09 May 2013
Design No Comments Permalink

Design – from the spoon to the city

May 9, 2013 No Comments

Good designers and good design agencies are versatile by nature. There was a time when top designers would fiercely compete to design CD covers and record sleeves, but now the best projects are often purely digital.

Early in my career I was asked to design many CD covers, often for classical music launches that needed good design thinking to make them fresh and appealing to new audiences. A series of my designs for the City of London Sinfonia stand out, as they lead to more than the artwork design for the covers and needed lots of versatility.

The ‘from the spoon to the city’ quote comes from Italian designer Massimo Vignelli who was echoing earlier design theorists and began his career in architecture in Milan. The lesson the master teaches is that architects and professional designers need to have a breadth of skills and be able to design small items like cutlery as well as the city itself. Regardless of the size of the project the designer’s approach and thinking is always the same.

Design thinking is the ability to think logically and systematically and is a highly valued skill for all businesses.

Professional design skills are useful in all areas of design activity. Design thinking is the ability to think logically and systematically and is a highly valued skill for all businesses.

Having designed a Vivaldi Vivace CD for the City of London Sinfonia, the orchestra’s sponsors asked me to design and stage an event in Monaco, including an interactive presentation, an exhibition stand as part of a major European trade conference, culminating in a live performance by the orchestra of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons at the Monaco auditorium.

 

I was able to turn my design thinking to areas such as stage and lighting design, as well as logistics management, 3D production and video editing. The success of the project was a fine example of the ‘from the spoon to the city’ approach in action.

As a new breed of design agency versatility is part of everything we do. Now that CDs are history, we’re making new digital products to create new stories and new histories for our clients. We partner with clients and help create and develop new categories. We design and build experiences on and off-line to give our clients the tools they need to be successful and to grow their business. We use design and technology to transform lives and businesses.

If you’re thinking about transforming your business talk to us about ways we can help.

Eugene Burns

 

06 May 2013
Branding, Design, Marketing, Social Media No Comments Permalink
Fragment of a cubist portrait.

Understanding Big Data – a Cubist approach

May 6, 2013 No Comments

Marketing is changing, design is changing and businesses and how they work are changing and these changes are happening quickly driven by technology. I’ve already published some thoughts on what I call the big data approach to branding and what it means for you and your business. But here are some thoughts to help you get your head around what’s different in the approach, and how it can help you grow your business.

‘The techniques of correlational analysis are being aided and enhanced by a fast-growing set of novel approaches and software that can tease out non-causal relationships in data from many different angles – rather like the way cubist painters tried to capture the image of a woman’s face from multiple viewpoints at once.’ 

From Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work and Think, London, 2013.

If you consider how you normally measure your customers, or even your social media engagement, you probably gather information from a single fixed viewpoint, such as the number of sales in a given period, or the number of Twitter followers. But what happens if you take a Cubist mindset, realising that your users, your customers and your potential business targets are dynamic, fluid, and changeable? You begin to understand that it’s more useful to take a multiplicity of viewpoints to communicate and engage with them in a more meaningful way. This is where the Cubist metaphor is very useful.

A big data approach to managing your business lets you see your business and your customers more ‘in the round’ – from as many different viewpoints as possible. This gives you a multi-dimensional view that’s more valuable when you’re making important business and brand decisions such as launching new products, or planning new campaigns.

It helps tell you what your business is doing now and in the near future, and it’s based on correlational analysis which gives you a good idea what your users and your customers will be doing too. Leaving the aesthetic considerations aside, big data gives you a Cubist viewpoint that you simply don’t get from being static and rooted in place and time.

A big data approach to managing your business lets you see your business and your customers more ‘in the round’ – from as many different viewpoints as possible.

If this sounds like a nice theory that’s of little practical value, then think about this. I’ve found that our own business is growing as we’re gathering new insights and making new data and technology-driven connections that more traditional design agencies normally miss out on. It’s an approach that’s helping us grow and develop in new and often unexpected ways.

Knowing more and knowing it faster, seeing your business and your clients and future clients from a range of different viewpoints, gives you a very valuable business advantage. So imagine what a Cubist approach could do for you today.

Eugene Burns

25 Apr 2013
Branding, Design No Comments Permalink

Of mice and men – your big data big brand moment

April 25, 2013 No Comments

‘For much of history, humankind’s highest achievement arose from conquering the world by measuring it.’

