second, are there any rules that you need to break in order to create that desire, innovate and market that product? Most of the examples that I’ve given you tonight are about people who broke the given rules of how something was done, or how a business was run.

And then tomorrow, what’s the one thing you can do to reframe, to look at something different, to put it in a different context that you can look at and go back and just approach a little differently tomorrow morning.

Gary Hamel, who’s at the Harvard Business School said, “The accountants and the engineers are going to have to learn to love the poets and the dreamers.” All of the examples I gave you tonight, and everything in this room is about poetry and dreams, and delivering a better experience.

And so, hopefully what will come from all of this is that thriving versus surviving in today’s marketplace mandates that you innovate in a way that connects on an emotional level. That’s design with heart, designing a message, a product, a social mission. Design with heart will help you do that.

And the last thing is, it’s not how much you spend, but how well you connect. It’s connecting in times like this that really make the difference. So, thank you very much.

[applause]

I’d be happy to answer any questions that you might have. I’ve thrown a lot of information out at you. Any questions? Yes?

Audience:

[off mic]

Robyn:

Yeah. The question is about the economic times and pay loss. Of course people want to pay less for whatever they get, but within that there are still choices to be made. Some things will drop off, but still when a purchase is made it will have to be more emotionally engaging. It will have to connect on a higher level.

Things will drop by the wayside, and people will forgo certain things, but this is the time, I think, in terms of marketing where people can stand out and deliver an experience, because everybody else is dropping off and falling out. So, you can turn this around and look at it as an opportunity, or you can just say “I’m going to pull back.”

There’s a great quote from Robert Redford. He said, “Growth is a creative process, not an accounting process.” Even in these times you have to be creative, and you can’t cut your way to greatness. You can trim, you can still find more effective ways.

I think the essence behind the whole idea of design with heart is, whatever you have to spend, it needs to connect on an emotional level. It can’t just be about more media, cooler things or more stuff out there. It has to be more meaningful, not just more. That’s part of that “expect more, pay less.”

Even though Target may be promoting more of the “pay less” aspect of their brand promise, that customer has been trained to still expect more. They’re still talking about their design for all, and a lot of their cool new products. But it will balance out a little different.

I think that those companies that stand out in this time, it’s connecting to what’s important. “We get you home faster”, not just “We get you to work faster.” Those are the things that, when times are tough, people resonate with more strongly. It’s a very soft, subtle connection, but it’s one that I think is eminently more powerful than just “more stuff.”

Any other questions? Great. Well, I will be signing books here afterwards and will be happy to answer any questions as well, so thanks very much.

[applause]

[music]

Luke: We hope you enjoyed Robyn’s presentation. If you have any questions or comments about anything she discussed, you can email those to us using the address feedback@experientialmarketingtoday.com. You can also leave comments on the website using the space provided at the end of the show notes. Our website address is www.experientialmarketingtoday.com, where you’ll also find links to resources related to Robyn’s presentation.

If you prefer speaking over typing, you can leave your comment on our voice comment line. That number is 615-690-6796. We hope you’ll join us for the next episode.

[music]

Announcer:

Thanks for listening to Experiential Marketing Today.

[right-click to download: http://s3.amazonaws.com/xmt-podcast/xmt-009.mp3]

Show Notes

00:00 Introduction

01:38 About Robyn Waters

02:53 Design with Heart

06:26 The State of the Market

08:41 The Contradictory Consumer

09:37 The State of Innovation

23:05 Design with Heart

23:36 Designing a Product with Heart

34:20 Designing a Service with Heart

37:25 Designing an Experience with Heart

46:19 Designing a Marketing Message with Heart

53:45 Designing a Corporate Mission with Heart

58:53 Closing Comments

60:40 Q&A

62:56 More information, resources, and feedback

Additional Resources

• Full transcript of episode nine
• Event Marketing Innovation Tour (hosted by the American Display Alliance)
• Amazon: The Hummer and The Mini: Navigating the Contradictions of the New Trend Landscape
• Amazon: The Trendmaster’s Guide: Get a Jump on What Your Customer Wants Next
• Amazon: The Big Moo: Stop Trying to be Perfect and Start Being Remarkable
• RW Trend website: http://www.rwtrend.com/
• Robyn’s Newsletter: http://rwtrend.com/section01/trend_newsletter.php

Entrepreneur author Karen Spaeder highlights the company’s healthy business practice of rewarding it’s employees in unique ways.

“We define wellness more liberally than others might,” says John Roberson. “It’s about more than the physical, it’s about the whole person. So we

encourage those things that will help not only [employees’] physical health, but their emotional well-being, too.”

To read the full article, you can download the PDF version.

Figure out the reason why you are doing the show.  Pick your space and start to develop floor plans.  Keep in mind the flow of people, what you would like to offer to your audience, and of course know your audience!  This is the best time to read over your contract and make note of details that could sneak up on you.  Carefully read through rules and regulations.  Track when your payments should be made and set that up in your calendar.  Submit your application as well as the first payment.  Determine your budget in advance, since you are getting such a head start it should be easy to keep up with your budget.

