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Eco Luxury: Not to Scale, Yet

My big advice to Nau 2.0: Charge more for your clothes. And start as small as you can.

A few months ago, I wrote a post on the rise of Indie and Eco Luxury, and one of the hero companies of Eco Luxury that I mentioned was Nau. They were one of the first attempts at creating a luxury brand that forcefully marketed ecological, sustainable, and stylish clothing through online and direct retail stores.

Sadly, due to a lack of venture capital funding Nau was forced to shut their retail stores and sell off all of their stock at a discount. There's been much talk in the blogosphere about what killed Nau v1.0:

Their unusual, I mean novel, retail model. Nau stores generally carried one size of each style and encouraged store visitors to have their purchases shipped to their home instead of buying them in the store. Critics have noted that many luxury fashion purchases are often made on whim, and the inability to easily carry a purchase out could have been a negative for the buying experience. (I personally didn't care when I had made an purchase there, but then again, I'm not really a luxury shopper.)

Their all-Flash Web site. Nau.com, as much as I love it from a branding perspective, was not created in a manner that made it easy to shop and had weak user experience. When the brand launched, some of my designer friends had hammered on the site design as an example of design trumping usability, which is definitely a bad place to be for a design-oriented brand that focuses on function and form.

Their oversized ambition regarding audience demand. Nau's business plan hinged on continued rounds of investor financing to ensure their continued growth into more retail locations. This is what really spiked Nau's ambition, when you boil all of this down. Instead of fostering an audience through their Web site and then growing that online audience into local retail, where demand had been generated, Nau was looking to expand into new locations even as they were discussing shutting their doors. My neighborhood of Fremont in Seattle was the destination for one of those new locations.

I find it fascinating that a company that wanted to live, eat, sleep, and breathe sustainability in clothing production, distribution, and sales practices didn't launch their business by only selling through the Internet, or intentionally limit their market by starting very exclusive before mass-producing their line and attempting to go big retail. Millions of dollars were wasted in proving that without a strong online customer base, a compelling retail experience in a few upscale markets isn't quite enough to keep the doors open.

Had Nau offered a smaller product line that was made to order and was perhaps more exclusive in both price point and retail placement, my gut tells me that they would have organically created a group of loyalists that would have evangelized the brand when they dove into the mainstream retail market as their own storefront.

Small pioneering eco-luxury brands such as Mink Shoes took about as long as Nau's lifespan to get off the ground, and still haven't achieved any major economies of scale. But they're profitable, and resell through many top retailers. A recent article in Fast Company echoes similar sentiment regarding the need to find sustainability through selling small quantities of green products in the luxury market. You won't see Barney's selling 2,000 of the same pair of eco-friendly shoes. Eco Luxury has a long, long way to go if it's going to scale to the mainstream in any meaningful way.

Hindsight is 20/20 here. And luckily, Horny Toad has swooped in and purchased the Nau brand and legacy, along with much of the original staff, to give it another go. Here's hoping that with this new financial backer, Nau 2.0 will be able to create a sustainable business practice through actual clothing sales that matches the deep philosophical roots that underpin their products.

So, back to what I said at the start of all this...

Okay, Nau 2.0: Now that thousands of your loyal customers have jumped up and down and told you how much we want you to stick around, I don't think we'll mind paying a little more for your clothes -- especially if that will allow you to continue donating 5% of each purchase to charity.

If you're going to try and keep the luxury mantle on your products and your philosophy untouched, that's one of the few ways to keep an edge on the dozens of other fashion brands that are now rolling out eco-friendly lines alongside their usual unsustainable practices.

And we'll forgive you for the missteps along the way... just be sure to be a little smarter about what you're doing this time.

Trying to Solve a Wicked Problem?

When you work as a professional in the area of solving problems for clients, no matter what your discipline, there's rarely a roadblock you run up against that can't be overcome through collective brainpower or sheer brute force.

