A is for Awards.

The annual YCN Student Awards ceremony was last night, in the magnificent Shoreditch Town Hall. 

It was a surprisingly smart affair, with more than it’s fair share of retro ties and thick-rimmed glasses. What were more unexpected, though, were the mountains of meat and chilli flavoured popcorn, the cellist, paint tins full of punch, and sugar covered mountains. The eagerly awaited awards (last year it was a thick handmade wooden ‘A’), turned out to be quite beautiful hand gilded gold A’s, which were picked up by everyone commended for their brief.

Check out YCN, they do lots of good things (including hosting a free library of design books!) www.ycnonline.com

Ever wondered what the cheapest way to live in London is?
If no, you’ve probably never done a design placement. If yes, then read on…

The Sandwich Man is a gem of an establishment just a short walk from our studio (in Farringdon) that, as of one o’clock every day, sells any sandwich or salad for a magical 75p!

Freelance sandwich delivery men on bicycles go round the offices of London, flogging people, who are too stressed or lazy, their lunch at about £2 a pop. Then when they can’t sell anymore, the sandwiches are brought back to the shop and re-sold for just 75p.

With a pretty decent range of things (although it does depend on the popularity of sandwiches that day), and for that amount of money, it’s no surprise there can be a bit of a queue come one o’clock.

So whether you’re on a placement or just feeling frugal, it’s well worth a try, lunch here for a week could save you £20, which might be enough for a few beers on the weekend…just.

Find them next to The Easton pub and at: www.thesandwichmanlondon.com

Last weekend I had to get the train down to the coast once again, so armed with my vouchers from National Express I approached the ticket desk at London Liverpool Street and asked the man (dressed in National Express uniform) behind the counter for a return ticket.

Upon advising him that I was going to be paying with vouchers I was met with a surly sarcastic response about how “oooh, vouchers are our FAVOURITE form of payment”. Confused by his attitude I questioned if he was intending to be sarcastic or not. He replied, in an equally sarcastic tone, “no, of course not, we just LOVE vouchers. Of course come the end of the year the company accounts will be £50 short because of your vouchers so there will undoubtedly be a fare increase next year to cover the loss, but that’s just fine. Thank you.”

*BUMP*

The customer experience of National Express returns to earth with an almighty crash.

To anyone who’s read my previous posts it will also come as a surprise that I would be praising a rail company, but believe it or not here it comes…

Just before Christmas I had to make an urgent trip from London to Essex. I arrived at Liverpool Street station, checked the departure time of my train, shovelled a big wedge of cash into the ticket machine and just as my tickets printed out the automated departures and arrivals board lit up in a frenzy of flashing lights as one-by-one the trains changed from ‘On Time’ to ‘Cancelled’, ‘Bus Service’ or ‘Delayed’. Mine was cancelled. The tickets, still warm from the printer, cowered in my clenched fist.

I then embarked on the most excruciating train journey of my life. Both the outward and return journeys were subject to cancellations, delays, lack of onboard refreshments due to a broken boiler, overcrowding and general displeasure.

On my return I set about drafting a letter of complaint to the train company responsible, National Express. Seeing as there has been a lot of talk of will they/won’t they mergers with Stagecoach recently I wasn’t holding my breath in getting a positive response to my request for a full, and immediate, refund.

As Christmas set upon us I received a letter from National Express to inform me that they had read my letter and would attempt to come back to me within 6 days. Actually, it was more like 15, but hey, it was Christmas and who’s counting? I was stunned to receive another letter the other day profusely apologising for the ‘unforgiveable’ experience I had had to endure that day on the train, and explaining the reasons for the delays/cancellations but in a tone that was more apologetic and responsible than blame-ridden and bitter. Neatly tucked in the folded letter were vouchers for rail travel (on ANY network in the UK) for not only the full return fare but for the full fare + 25%.

Now, I’m not too sure whether it should be a big cheer for National Express per se, or a big cheer for the cranky insistence of a grump like me, but regardless, I thought the communications tone, and the ‘above and beyond’ value of the vouchers were a great example of a brand’s ability to create a positive experience out of a bad one. Well done National Express.