There was a time long, long ago when Amazon didn’t have only techies on its payroll. They had editors and critics who evaluated and sifted through the titles that featured on the site’s pages and offered their human and insightful views on the latest books and made excellent and informed recommendations. They were celebrated in the pages of the Wall Street Journal as the US’s most influential critics as they drove so many book sales.

But then Jeff Bezos had another idea. What if the site could recommend books to users based on their individual shopping preferences? Amazon analyst Greg Linden saw a new way of doing things too. What if the site could make associations between products themselves rather than compare the preferences of people with other people? In 1998 Linden and his colleagues applied for a patent on ‘item-to-item’ collaborative filtering and the shift in approach made a big difference – a big data difference.

The company had a mice or men choice on its hands. What to put on the site – machine-driven content that showed empirical relationships between products, or reviews crafted by Amazon’s in-house book experts?

They ran tests and the data-driven sales vastly out-performed the critic-driven version. In the Amazon way the decision was made and today it’s said that at least a third of Amazon’s sales are made through data-driven recommendations and personalization systems. You could call it Amazon’s big data moment.

One important consideration is that Amazon didn’t bother too much questioning why the measurable upsurge in sales happened. They just knew that it did and acted quickly to take advantage of what the data told them. That gave the Amazon business and brand an advantage over just about every competitor they have ever had and all because they weren’t afraid to leverage the knowledge their own systems gave them. For good or ill of course.

‘Treating data as something imperfect and imprecise let’s us make superior forecasts, and thus understand our world better.’

So what does this Amazon big data moment mean for you and your business? What do you know that other people don’t and what do you have that can make your decisions faster and more accurate? That’s the big data question. Are your decisions machine-driven, gut-driven, or a little bit of both?

How do you know what will work for you and your brand and how do you decide? Do you click with your users and, perhaps more importantly, have you got the courage to find out?

Interesting questions aren’t they? I don’t have instant, off-the-peg solutions as every business and every brand is different, but if you would like to have a chat about what could be your big data, big brand moment – Let’s talk.

Eugene Burns

 

Quotations and overview of the Amazon strategy are taken from Big Data: A revolution that will transform how we live, work and think, by Viktor Mayer-Schonberger and Kenneth Cukier, 2013.

 

 

 

24 Apr 2013
Design No Comments Permalink

Beyond creativity – designers can learn from great film directors

April 24, 2013 No Comments

There are many things designers can learn from film directors in producing designs that go beyond the givens of any creative brief, to create lasting solutions that can make strong statements in the marketplace. We’re not talking about purely commercial film directors like Christopher Nolan of course, but those that have produced lasting work that lives in the consciousness.

The Brandlogik team recently rewatched the French movie Irma Vep. Directed by Olivier Assayas and starring his soon-to-be wife Maggie Cheung as the Chinese movie star playing herself, Irma Vep is a movie about making a movie. With Truffaut alter ego Jean-Pierre Léaud playing the director of the film it’s hard not to think of this as a homage to Truffaut’s La Nuit Américaine.

Irma Vep is more than a homage. It’s a film about making a film and therefore very French and post-modernist in its intent. But this film is much more than that. It’s about the nature of creativity itself. About how you take some elements –such as maybe remaking Louis Feuillade’s Les Vampires, adding some understated sexuality in the catlike, latex-covered shape of a beautifully exotic Chinese movie star and mix in some French style and behind-the-scenes passion and intrigue.

[blockquote]Creativity is unique and comes from a singular vision that is more than the sum of its parts.[/blockquote]

There’s more to the creative process then just mixing up the elements to see what takes shape. There’s the thinking, the thought process, bref some real crafting that’s both innate and bloody hard work sometimes that creates something new – something that hasn’t existed before.

Creativity is unique and comes from a unique vision that is more than the sum of its parts. It creates new life and, when it comes to design, it’s something that’s so much more than style because it’s built on strong, logical ideas.

This film about filmmaking ends with a screening of the work of the absent filmmaker that is surprising, a little shocking, hilarious and totally unexpected. It’s certainly something you wouldn’t find in a Hollywood movie where box office rather than creativity counts even in the era of Nolan and his cronies.

Ideas and great creativity are always unexpected. They can even be astounding within the right context. You can go beyond the Designlogik of any brief and create something that stands alone. All designers need are clients with a vision and the belief that great design gives them the power to grow their business and a great creative advantage over the competition.