Most designers would be loath to concede defeat in the face of a client need. We thrive on challenges that require all of our wits to surmount, either by solving a difficult problem with an elegant design solution, or reframing the problem to probe the thinking behind it and come up with a new problem to solve properly. Wrong audience, business, message, media: no problem. Just adjust these dials, push a button or two, and we've recalibrated the machine for maximum throughput. Press "print" or "go live" and all will be well in the state of Designopolis.

Once you start playing with the big corporations, however, you aren't solving simple problems anymore. Instead of digging a hole to plant your tree, you're asked to move a mountain, spoonful by spoonful, to the other side of the bay. And while you're at it, can you raise customer satisfaction in the 24 to 40 age bracket by 20 percent and sell $2 million more of our product line, and pronto? Different goals and needs become tangled together. What you as a designer can control, and what your client controls, become contingent. Insert a wicked problem here, and it'll all go haywire.

Wicked problems. Big, thorny, gnarly problems. The kinds of problems that drive our creative industries to sleepless nights, burning with their own sort of dangerous energy, morphing over time and confounding marketers left and right.

The idea of "wicked problems" was coined by Horst Rittel, a theorist of design and planning and M. Webber. (See the full Wikipedia entry here.) I've copied Rittel and Webber's list of wicked problem criteria here from Wikipedia because they can't really be paraphrased, and while they're related to social policy planning, as you read through this list some previous clients you've worked with and the problems they were trying to solve might bubble to the surface of your mind:

• There is no definitive formulation of a wicked problem.


• Wicked problems have no stopping rule.


• Solutions to wicked problems are not true-or-false, but better or worse.


• There is no immediate and no ultimate test of a solution to a wicked problem.


• Every solution to a wicked problem is a "one-shot operation"; because there is no opportunity to learn by trial-and-error, every attempt counts significantly.


• Wicked problems do not have an enumerable (or an exhaustively describable) set of potential solutions, nor is there a well-described set of permissible operations that may be incorporated into the plan.


• Every wicked problem is essentially unique.


• Every wicked problem can be considered to be a symptom of another problem.


• The existence of a discrepancy representing a wicked problem can be explained in numerous ways. The choice of explanation determines the nature of the problem's resolution.


• The planner has no right to be wrong (planners are liable for the consequences of the actions they generate).

While scientists have been spending years trying to develop various tactics to break down and expound upon wicked problems to derive positive change, we as designers can't easily engage with wicked problems -- that is, without entering into a client-designer relationship without both parties being aware that the problem is wicked and that we can only define success as a specific type of improvement agreed upon by both parties. Without calling out the complexity of a problem before engaging with a client, and being aware that you can't "solve it," you can't easily escape failure. This is why marketing is both an art and a science. You can quantify your goals and your previous actions, but only hope to predict the outcomes of your current and future actions, based on a snapshot of your audience's needs that are fluid, at best.

When I first read this list, a wicked problem for designers seemed to fit these criteria neatly:

Being asked to steer public opinion regarding a complex societal problem to sell a product. Hello, greenwashing. Social responsibility marketing, or any kind of marketing that is hinged on "changing the world for the better," really, is a function of a wicked problem. This is why there's hypocrisy inherent in promoting incremental improvement towards an idealistic goal of reduced environmental impact for, say, a plastics corporation. I could go on and on regarding this subject, but I'll leave it here with the knowledge that my thinking alone won't make a major dent in this problem. Marketing products through social responsibility requires reductive thinking on the part of the marketer and the market, which doesn't always indicate positive change from the requested action on the part of the customer.

The following didn't seem like a wicked problem at first, but it's definitely indicative of some of these criteria and hard to overcome:

Being asked to create belief in a company's actions when the customer's desired experience is never acknolwedged. If you are asked to motivate consumers to act based on a poor product experience, it's going to be an uphill fight. The rules change monthly, if not daily, based on customer behavior prompted by variables you can't control. Designers can't solve these types of problems without systemic change by the client, and can only effect positive change by attempting to foster alignment across all parties in the long term -- and hoping your competitors don't move to entrench their relationships with said audience at the same time. This type of situation requires designers to have discussions with potential clients about doing more than a marketing campaign. It requires a systemic gutting of how that company approaches their customer experience to achieve real success. Otherwise, you're just moving the needle positively in one area while the other ones plummet.