Welcome to Manchester

When considering my journey, I flirted with the possibility of traveling first class in order to be able to get some work done. I’ll admit, I was seduced by the idea of a quiet haven where you could focus on your work, undisturbed other than to be offered coffee at your seat, and would generally be made to feel as though you could just get on with being ‘terribly important and busy’.

So, 2 weeks before I was due to travel I popped on to thetrainline.com and looked up times and fares for the date I needed. £66 for an off-peak standard day return. Lovely. Seems reasonable.

My eyes scanned down the page to where the first class fares were listed…

What was that?

Sorry, what was THAT?

£355 for a day return?

Wrestling my eyeballs back into their sockets I began to contemplate what one would get for their £355 ticket. Seeing as I could fly BA (return) to Milan and have a night in a 4-star hotel for the same price, I imagined that a train company commanding the same money must do something pretty special. Do we travel via Capri with a night in a luxury villa, where I’m massaged to within an inch of my life and fed fine cheeses and cured meats until I burst? Do I get to dress in black tie, be drowned in expensive champagne and flirted with by top supermodels for the entire journey whilst, in the background, the London Symphony Orchestra play a collection of my personal favourites? Nope? What do I get then?

A coffee and a newspaper. Fantastic. For the bargain price of £289 I can get some coffee and a newspaper.

I’d be intrigued to have a chat with the head of the particular train company in question and ask him “So, Richard, how do you develop your pricing structure exactly?”

I wonder what the answer would be…

But in this case, no such conversations need take place.  That’s because the drawing has been produced not by a well-remunerated corporation, but by a child. It is the work of nine-year-old Florence Jackson, from Bristol, who was one of 17,000 children who entered a BBC Blue Peter competition to design the new coin. The media, the public, most (not all) designers, when they know that it is designed by a child, will soften their eyes and celebrate, rather than criticise its flaws. And, even if they missed the press release, no one’s going to be in any doubt about its youthful provenance because the design is so obviously juvenile. Crude, puerile and naïve her art may be, but in the context of such a competition these are exactly the criteria that the competition judges would have desired. Indeed, I am confident to assume that many more accomplished submissions will have been rejected for being too good; not childlike enough. This competition was never about the quality of the design but what it is that the design represents.

This highlights a crucial aspect of human judgment that applies to design and much more widely beyond. It’s the reason why brand consultancy is not only the most important discipline in the marketing mix but a critical component of modern business strategy. It might even help us to define what “brand” means. Yep, I’m making a big deal of this one, because I think Florence has hit on something important here.

To up the ante a little from 50p, let me ask you a question about another piece of art. If the Madonna of the Pinks that hangs in The National Gallery turns out, as some suspect, not to be by Raphael but a fake, is it worth less than the £22M it cost to buy? Philosophically, the painting could be said to exist in two parallel universes. One, where it marks a brave and progressive watershed in the history of religious portraiture that inspired not just art but generations of social history. Another, where it is simply a derivative work by a talented, yet insignificant forger. Physically, the two universes of the paintings collapse into one – its tangible attributes are the same. Intellectually, they are forever apart.

Old Masters may be an extreme example but the point is this: we judge things not for what they are but for what we think they mean. To truly understand something we need to look beyond its tangible qualities and consider its intangible attributes too. We seek to explain what we see (hear, touch, taste, or smell) by giving it a back-story – a meaning beyond the physical experience it provides. The Madonna of the Pinks is not just a well-executed painting of the Madonna and child but a landmark moment in art history. Florence’s coin is more than a badly drawn picture, it represents the hope, potential, and the carefree joy that only a child would have the courage to see, yet to which all adult human beings aspire.

Don’t just take my word for it. This aspect of human intellect is a fundamental philosophical concept. In the 4^th Century BC, Aristotle defined hypokeimenon, literally meaning the “underlying thing”, as the quality that sits behind a thing’s physicality and persists through any change. In the 13^th Century John Duns Scotus described haecceity, literally “thisness”, as the quality of a thing that differentiates it from another with identical form (where its form expressed in generic terms is called quiddity, or “thatness”). Neuroscientists have explored these concepts in their analyses of how the human brain makes decisions, examining the complexity of the relationship between rational and emotional processing. Some, like Chris Frith, even suggest that rational decision-making is an illusion created by our own brain to defend us from the incomprehensible reality of our truly irrational selves. The scientific and philosophical facts are clear: things are not as simple as they seem.