Eugene Burns

 

 

16 Apr 2013
Branding, Design, Marketing, Social Media, Transparent technology, Web No Comments Permalink

Our latest monograph – The future is now

April 16, 2013 No Comments

There’s certainly a lot of talk about the benefits that a Big Data approach can offer businesses of all sizes and in all sectors. What are you doing and where exactly are you going with your business and your brand? If you’ve got a strategy in place how do you measure that strategy and know that’s it’s a good one that’s worth following? Maybe you need to take some time to breathe and to think.

That’s why we put together our new monograph – to take a breathing space from the everyday and try to see what’s coming next. We thought we’d share our thoughts on branding, design, media and the opportunities that technology is bringing to us all – today and every day.

[blockquote]‘A big data approach to your brand and marketing activity let’s you see the future performance of your brand now rather than tomorrow. It gives you an advantage over your competitors you would be crazy not to take.’[/blockquote]

This approach is all about learning how the major internet businesses like Google, Facebook and Apple think more strategically and generally take a long-term view of their future business plans. But even if you’re a small business you can think in a more creative way about how you grow, get new customers and find new opportunities.

When you understand the underlying business trends that drive the digital economy, it’s possible to learn to embrace change and even to welcome tough, disruptive competition in your market. As long as you have a positive attitude and a little creative help from a friendly design and branding agency to give you a competitive edge.

[blockquote]‘And all you touch and all you see, is all your brand will ever be.’[/blockquote]

We’re living in interesting times and we’re not even at the end of the beginning of the current internet evolution. Wouldn’t you rather take advantage of the new technological innovations than end up being a casualty of change?

You can download The Future Is Now brochure and see what the fuss is all about and if you’re ready to be part of the future today, let’s talk.

Eugene Burns

 

10 Apr 2013
Advertising, Branding, Design, Video and TV, Work No Comments Permalink

Mad Men new season – dramatizing the creative process

April 10, 2013 No Comments

Having just returned from New York I would like to share some thoughts on the opening episode of the Mad Men new season. Warning: contains some spoilers for readers in the UK and Ireland.

In the first episode of Man Men series 6 there’s an interesting examination of the creative process intertwined in the lives of the advertising agency characters.

Early in the episode Don returns rejuvenated from a luxury winter break in Hawaii with Megan, paid for by his client Royal Hawaiian Hotel. Yet later in the episode when it comes to creating the next advertising campaign for the hotel, he allows his own emotions, his own inner inferno, to get in the way of finding a great creative solution.

Don’s past and present confusion gets in the way of the client’s brand so he fails to execute one of his killer presentations, much to the annoyance of Pete Campbell and Roger Sterling. His creative approach and his stapline ‘Hawaii – the jumping off point’ are so clouded by his own emotions that the voice of the brand and the brief itself is lost, and the great Madison Avenue Creative Director is all too visibly cast adrift in front of his disappointed client.

Don’s confusion is later contrasted with Peggy – now a senior copywriter at a rival agency of course – who is forced to come up with a new creative solution for a Koss headphones Superbowl spot, when the client gets nervous and wants to pull the advert at the last minute.

In contrast to Don, Peggy – who of course has learned so much from the master – is forced to work hard to find a stronger feature about the product that better dramatizes the brand.  And how does she find the solution? Not by looking within but by allowing the outside world to inspire her creative juices. The implication is that Peggy has grown to be a better creative by getting out of her own way and taking her creative thinking to a higher level.

There may be a lesson here for all designers and advertising creatives. Great work is not about you. It comes from finding out great things about your client’s business, or product, and getting out of the way to allow the truth to shine through to the users and the audience.

That’s not to say that there’s no room for personality in design and advertising. In fact personality is essential. It’s in the treatment – how you choose to use your skills to express the tone-of-voice of the brand. It’s the words you choose and the typeface that you use. It’s the colour, the definition and the character that you bring to the end result and what gives depth to the final work.

In many ways the creative process must be much the same as the scriptwriting process. With Dante’s Inferno echoing in your head, you may have trouble allowing long-established characters to find their true voice.

It’s this level of approach that makes the Mad Men new season something more than just another TV series. It sometimes knows when to creatively get out of the way and let the ideas and the characters speak for themselves.