You'll notice that posing any type of positive solution to these wicked problems fall outside the domain of what designers can usually control. And nowadays when a client comes to you, asking for a solution to a problem that can't really be solved, only improved, it usually requires reframing the problem on a grand scale -- reaching your hands into the mechanisms of their organization to point out where the real problems may lie. This can be a scary place for a designer to operate, as it isn't always our core competency. Also, as marketing can be very reductive -- Universal Selling Proposition? Three product pillars in the body copy? -- I would argue that any type of reductive thinking will actually worsen a wicked problem unless it's grounded in a very sophisticated long-term plan that strings together those marketing nibbles into a holistic, long-term pattern that generates meaningful change.

The Three Fundamentals of Creative Strategy, Pt. 6

Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5.

Now that we've worked through some of the key approaches to formulating business, marketing, and tactical strategies for your clients -- and how those form the frame around your creative strategy -- I thought it would be valuable to include a few points about how to distill your marketing insights into compelling creative communications.

Think outside the box, but inside the strategy.

As a designer, there's nothing I love more than launching into space after reading a creative brief, brainstorming solutions for the client's needs. But that brainstorm should never go off into deep space, never to return. I know it's bad etiquette to edit during brainstorms, so I try to let every idea have its due... at first. But when you're culling those ideas down to what will become solid concepts to put in front of the client, you have to be ruthless. Anything that doesn't fit the strategy and the key insight the client approved in the brief, or modifies that insight into something completely fresh and new, needs to be placed in the parking lot and saved for future use. (Unless your brief was wrong in the first place, which means you should back up a few paces and make sure you landed the right insight to back up your creative work.)

Firmly fix your concepts on a properly told story.

You know they want your vacuum cleaner because it has a sexy design, it lives at a slightly lower price point than the competition, and the HEPA filter makes it easy to clean up dog hair. Yawn. Don't tell me the details. Show me how it's going to change my life. Find a story that communicates this seed feeling to me. Then hammer on it mercilessly. Again, if you don't have a story that matches your key insight, you need to step back and rethink where you're at.

Don't move away from a key insight or position too quickly. You might piss off your clients and your audience.

As you develop creative concepts in a series, don't be too hasty to bring in something new. There's a major piss-off factor that happens when you iterate insights about your brand too quickly. It usually just means that you landed on the wrong insight, which is a kind of weakness that consumers can smell on the wind.

You won't lose a client because your key insight over a year or two doesn't continue to hold. Audience behavior shifts over time, based on a number of factors that corporations and designers can't easily control. But you will lose a client straight out of the gate if your key insight fails to hold up. It means that the foundations of your house were faulty to begin with, and somewhere along the way, due diligence wasn't exercised. So be sure that if you are going to make a client recommendation, the tires have been kicked enough times that you don't have to fear running out of air as you pull onto the highway.

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Now that you understand your client's business logic, their overall marketing needs, and what tactics you're going to employ based on your audience behavior, you're ready to create properly positioned creative concepts. At this point, it may seem like your work is going to be bulletproof, but we're only halfway home. You've got to execute an effective piece of marketing communications! Thankfully, that's the lion's share of what we get paid for, and in many ways, what we'll always need to do best to retain our clients.

The Three Fundamentals of Creative Strategy, Pt. 5

Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.

Great creative strategy always starts with a clear articulation of a business problem, and a rational strategy for solving it. This is the outer layer of the onion that peels away to expose a marketing strategy. Let's talk about how you apply your marketing strategy and your audience insights to generate tactics that sing.

Based on how you answered your top three questions in Part 4 of this series, you have the answers that you need to select your tactics. So, let's flip those questions around and use them as the proper guide to discuss the thinking that should help shape your tactical marketing approach.

Tell your audience what they want to hear, based on how they feel.