And this helps us explain what a brand is. A brand is the complete set of criteria upon which the human brain decides. (Note that lower order mammals don’t use ‘brands’, just sub-conscious instincts; they don’t ‘decide’.) Brands are a complex interdependency between rational and emotional propositions where each works to shape and explain the other. They are about hypokeimenon (essence), haecceity (differentiation) and quiddity (experience) and touch not just logos and marketing but every aspect of what an organisation thinks and does. It follows then, that managing a brand requires profound and holistic consideration, with the intellect and imagination of a deeply enquiring mind. If we are to believe Chris Frith, then it’s the most important thing that any business should consider, overriding all the rational considerations that businesses typically prioritise in their plans.

Of course some philosophers (the empiricists and phenomenalists) disagree with this point of view. For them, a thing is no more than its tangible self: The Madonna of the Pinks is just paint on canvas, worth no more than, say, 50p. They would consider a conversation about brands to be an exercise in vanity and a waste of money and time. Such people should be introduced to Florence. Sometimes it takes the perspective of a nine-year-old to help you open your eyes.

I was amazingly impressed when I clicked on this link for artist Isaac Cordal: he makes miniature cement statues, a bit like Anthony Gormley, but in reverse. Bizarrely enough, he seems to have magically recreated our Grand Tour campaign, but in a small scale as one of his pieces!

It’s nice to see that, while art has influenced design, design is now influencing art back!

Social Media's capital

I was intrigued to read last week on The Telegraph website how London has been confirmed as being the ‘top city’ when it comes to social media. Twitter, Facebook and Digg have all confirmed that London has the highest level of social media contributors of any worldwide city (in relation to population size).

Digg announces that “Nearly 10% of traffic to Digg is from London and the UK is our second largest country next to the US.”

As a Londoner as well as a keen Tweeter, Facebooker, blogger and general ‘social media meddler’ I was impressed. I felt a warm glow of pride swell inside as I considered myself to be part of the most progressive, digital nation.

In. The. World.

I finally felt like the hours I spend poring over what to blog, or how to condense my puerile ramblings into a mere 140 characters, was worth something. No-one knows my name, or gives a damn for that matter, but I don’t care, I’m an inhabitant of the ‘Social Media Capital’. Hear me roar.

As I pondered on this for a while longer I began to wonder what has been the reason for London, in particular, to rise to this remarkable level of social media usage. Is it because, as a population, we are just inherently more digitally advanced than our erstwhile neighbouring nations? Are we so super-tecchie with our fingers firmly pressed on the pulse that we are close to uncovering the secrets to The Matrix?

Just then my phone rang. The caller display informed me it was a good friend of mine calling. I stared at my phone as it called out to me like an needy infant “Answer me, answer me, answeeeerrrrr meeeeeee”, and I just let it ring through to voicemail as I thought to myself “I don’t have time to speak with her right now, I’ll just drop her an email in a few moments and deal with it that way”.

Then it hit me.

Londoners may not be any more digitally innovative and progressive than any other ‘hooked up’ nation. We’re not necessarily leading the charge towards the purely digital age. The reason social media is so successful in this City could well be because we are just generally quite anti-social. We may well be a melting pot of diversity, but we are surely also one of the world’s most anonymous cities. There’s not a person I know who hasn’t admitted, at some time, to actively dodging a colleague/friend they’ve seen on their morning commute just to avoid a polite conversation because they ‘don’t feel like it’ that early in the morning. Equally there’s the people who like to pretend they’re asleep in an aisle seat on the train/bus just so someone won’t ask them if they can occupy the vacant seat beside them thereby forcing them to interact with another human being. Or there’s my personal observation that a vast majority of Londoners moving around the city are permanently plugged into varying music/media players, or engrossed in tapping away on some PDA/mobile device, as a means of isolating themselves from all that’s occuring around them.