Eugene Burns

27 Mar 2013
Branding, Design, Marketing, Web No Comments Permalink

Amazon and the A to Z of disruption

March 27, 2013 No Comments

You’re almost certainly aware that Amazon has had one of the fastest growths in internet history and become a worldwide superbrand – the digital equivalent of Coca-Cola. Amazon is essentially one of the first and most successful Big Data companies, in that it has used its technology to extract meaning from its huge data resources and above all act on the insights that the data makes available.

The Amazon brand is its technology and it seeks to position itself as ‘the world’s most customer-centric company.’ Features such as ‘Recommendations’ and ‘Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought’ have become paradigms for online commerce as well as the Amazon one-click and buying process. To trust the Amazon brand is to trust its technology.

To trust the Amazon brand is to trust its technology.

Amazon is of course the paradigm for online consumer delivery. I recently berated a bungling office furniture company for failing to deliver in a specific timeframe as, like you I’m sure, I’ve become so used to the Amazon process that anything less seems so much inferior.

Amazon customer service is essentially software driven and even if Amazon employees are not located in plush surroundings – we’ve all heard the stories of how they use doors for desks – the key point of Amazon service is that it normally just works seamlessly.

Core to the Amazon business, and therefore the brand, is the idea of the Digital Engine ‘a digital lever providing a significant advantage to outperform one’s competitors’

Amazon’s Jeff Bezos has outlined his three big ideas:

1. Digital enables limitless inventory

2. Digital boosts customer care

3. Digital allows high margin, lowest prices

And then there are the three As of the Amazon brand: Anything Anywhere Anytime that position Amazon as a world player without any recognizable frontiers.

But if haven’t been paying close attention to the business and restricted yourself to digging out the occasional bargain to place in your Amazon Shopping Basket and saving for later in the expectation that the price will drop, there’s lots more to ponder about the ubiquity of the Amazon brand and its future developments.

For a start Amazon are starting to become a player in the B2B sector with Amazon Supply. If you haven’t seen it take a look at the Amazon Supply site.

If you are in the B2B sector yourself how will you and your brand respond when the Amazon Supply delivery boxes start making inroads into the UK and European markets? Are your business and your brand ready to deal with the Big Daddy of Big Data and take them on at their own game?

Again if you haven’t been paying too much attention you may have noticed that LoveFilm now calls itself ‘an Amazon company’ right there under the logo. But have you seen what Amazon is doing in the film and media production sector with Amazon Studios?

Amazon is using the power of its technology-driven brand to make significant moves in a wide range of business sectors that have the potential to disrupt and reinvigorate those sectors with implications for businesses of all types regardless of size.

This is not the future, this is now. And I’m not even going to mention the computer tablet and publishing sectors where Amazon’s Big Data approach has already utterly changed everything for everyone in the market.

Is your brand ready to face competition from Amazon or another new player in your market that is ready to disrupt and change the terrain? Can you business and your brand stand comparison with an Amazon’s rock solid technology-driven positioning?

Of course the Amazon brand is far from perfect and its technological strength can also be perceived as a weakness, often revealing the company as a monolith beset by the all too human flaws of greed and wilful stubbornness.

If your business delivers a commodity or service of any kind, and especially if you deliver to your clients digitally, then Amazon is already your virtual competitor, no matter what market you’re in.

If your business delivers a commodity or service of any kind, and especially if you deliver to your clients digitally, then Amazon is already your virtual competitor, no matter what market you’re in.

The answer is that having a meaningful brand based on solid business principles and foundations is the best way to compete and be part of the disruptive process. To be a strong, recognizable and successful brand takes a lot of hard work, however, and a lot of skilful thought and design. But when you have to compete with the best in the world, you will find that all that hard work is worth it.

Eugene Burns

 

 

26 Mar 2013
Advertising, Branding, Design, Video and TV, Web No Comments Permalink

First Screening driven by great ideas

March 26, 2013 No Comments

‘The mobile is evolving as a primary screen for consumers.’ Mobile World Conference, Barcelona 2013

There was a time when we all got our news and even some of our values from our TV set – when most major news and sporting events were a shared, national, screen-based experience. Like many of you I no longer depend on TV alone. In fact TV is my second or even third screen. My first screen depends on the time of day or where I am. Second screening no longer applies.