You've determined some key understandings about your audience base. Now distill that material into one key insight that will make them pay attention. Ideally, you have to be able to say this in one sentence (or less) to succeed in selling your client and your shareholders.

In the realm of financial services, think about MasterCard: "Priceless." Or Citi: "Live Richly." Or way back when Washington Mutual knew what they were doing: "More Human Interest." Each of those key insights was an embodiment of how they understood their audience needs. They are all ways of making a dull, droll, somewhat cutthroat industry foster a human connection with their audience. (Reading that previous sentence over again, I'm sounding pretty jaded.)

I'm not saying you always need to come up with some catchy phrase for your client. You just need to know what human insight drives your tactics. Some clients can hand the appropriate insight to you on a platter, and save you plenty of work. If you have a less sophisticated client, or you're being hired to generate this insight, you will need to include this key insight in the brief, or you're taking a big risk.

Talk to your audience where they'll pay the most attention.

Once you have the insight nailed, you go back to your research about where your audience lives and breathes.

If they're business travelers, you could hit them in the taxi, in the airport, on business television, on those little coffee cup sleeves.

If they're consumers, you may recommend redesigning their packaging based on behavioral research and focus groups.

If your audience likes to spend a ton of time online, you could develop a seeding strategy for bloggers, fostering two-way communication between your corporation and your customer base.

Of course, all of these thoughts will dovetail with previous efforts your client has made, and the statistics about how they have performed.

In the good old days, we used to talk about "above the line" communications (a.k.a. television, print, and other high-profile awareness-generating mediums) and "below the line communications" (direct mail, in-store sales, training, anything focused on fostering sales). Nowadays, there is no line. Since we're talking about fostering great customer experiences that lead to long-term relationships with brands, every single customer interaction could lead to a positive or negative impression of a company and its products and services. If a client comes to you saying they want to sell 100,000 more bags of chips a month, you can't just say to run some ads and call it a day. Your approach needs to be multilayered and more sophisticated, taking into account both traditional one-way media communications (such as advertising, collateral, branding) and two-way media communications (such as compelling interactive, social networking, blogging, thought leadership, in-person dialogue).

So while it's easy to tell a company that they need to get in front of 1 million eyeballs to generate 10,000 sales, it's not the appropriate answer anymore. I can't imagine walking into a client's office and advocating that kind of solution without being roundly laughed at. As consumers, we expect dialogue with brands. We know we're in control of the game and have a real voice in the marketplace. Online, your voice can carry just as much weight as 100,000 impressions of a banner advertisement, or more.

Assume the audience won't hear it the first time. Or the second. Or...

Another attribute of your audience research should be focused on how you can craft your communication strategy to surround the right people at the right point in the sales process with the right message. It's no longer "one size fits all" communications that can accomplish every single goal with one swing of the hammer. Be smart about how each touch fosters progress through your sales process, while at the same time, being aware that your customers may only get message 2, 4, and 7 out of your grand media scheme -- meaning that each creative communication should always hit home the key insight and provide some of the support necessary to foster the right kind of experience and prompt some level of future interaction.

Test, test, test. And then test some more.

Return on investment should dictate every move you make in the marketplace. Don't ever put a tactic on the table, such as a long run of television spots, or a grandiose series of online ads, without factoring iteration and improvement into the process. Due to up-to-the-second metrics on interactive properties, clients expect adjustment on the fly. And be prepared to kill a buy midstream or shift media or money to other channels if they don't perform at the right cost per acquisition. Unless your goals include some measure of thought leadership or more favored brand presence, don't think about pouring more cash into "love bombs" or other forms of sheer goodwill without the research to back up the long-term ramifications of your actions.

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In the final part of this series, I'll share some broad guidelines to help your marketing insights take the appropriate form in compelling marketing communications.

The Three Fundamentals of Creative Strategy, Pt. 4

Read Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

Great creative strategy always starts with a clear articulation of a business problem, and a rational strategy for solving it. This is the outer layer of the onion that peels away to expose a marketing strategy. In this post, I'm going to detail the key questions that comprise the guts of a high-level marketing strategy and the seeds of both your creative strategy and marketing tactics.