Does this sound to you like the behaviour of ‘social’ people.

I believe that Londoners, and Britons in general, could well be embracing social media simply as a means of avoiding direct contact with others. Why ‘speak’ to someone when you can email them? Then you don’t have to suffer the agony of small-talk or, heaven forbid, listening to the woes of others. You can just fire off a quick message via the varying digital channels available and the job is done.

Don’t get me wrong, I am probably one of the UK’s biggest advocates of social media and the opportunities it opens up. But then, I am also one of those people who’ll dodge to the other side of the street if I see you approaching and I haven’t had my morning coffee as yet. As proud as I am of London embracing the digital age, I’m also slightly embarrassed that it may just be because we’re so anti-social as a population.

On that note, I’m going to pick up the phone, call my friend and see how she’s doing….Ah, voicemail…..never mind.

There are some wide-reaching goals in the GLA’s brief, and some expectations that beggar belief. Come on guys, get real: the reasons why people will choose to visit London, do business in London, study in London, live in London, or invest in London will not be because of a logo. It will be because their lifetime of personal experience tells them that it offers something rationally and emotionally unique.

A logo is not a brand.  The opinion people hold of what it represents is the brand. A logo is just a convenient shorthand that calls that opinion to mind. At best, a logo is a worthy experience itself. But, in the case of a 2000 year-old city, with 10 million inhabitants, at the centre of attention of the world, it will only ever be a tiny percentage of the totality of experiences that people have.

Now that doesn’t mean there isn’t a role for an identity for London. But, in contrast to the GLA’s brief, I’m not interested in one that follows the well-worn path of a traditional corporate identity solution. Nor do I care about the bureaucratic need for it to form a coherent ‘brand architecture’ (how I hate those words) with the plethora of other London identities that already, pointlessly exist. I’m uninspired by the prospect of yet another dull, didactic wordmark that tries to tell me what I’m supposed to think.

Instead, as a Londoner, I want something altogether simpler and more inspired. Something that makes me smile and that provides a personal invitation to think. I want an iconic piece of design of which I, and all London, can be proud. If London is the greatest city on Earth, then it deserves an identity that follows suit. Where the GLA aims too broad, I want to go narrow and deep.

But by setting their expectations too broadly I suspect that the GLA is denying the opportunity for such a solution to exist. Committees will squeeze out any genius that emerges as they test it against their irrelevant criteria. Conservative forces (I don’t mean Boris) will water down the possibilities as they seek to stretch it out too thin.

Against a brief that asks for everything, they will end up delivering nothing of value at all.

The new high speed train service from Ashford to London is a revelation. It makes the journey in 37 minutes instead of the 1 hour 22 minutes that a regular train demands. The speed feels effortless, especially where the line runs alongside the Motorway and you get to see the futility of a similar journey by car. The carriage is clean, comfortable, and hardly busy. The departure and arrival (St. Pancras) points have a clinical efficiency to them meaning that you’re in or out before you really know it. The end to end journey is fast. Damn fast. And, as high speed rail rolls out to more parts of the country over the coming generation, will probably change the way, or at least where, we live.

In this business we talk a lot about brand experience, and this one has to be up there close to the best of them. It succeeds where so many others fail by delivering the thing that matters most, an outstanding product.

Where it could yet deliver more is on the emotional side of the experience. Perhaps the most surprising aspect of my journey was the absence of any surprise. As it’s generally true that most railway-bound surprises are bad ones, then that could be said to be a strength but I can’t help but feel that there’s room for something more here. This is an experience that could afford a little more celebration. No, I don’t mean self-congratulatory announcements from the driver, but more something that allows the passenger to inwardly remark on the fact that a great travel choice has been made. And with only 37 minutes to fill instead of the old-school 82, one or two great ideas could be all that it needs.

At the end of the journey an American accent announced our arrival. This felt entirely appropriate, somehow emphasising the cultural shift that this service represents – from the slow discomfort of British railway’s past, to the fast, cosmopolitan simplicity of the future.

Now, where do I catch the tube?