Six Months Before:

At the six month mark, set goals and objectives for your the trade show.  If some of your work needs to be outsourced during the event, make sure you start to line that up.  Find a company for set up or tear down, plan out transportation.  Find an exhibit designer and begin to develop a design plan.  Plan a marketing strategy on how to get people into your booth.  Whether you send e-mails, postcards, small meaningful gifts, this needs to be prepared now.

Four Months Before:

Line up the tradeshow staff you would like to work your exhibit and plan out travel arrangements.  Find out if there are any specific needs for the exhibit itself.  Finalize design products and select the floor plan for your exhibit.  Start advertising for your show.

Three Months Before:

Again, go over the exhibitor manual, you will need a refresher at this time.  Communicate with your exhibit supplier the dates for your exhibit and reserve.  Confirm all travel and lodging arrangements make changes if needed.  Plan presentations to happen in-booth and brief staff on sales approaches.  If any meeting rooms are needed go ahead and submit reservations.  Pick out catering menus if needed, and plan a meeting for before the show.

Two Months Before:

This is where you will start tying up those loose ends and getting a lot of the little work done.  Get name tags, press kits, graphics, briefing packets, training manuals, and agendas finalized and sent out to the appropriate people.

One Month Before:

This is where you follow up on everything, preview displays, send everything that needs to be shipped to the location by the appropriate date.  Meet with staff about event.  Finally, make sure that you have everything that you may need a copy of copied and ready.

Upon Arrival

Go to your booth and make sure everything that is needed is there.  Talk with the hotel about meeting rooms if needed for your staff.  Be there when the booth is being set up.

During Show

Coordinate with your staff any current needs that are occurring.  Make note of how to do it differently next year.  Go ahead and reserve your space for next year.

After Show

Again, be there when they dismantle your event.  Handle any sales leads that occurred during show.  Most importantly, send out thank you notes to the people who stopped by.  They may not have been a lead, but that could change.

For supplemental reading you can study up on basic trade show planning.

Your next company event doesn’t have to just be a few veggie trays and bottles of water in the corner, it can be a great arena to show off to the world who you really are. If you’ve got your best customers together all in one room, or even potential clients, why not really show off who you are as a company maximizing the use of your brand space?

Allowing your brand to seep into everything you do not only helps you really define who you are as company, but it presents the perfect package to current and potential clients. A cohesive image across the board says, “this company really has it together, knows what its image is” and that is something that goes a long way when people are looking to do business with you.

If you would like to brand and market your next event, contact us at Advent. Our passion is helping you succeed in branding your company in everything you do from trade shows to your office space to your next corporate event. We are members of the American Display Alliance and look forward to working with you on seeing your corporate branding come to life.

Voiceover:

Welcome to Experiential Marketing Today.

[music]

Todd Austin:

Welcome to this episode of Experiential Marketing Today. This show is about the theory and practice of using experiences to engage audiences with the authentic nature of a brand or company. We believe that it may be the most powerful tool marketers have, but it’s also some thing of a mystery.

My name is Todd Austin and I will be your host for this episode.

Episode 8: Interview with Robyn Waters.

The 2008 Event Marketing Innovation Tour recently made a stop at Nashville, which was the 6th of nine cities on the tour. The Event Marketing Innovation Tour pulls together the latest ideas and best practices in event and experiential marketing for a half-day seminar. This year’s keynote presenter for all nine stops on the tour was Robyn Waters.

Robyn is the former Vice President of Trend, Design, and Product Development for Target. She is the author of two books: The Trendmaster’s Guide: Get a Jump on What Your Customer Wants Next,  and The Hummer and the Mini: Navigating The Contradictions of The New Trend Landscape.

She is also a contributing author (along with Tom Peters, Seth Godin and Malcolm Gladwell) for The Big Moo. We caught up with Robyn about an hour before her presentation. The following interview took place in the hall where she was about to speak.

Todd Austin:

So, Robyn, this concept of design has followed you around like a puppy. Guys like Seth Godin and Daniel Pink either talk about you by name in their books or they talk about the work that you did at Target. How has design become so important, how did we get here?

Robyn Waters:

Well, I can give you a little bit of a background. When I came to Target in 1992, it was a $3 billion retailer discounter, it was an also ran. Wal-Mart was 10 times bigger; K-Mart was three times bigger. We had a very visionary CEO, who looked at the numbers and said, you know, there is no way we can win on scale, economies of scale, cutting expenses, we need to truly differentiate.

And so what he did was, innovate, reframe a unique space in the retail landscape between a discounter and between a high-end department store. Therefore Target covered out the space: upscale discounter. In order to achieve that, for a discounter to go into the market to buy goods, the goods that were out there weren’t trend right, they weren’t well designed, they weren’t great quality, so we had to do it a different way.

And what we ended up doing is creating an internal design department, so that we would have exclusive design-driven trend-right product. People often ask me what is the secret to success, what made Target “Tarzhay?” And there are three things. It’s the idea that the company wanted to borrow on their department store heritage and be trend right. Notice I didn’t say trend forward, but trend right.