Marketing Strategy at a Glance

Based on our business needs, what actions should we take in the market to better sell our products or services? From the corporation's point of view, this often boils down to bottom-line impact, moving the needle by a point or two. For designers, this business need must be clothed in a human insight to have any lasting effect on the market.

When embarking on a marketing plan, the following questions need to be addressed and always in this order. Otherwise, you're throwing tactics at the wall like spaghetti.

1. What does the audience want to hear from this company? Is what the company wants also what the audience wants? Before you can propose a strategy, you need to know that the audience is receptive to such messaging. And if they aren't, you need to come back to the client with solid research to indicate the direction they should take.

2. Where does the audience want to hear it? Where does the audience live, breathe, and communicate? Where they live, work, and seek distraction, as well as online destinations where they congregate -- and how much time they spend in those different locations -- are all fair game.

3. What customer problem does this approach solve? Where's the real customer pain you're addressing? If you're creating a pain and then solving it for a customer, then you're going to have a harder row than stepping into your audience's view with something fresh that fulfills a tangible need.

It's important to note that these questions are the core of both your marketing plan and your creative brief. And often all the answers can be found through informal research.

The Importance of (In)Formal Behavioral Research

The questions above can be answered in a number of ways, but most often it requires some level of research. And by research, I'm not talking about 50,000 surveys and heavy focus groups over a period of months around the United States. I'm describing observing your audience in their domain, either through spending some time where they congregate, or doing some anthropology by easing your way into their work environment to gauge how things appear from their point of view. This can be accomplished by engaging with a formal research partner, but in the case of most projects, there isn't time or budget to do so.

So, in lieu of hiring a professional, I do the following.

Spend time in retail environments with the customers. I go out to stores where my client's products are sold and watch every little detail: how people make choices between multiple products, what they may say aloud, whether they interact with salespeople and the quality of their interactions. Designers nowadays are asked to address the overall experience of engaging with a brand, and the sum of these interactions can often give an indication for why people aren't acting in a manner that the corporation would like. The audience is always in control. My rule of thumb is that if I see a behavior repeated 4 to 5 times across multiple stores, it's probably an indication of a much larger concern -- especially if those behaviors are happening across multiple geographies.

Spend time watching how your customers behave online, and if they complain about their on- and off-line experiences. If you can get metrics from your client, combine them with how customers are reacting on wikis, blogs, forums, Facebook, and Twitter. Marry up trends in your Web site statistics, such as fall-off in transactional processes, with real quotes about actual problems that can be solved. Treat every complaint like gold from heaven. If your customers aren't complaining, they probably aren't giving you strong insights.

Do a task analysis. Task analysis allows you to step into the environment of your key audience members and observe how their specific needs can be fulfilled by a the features of a product or service. Ideally, you'd work this kind of research into your agency fee, and a task analysis can help bolster and refine your general behavioral research while also contributing to the development of, say, a complex Web system.

Listen very closely to the client's point of view about their audience. I always read the client's provided research and mine it for insight before going into the world to validate. Even if your client provides you with all the answers, I think it's our responsibility to see if there are any areas in the margin that we can scribble in a little more insight. Designers are intuitive thinkers that can sense the emotional undercurrent of a person's dialogue about, say, a bar of soap. Teasing out those details provide the shape of how our audience is behaving at this moment in time, and what they expect out of any kind of corporate communication. Sometimes your audience is moving so quickly that how they felt six months ago isn't an accurate snapshot of where they are now -- and where they are headed tomorrow.

The following is a gut check that I always apply at the end of research.

See what can and can't be controlled in the sales process. Ever been asked to sell more product when the product really isn't very good, or when you can't control the customer's experience in the store? When doing research, you need to be aware of what you can actually accomplish. You may need to share with the client that their goals are unreasonable, and propose a sturdier, more realistic course of action.