Thinking back it’s almost four years since we’ve had a web TV that plugs right into our home network and we bought that TV standing in front of the exact same model in John Lewis while completing the Amazon check out on my iPhone.

Before breakfast or traveling my iPhone is my first screen. That’s where I not only first see my important emails of the day – and weed out the unimportant ones – but where I catch up with all my social media feeds finding out what’s happening in design, tech, sport and general world news before logging into my retina iPad where even on the move I’ll do some more detailed web browsing and check apps for business issues of the day.

For business and for pleasure my laptop and my desktop iMac are the first screens for pretty much everything and I expect you are like me in this respect.

Things have come a long way in just a few years and we’re still just at the beginning of what’s possible. Why does this matter?

[blockquote]First screening means now more than ever it’s the ideas that drive an insanely great design or marketing campaign.[/blockquote]

Designers have always designed for multiple formats and delivery channels. I remember back in my early days at McCann-Erickson reformatting full-page adverts for Peugeot was my first real studio job.

The difference is that now different devices and channels take and reinterpret the same artwork, the same imagery, and the same design. The measurement of success is in the engagement that the design delivers and not on the number of copies sold, or adverts screened.

The mobile device is starting to become a primary screen for viewing long-form video thanks to bigger and better screens, faster processors and connectivity and evolving consumer behaviour.

‘One out of three digital media consumption minutes takes place on a mobile channel.’ Source: comScore

First screening means now more than ever it’s the ideas that drive an insanely great design or marketing campaign. The freedom from the tyranny of format and the breaking out of the standard delivery channels means it’s the quality of the thinking that’s really on display. Great ideas can drive brand engagement now rather than multi-channel frequency.

Designers still need to deliver creativity and excellent thinking through imagery and copy while clients need to back and invest in that thinking if they want their brands to feature on that first screen where creativity is the star.

Creativity is the new rock and roll. So throw that TV into the swimming pool.

 

We’re a small team that delivers excellent creativity and brand insights with a plain speaking approach. Let’s talk.

 

14 Nov 2012
Advertising, Branding, Design, Marketing, Transparent technology, Work No Comments Permalink

The Shape Of Things To Come

November 14, 2012 No Comments

A few weeks ago I had a meeting with one of the major professional services companies. Client confidentiality means I won’t be able to tell you which one of course, but they’re world leaders in their field and are having serious difficulty executing a flexible international advertising campaign to promote the global reach and local depth of their brand. They were simply having problems deciding on an approach that’s right for them and that would get buy-in from the many stakeholders, regions and business sectors within the firm.

Having seen problems like this from an internal design and brand management viewpoint as well as from an external creative director’s point of view, it’s clear they’re very common in many organizations and need a considerable amount of thought and brand insight to solve effectively and creatively. Put simply they couldn’t see the wood for the trees.

There is no substitute for clear yet creative thinking when it comes to brand issues. The problem with many international brands is that they have too many conflicting interests, too much internal pushes and pulls to be able to implement quick, creative design and brand solutions. Major companies often do design and branding well, yet can’t act quickly or effectively enough to embrace inventive ideas to knock their clients socks off. They move more slowly than they should.

Large international firms need to think like smaller companies when it comes to branding and design. They need to be able to act at an individual level to make more impact in their marketing and reaffirm their credibility. Even when dealing with a large corporation or partnership we are all individuals and need to see the shape of personal elements in every brand. I know that this quick-acting, individual approach is easier to say than to implement but companies need to think and respond fast in a social media age.

I’m happy to tell you that the global partnership in question certainly listened to my ideas for the development of an advertising solution for their brand, and I look forward to seeing some of the results very soon, but there’s always a challenge in staying number one in your sector, and that challenge is the continuing need for fresh ideas and fresh thinking.

‘If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change,’ Italian author Giuseppe di Lampedusa said in his novel The Leopard, and that’s something that brand managers and marketing professionals really should always to bear in mind. It takes a lot of work to stay in the same place and in design and brand development this should never be overlooked.

What lessons are there then for you and your business from how major brands deal with brand and marketing issues? Firstly, if you’re not number one in your sector, you should see the relative lack of size and flexibility of your business as an advantage. You should be open to listening to good ideas and implement them quickly once you are certain of their value to your brand. Just be confident in their worth and find good designers and brand specialists to help you deliver them.