The second is they were going to be guest focused and guest is in the tradition of Disney. So, trend right means what are the trends, research them out there, but then translate them, translate is the key effectively for the guest, but design was a secret sauce. Design was the tool that we used internally to create exclusive product, based on that trend research, based on knowing our guests and tracking the trends around the world and then translating them effectively.

And so, we became really the first bastion in the US for what people now call democratic design or cheap chic. And we had people whose models we can follow, IKEA was doing at in the Scandinavian countries. So we didn’t innovate that whole idea, but we applied it to retail for the first time.

And so as the head of the design department trying to design, I literally hired the first designer and hired the 100th designer and there has been many more hired since then. So, that was a 10-year period, three billion to 42 billion in 10 years, Target to “Targe” in 10 years because of great design.

Todd:

What are some examples of some of those products that came out of that design focus?

Robyn:

There is a story about a sippy cup. It was designed by Philippe Starck. It was one of 5p products in a Starck reality design program. Unlike any other sippy cup you’ve ever seen, it was on a pedestal, it was made out of clear plastic to look like cut crystal and it had loving cup handles and it retailed for $3.49.

When the buyers first saw this prototype proposed design that Philippe Starck recommended, they looked at it and they go, no way, it’s not what a sippy cup looks like, you know, why would you put it on a pedestal, whatever. And what Philippe Starck did was demonstrated that good design is about more than function.

He filled it full of grape juice and he tipped it over and nothing spilled. So he said see it’s functional, it works. It’s functional, it’s inexpensive, we can retail this for $3.49, but that’s not why you should buy this design. And he took out a picture of his daughter, he had a little daughter who is two years old and he said here is why you should buy the sippy cup.

And what he was saying was that this little girl, whoever used this sippy cup should feel like a princess when she drank from her sippy cup, just like mom and dad did when they drank their Veuve Clicquot Champagne from a cut-crystal Waterford champagne flute.

So it wasn’t about the cup or even the design of the cup, it was how that design made that little girl feel and that is the essence of design with heart. So that was one product out of thousands in the years that I was there.

There was a very famous toilet brush cleaner from Michael Graves that made a full color spread in “Time Magazine.” We had a Coach’s Whistle Teakettle from Michael Graves that retailed for 24.99 that was in every hot design magazine around the country. So it was everything from garage storage and organization to kitchen towels, to bedding, to dorm room supplies, even food. There wasn’t an aspect within Target that the design strategy wasn’t applied in order to create more design-oriented products.

And it is the whole essence of their brand promise: expect more, pay less. You could expect more trend, more design, more quality, more fashion. Then you pay less for it, but not just less for it than if you were buying at another discount, but you could get the same thing, the gold plated charger plate at Target for half what you pay at Crate and Barrel and it was made in the same factory. So that was a big part of the success.

Todd:

You are the keynote speaker at all nine tour stops for the Event Marketing Innovation Tour. This will be sixth of those I believe that you are about to do today, what is the connection between design and event marketing?

Robyn:

I am presenting a talk called “Design with Heart” and I found so many great ideas and so many examples of great design with heart in each of the six cities that I visited. And by that I mean, there is a personal, emotional connection to the audience, to the clients with me as the guest speaker and I have seen tremendous differentiation.

There has been a consistency of the quality of the event, very high quality, beautifully designed, but every one is different. And it is really kind of a paradox, they are alike but they are different. And each one is different because they take the heart and soul of the essence of who their employees are, what their mission is, who their clients are and they have applied them beautifully.

I have been in a 16th century church in the middle of a farm field in Philadelphia. I am here at the Music Hall of Fame in Nashville. I have been at production sites and warehouses that have been turned into beautiful… I have danced with a robot. It has been a really great amazing visual interaction of great design turned into a great experience. It is designing a wonderful experience by using the emotional principles connecting.

Todd:

If you were to give us a state of the union of how far we have come in event design, what would the short answer to that question be?

Robyn:

I think phenomenal. And I think that there is so much an industry can do to the industry at large out there, because I go and I speak at a lot of events. Many of them are same old same-old. They are interactive, they are just someone on a stage presenting.

And what I have seen are so many great techniques and ideas to involve the audience, to get them to participate, to interact with them that there is just so much possibility for an industry and companies like this to deliver that out to the bigger picture. So it is just been outstanding.

Todd:

Robyn, if folks would like to find out more about your work, find out more about the books you have written and the research you have done, how would they do that?

Robyn:

I have a website, it is www.rwtrend.com. I’d like to say that I have a free monthly newsletter called Trend Counter Trend and if you click on “Robyn’s Newsletter, ” you can hear from me once a month.

Todd:

Sounds great, thanks for your time.

Robyn:

Thank you very much.

[music]

Todd:

We hope you enjoyed that brief interview. The content Robyn gave us in that interview was a preview of what she covered in her full presentation and it is our intent to give you that ful