Until They Pay, Keep Your Research Close to Your Chest

Keep in mind that working through this kind of research, especially before you've been paid a fee, is something that you should parcel out to the client very carefully. Depending on the scale of the project, this kind of research and analysis can take a good number of days, and time is money for any design professional.

I recommend that you determine the depth of your research in advance of agreeing to respond to the client proposal or request, and try to keep it to a budget. When I aim for a major piece of business, I dive hard into the research and try to come up with a strong insight before determining any course of action. If the project is at a much smaller scale, those insights may have to wait until they've signed the work order and we've started in on the creative brief.

Once you've collected this information, and you have distilled it into the key themes or trends that indicate a strong support to the business problem, you're ready to talk about marketing tactics, which will follow in our next installment.

Ecotagging: Fostering Transparency for Sustainable Business

Consumers now expect sustainability and ecological sensitivity to be factored into the cost of manufacturing and selling consumer goods. Corporations such as Patagonia, through their Footprint Chronicles, and Timberland, with their nutrition label for social responsibility, have started a major trend that pulls back the veil on the apparel industry, making us aware of the major demands that the textile industry put on our world. It's not enough to just offset your purchases. Through our purchasing decisions, we can alter how the industry operates.

The EcoTag for apparel, shown below in a draft format, was designed as a prototype to make sustainability factors more transparent for purchasing decisions across all brands -- not just these brave few who are striving to lead the industry. The ultimate goal of the EcoTag is to incent corporations to make their sustainability measures accountable to their customers. “Sustainability grading” or other methods of ranking products, derived from ecotagging, would create new ways for customers to evaluate the value of a product, while forcing corporations that have since been uninterested in bringing sustainability practices to their businesses to change their behavior.

The front panel of the tag displays the standard SKUs for a product, as well as the costs of offsets and recycling that have been factored into the product price.

The back panel of the EcoTag gives a view into how a piece of apparel was sourced, produced, and shipped, as well as the average carbon cost and whether the clothing is organic, recycled, and/or biodegradeable.

Ideally, the tag would be resized, printed, and affixed to goods in a way that had minimal impact on the product’s carbon footprint.

Without an industry-wide standard for this type of information, it will continue to be difficult for consumers to make educated decisions about what they purchase and how their purchases will influence the world. With proper education of the consumer at point of purchase, the latent waste of the textiles industry may be reduced and ideally replaced with more sustainable options.

Download a one-page PDF summary of this piece at this link: http://www.davidsherwin.com/EcoTagForApparel.pdf.

If you're interested in helping with this endeavor, please feel free to contact me at david at davidsherwin.com.

The Three Fundamentals of Creative Strategy, Pt. 3

Read Part 1 and Part 2.

Great creative strategy always starts with a clear articulation of a business problem, and a rational strategy for solving it. This is the outer layer of the onion that peels away to expose a marketing strategy -- or a sales strategy, or a need to retool existing products or services due to customer feedback, etc.

To forge the right approach, quantify the business problem, qualify the competition, and distill what you've learned to show understanding of their need. This post talks about qualifying the competition and distilling what you've learned.

Qualify the Competition and How It Shapes the Problem

After the client presents the business problem and you ask necessary questions to understand its context, look at everything you can find that frames the problem from the competitor's point of view.

Clear business strategy is crucial for us designers in presenting proposals or participating in a pitch, where clients may intentionally refrain from disclosing key information to see how much you can glean and intuit from the scraps scattered across the media and the Internet.

You need to sniff out the business reasons for specific marketing initiatives through client interviews and research in order to ensure that you're making the most appropriate strategic decisions to solve their business problem.

You also need to show that you understand the world that your client lives in, understanding the trends that shape their industry.

This is different from traditional market research, which would live in your marketing strategy.

This is knowing which competitors are privately held, and sometimes more nimble, versus publicly traded. Which products in their industry are selling the best, and why. What the analysts from Forrester and other trending firms are saying about your industry category. What the Wall Street Journal noted in their most recent column on your corporate outlook. What is going on locally and globally on a cultural level that could have an impact on your business.