The other crucial lesson for all of us is that you should never rest or be content with your design, your brand positioning and how you develop your conversation with your customers and your users. There’s always something new to consider and to learn when managing your brand. Branding, design and social media are still relatively new tools and there are always fresh approaches and fresh ideas and thinking that can drive you in the direction of business growth, or make that growth much easier to reach.

Having helped several major companies successfully re-engineer their brand in the first dot com boom, it’s my view this new media revolution is much more than a bubble. This digital revolution is how business is now and the shape of things to come has finally arrived.

Everything is possible thanks to great technology and software provided by Apple and other firms and great transparent technology tools like Twitter and WordPress that allow you to communicate, publish and effectively reach your target audiences with more accuracy than ever before. We’re still right at the very beginning of a social media age, but unless you want your business to stay exactly as it is, things had better change.

Eugene Burns

11 Sep 2012
Branding, Design, Marketing, News, Social Media No Comments Permalink

Think social – further thoughts on the Apple brand

September 11, 2012 No Comments

In the first of these think pieces on the effectiveness of the Apple brand, I tried to paint a bigger picture of a technology-driven brand that is authentic because it delivers on what it promises, and its products are seen as highly effective tools for business and for managing your life.

It’s interesting to look at the sensory elements of the Apple brand as, certainly from the second coming of Steve Jobs in the late 90’s, Apple’s focus was more to Think Personal as well to Think Different.

The feeling that infused the brand from this period was the primary importance of not just the brand and technology experience, but in making that experience as personal as possible.

This can be seen in the ability to customize and personalize desktops in the Apple OS and the ability to choose the colour of the new iMacs, although my own first home machine was the ubiquitous bondi blue iMac. But this personalization of technology, nothing new itself when you think of the Sony Walkman, really started to work with the launch of the iPod – a personal music player you could personalize in almost every aspect.

This is the time of course when Apple became not just a major force in the music and entertainment industry, but one of the key players in the personal consumer market, often leading the way in a cluttered market with cutting edge products and services.

The real brand movement which we are experiencing today as the new iPhone 5 is launched, is that this personal element of the brand could lead the way for Apple to produce technology that would help create the social media landscape and add a social dimension to what is really an impersonal, new-age corporate brand.

I remember fighting for a long time fighting against buying an iPhone, as I used Apple computers all day at work, at that time only had a ten minute commute in Central London which is almost unheard of for most Londoners, and had a 17-inch work PowerBook and an Apple PowerBook at home. What could I possibly do with iPhone?

Yet here we see that social element of the Apple brand resurfacing again as it soon became clear that the iPhone was not just another Apple product, but one that represented much more, to the user and to the Apple brand.

It was through the iPhone and later the iPad that Apple was to help drive what we can call a Think Social brand and technology experience.

The Apple iPhone offered connectivity, but not just the connectivity that a phone, or even a Blackberry gives you, but the multi-touch connectivity of having access to almost all your technology and information, all the time and almost anywhere. It lets you stay in touch and touch others via technology in a way that had never been seen before.

You could say that Apple products, and by extension the Apple brand, helped create the social media age by providing the essential mobile devices which became the platform and the means for its emergence.

Without an iPhone and iTunes there would have been no podcasts and the big social media players like Twitter and Facebook would have had much less penetration as much of their new users are driven to their platforms through using smart phone technology. Mobile internet has created the personal stream of social media that need no longer be interrupted.

And here we have another part of the Think Social aspect of the Apple brand. Back in the late 80’s the cost of Apple computers was part of the brand experience. They weren’t really a personal computer, they were the only available computer for creatives and design professionals and as such users were an affluent, if sometimes counterculture, élite.

It’s interesting to note that Apple products are cheaper now than they have ever been in my lifetime and it’s the affordability of products such as the iPhone and the iPad that have helped make Apple a more successful, more profitable, and on certain levels, more social brand.

In spite of this Apple remains a distant, almost silent monolith that, especially in the post-Jobs era, has no unique defining voice. It is, more than most perhaps, a brand that speaks though its products and its technology, which could perhaps account for its seemingly unstoppable worldwide reach.

So Apple is a global brand that’s not itself particularly social yet provides the technology and the tools to allow a large part of the human race to become more social and connect meaningfully with others. That’s quite an achievement for a brand born in a garage, don’t you think?

What about you and your own business? How authentic is your business and your brand positioning? Is it time to Think Different and to Think Social?