All these elements shape the world view that your client holds. Being able to present this kind of information, peppered through your ongoing communication, lets your client know that you appreciate where they're coming from -- and helps to support your creative strategy from a business perspective.

Distill What You've Learned to Show Understanding

The best trust-building exercise with a new client is reflecting back to them what they said, in an intelligent manner, with a few key learnings that they may not be aware of.

Whenever you write a proposal for a new project, you should begin the document with a narrative articulation of the client's business case and current strategy. This shows to the client that you understand their business needs at a high level, and any marketing recommendations that may follow are derived directly from their needs.

Always try to simply answer Who? What? When? Where? and Why? The How? is always proposed through what follows the business strategy: our marketing strategy.

As you craft this paragraph or two, be aware of your audience. As such, I make it as simple and quick to understand as possible. I always pretend, as I'm writing, that the CEO of the company could get their hands on this document. Besides, don't you want the CEO signing off on the dotted line and handing you that nice big project?

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Future posts in this series will talk about how to leap from the business problem to your creative solution through marketing strategy and tactics.

The Three Fundamentals of Creative Strategy, Pt. 2

See Part 1 here.

Great creative strategy always starts with a clear articulation of a business problem, and a rational strategy for solving it. This is the outer layer of the onion that peels away to expose a marketing strategy -- or a sales strategy, or a need to retool existing products or services due to customer feedback, etc.

To forge the right approach, quantify the business problem, qualify the competition, and distill what you've learned to show understanding of their need. Let's talk about quantifying the business problem in this post.

Quantify the Business Problem(s)

New clients can articulate a wide range of business needs, but most often, their business requires short-term sales generation and stable, long-term growth in revenue that leads to profit.

Short-term sales are contingent on tactical marketing decisions. Long-term sales require a holistic view of all marketing communications and a full awareness of the client's brand equity and its increase in value over time. Solving a long-term business problem often requires making large assumptions, and since they are often not in your direct control, your marketing solutions will require some measure of flexibility.

Even if a client walks in the door requesting an awareness-generation campaign that has no sales metrics, it's inevitable that in the long-term view, they need to make money from selling their soda or flat-panel TVs.

With this in mind, I try to strip away the tangibles from a client request -- we need a new identity, help us improve our advertising -- and work backward into what business need is driving their request. I always try to understand how they arrived at this decision, and what needs to happen after the decision in the short and long term to ensure it has an impact.

Here's how some of these client requests can be translated from tactical requests into business needs, and then attacked as creative challenges.

If it's a short-term problem (1-3 months): I need to sell 5,000 loaves of bread by May 31st.

Why? Because I am $100,000 short on revenue this quarter and I need to fulfill our budget objectives to maintain our profit margin.

Why is this valuable to know? It allows us to determine if there are more creative approaches to bringing in the million dollars in revenue. Could we sell more pastries and dinner rolls along with the loaves of bread? Creative thinkers are good at thinking around business challenges to find these novel approaches.

If it's a long-term problem (4-12 months): I want to launch three new MP3 players over the next year and gain a 6% share of the MP3 market in sales, while raising our brand equity by 10%.

Why? We've lost 20,000 customers to our largest competitor in this space and our research has shown that our brand equity has decreased by 4 points due to our competitor's behavior. If this continues, we will take a net loss that may require selling off this portion of our business.

Why is this valuable to know? Knowing the reasons behind their request creates an opportunity to do due diligence. Can their business problem be solved with marketing alone? Over the long-term, what activities from both a business and a marketing perspective would be necessary to forge a clear plan of attack?

Remember to be respectful in how you ask clients for this information. Often, they are in trouble when they ask for your help, and want you to approach their request as an opportunity (a positive challenge), not as a problem.

The Three Fundamentals of Creative Strategy, Pt. 1

This is the era of design as more than just a strategic business initiative -- it's a way of life and a method of bringing creative thinking to rational, left-brained business professionals.

With the current shift from design as a decorative function to design as a business requirement, designers have been forced to equip an arsenal of tools that go beyond what we'd traditionally call design. As such, we designers have been appending the word "strategy" to everything that we do, perhaps in the belief that it creates a higher-level business orientation to our often intuitive decision-making process. Brand strategy. Content strategy. Design strategy. Interaction strategy. Media strategy. We've developed a strategic nomenclature that is like peeling back the layers of an onion. The list goes on and on and on.

But design within marketing as a core business function only has three fundamental strategies. These are what our clients recognize as indispensable foundations for any creative project, though they aren't all "creative" in the traditional sense. And design strategy can't exist without them.

1. Business Strategy

This is big picture thinking that encompasses the most important questions for any corporation: cash flow, product creation and distribution, and overall operations. Marketing strategy and tactical strategy fall out of overall business strategy and support the overall business needs.

To make a bold generalization: this is the area that designers often impact the most, with the least desire of input by the business principals. After all, we have BFAs, not MBAs.

2. Overall Marketing Strategy

Based on our business needs -- which may be informed by marketing -- what actions should we take in the market to better sell our products or services?

This is an aggregate view of tactics that can be taken and their intended reactions in the market at large, concerning long-term brand equity and value as well as short-term sales gains. Most designers want to own this space, as they can predict and control each project that they engage.

3. Tactical Marketing Strategy

What is the approach that governs each individual action that we need to take, and in what channel(s)? This is where we get to do the tangible design work, and reap the rewards of implementing a project properly. Without the proper tactics, you won't have creative that makes an impact.

Over the coming weeks, I'm going to outline a taxonomy of how our creative strategies, as designers, can be properly forged by these three fundamental marketing strategies. I'm also going to outline some baseline rules that can govern what creative strategies you choose, what you outsource to partners, and what you decline to include in your core set of capabilities that you share with your clients.

Common Mistakes in Marketing Luxury Brands

Don't associate your products with other brands unless they perfectly mirror a lifestyle.

High-end brands are being extended across categories -- and faltering.

Brands that offer services and brands that contribute to lifestyles (such as Starbucks) can't cross over into luxury goods, and vice-versa, without thinning their brand. Can you imagine a Starbucks BMW? A Godiva Porsche? No way. There's no parity between them. But I believe in the Eddie Bauer edition of the Ford Explorer... barely.

Everyone has their own internal weights and measures when it comes to rationalizing a purchase, but I think it's fair to say this: A jacket is a jacket and is not a car. Don't overreach your category, your brand space, and what your customers will believe. It's better to cross-promote your products to another brand's audience than to badge your products incorrectly or mash your products up to try to be unique.

Don't price based on cost of goods. Price on aspirations.

People are more likely to rocket due to perceived value, not real value.

The luxury category has fragmented by budget. Audiences are asked to pay closer and closer attention to nuanced categories, with the idea that they'll always aspire to a product out of their budget.

This is known as "rocketing" in a product category, see the fantastic book Trading Up for an in-depth treatise about New Luxury or "masstige" marketing and how it differs from the old mindset about luxury goods and how the market is evolving luxury into new forms.

Don't tell a completely new story about your brand when you've already staked your ground.

If you didn't start close to the luxury space, you'll never create cachet around your product without expending a vast quantity of capital to change perception. Start a new brand if you really want to get in the game.

Don't make more! Limited quantity equals controlled demand.

Easy to understand in theory, but very hard to pull off when people start beating down your door waving fat wads of cash. Companies often cave and produce more when they should just have a plan in place as to how they can extend that demand into a new (similar) offering.

And last, but certainly not least:

Don't horse it up.

"Less is more," more or less. With clean design and smart production tactics it's relatively easy to convey an aura of luxury and exclusivity.

This is the expected first route for a designer to take with a luxury product, so don't think you have to beat a path through the weeds to engage your audience and emerge with something too novel from a branding perspective. Does it really convey the right feeling if the design is incredibly busy? Unless you're conveying some level of sophistication, your audience will have trouble understanding why they should pay 2 to 10 times the price of the competition.