We have an oppor­tu­nity to meet with a new client and it would help greatly if you could give us some infor­ma­tion. If you fre­quent the Dallas area cafeteria-​style restau­rants (Luby’s, High­land Park Cafe­te­ria, Furr’s, Golden Corral, etc). Take a moment and fill out our survey. We’re paying one lucky indi­vid­ual with a $100 gift card.

Thank you very much for your help!

Work­ing in the cre­ative world, you see a TON of pho­tographs. Find­ing the right hero image for a brochure means look­ing at some­times hun­dreds of the wrong ones. And who can think of more fun than search­ing for stock photos on the web? Can’t think of a better way to spend a day. That’s why when we see great pho­tographs, and great pho­to­graph sites, we want to point them out.

If you haven’t already, stop by and check out Boston.com’s The Big Pic­ture. Better yet, grab their RSS feed and down­load the pages that look inter­est­ing. Today’s fea­ture has some stun­ning shots of For­mula 1 racing. That’s the auto race that requires something other than a left turn.

Why do you think F1 racing is big around the world, but not in America?

Chocolate and peanut butter. Starsky and Hutch. Frylock and Meatwad. We think some things are better in teams.

Since 2006, Mar­ble­head has been about two things. Cre­at­ing a better cus­tomer expe­ri­ence and treat­ing our clients like we would want to be treated. Cus­tomer expe­ri­ence is one of those terms (like “consulting”) that can mean a few dif­fer­ent things. For us, it meant mar­ket­ing strat­egy and cre­ative design focused on making every inter­ac­tion a cus­tomer had with our clients as enjoy­able as pos­si­ble. Cus­tomer inter­ac­tion as a des­ti­na­tion. People antic­i­pat­ing and liking marketing con­ver­sa­tions. We take great pains in our areas of exper­tise to make this happen. Clients would ask what we could doto  extend this phi­los­o­phy into adver­tis­ing. Nada. That was one thing we had no exper­tise or train­ing in. I didn’t know that media had to be planned and bought. In fact, the clos­est thing I knew about adver­tis­ing what Bob Hoff­man had to say at the Ad Con­trar­ian. And that scared me.

Late last year an adver­tis­ing firm approached me about team­ing together to expand both our offer­ings. It would give them a chance to offer inter­ac­tive and direct mar­ket­ing and give us tra­di­tional adver­tis­ing exper­tise. So after lots of spare time fig­ur­ing out all the details, we are now part­ners with the adver­tis­ing agency Com­merce House. www.​com​merce​house.com.

The first thing we did was create a new web­site. Let us know what you think.

The Mar­ble­head Blog will con­tinue to pro­vide all the inter­est­ing things you’ve come to expect. But we are also tin­ker­ing with the lessons we’ve learned and our new part­ner­ship to make this blog even better. Look for some new posts coming up in the next week.

Hi-

We love our Mar­ble­head blog, but some­times work gets in the way of fun. It’s the car­di­nal sin of social media and we’ve com­mit­ted it. We have had some big changes come along Marblehead’s way and it con­sumed us for a bit. I’ll follow up with another post about that. But, we are now begin­ning to see the light ahead and will get back to blog­ging with a new con­tent strategy.

Thanks to all our vis­i­tors and thanks for the patience. We’re back on the wagon.

Yeah sure, Apple and a handful of other design focused companies do a pretty good job these days, but for jaw-dropping style that spans a generation, Bang and Olufsen takes the gold medal by a mile.

Their cre­den­tials? Let’s start with a small, super­fi­cial exam­ple: Bose makes luxury car stereos for high end Fords and VWs, B&O makes the stereo for the Audi R8, and Aston Mar­t­ian V12 Van­tage. (that’s better) Beyond that, their prod­ucts are often so dis­tinc­tive, they don’t put any badge on the front. If you have a Sony TV you can tell, because its a big silver logo right below the screen. If you have a TV made by B&O, you can tell because it looks like no other TV on earth… and because you’ll be broke after buying it.

That’s all very impres­sive stuff. But any new-​money, design obsessed brand with deep pock­ets can make crazy stuff. (Delo­rian anyone?) The reason B&O is design brand­ing roy­alty is they’ve spent the last 30+ years making prod­ucts with cut­ting edge tech­nol­ogy and design… and their design lan­guage has barely budged. You could place their 1970s turntable in a show­room along side their modern prod­ucts and have a hard time find­ing anyone who’d think it seems out of place. Their design aes­thetic for the last 30 years: min­i­mal lines and phyco futur­is­tic. It’s a bold strat­egy since most people don’t live in the space sta­tion from 2001, but it works for them. Here’s one of my favorite designs:

When I’m design­ing an iden­tity for a client, this is what I’m ulti­mately after. I try not to get caught up in the fash­ion of the moment or short term effect. I define brand­ing suc­cess as a com­pany designed so well, they remain aes­thet­i­cally rel­e­vant for at least 10 years.

Rebrand­ing is a huge plunge for a com­pany. Some­times it ends in dis­as­ter. But often, with the right focus and very few deci­sion makers, a rebrand posi­tions a com­pany for the future. Each year Rebrand.com finds the good ones and awards them. I high­lighted a few that grabbed my attention.

WebEx 

I always thought the WebEx globe and painted people was corny. They were trying to be hip and dotcom after every­one else had moved on. It reminded me of the 40 year-​old guy still trying to extend his col­lege days by partying-​till-​you-​puke every Sat­ur­day after­noon. At some point you have to grow up and become legit. With this rebrand, WebEx has left the dorm room, bought a suit, and is ready to be serious.

Brewhouse Beer

With the Brew­house rebrand, col­lege is exactly where it wants to be. In the crowded cheap beer market, Brew­house is hoping the “honest with attitude” ads will bring the just-turned-21 crowd into the convenience store to grab more Xbox fuel. While I’m a long way from my col­lege days, the ads made me laugh.

Mont Blanc Gourmet

If I could sum up the cur­rent trend in food indus­try brand­ing right now, it would be; “all about the ingredients.” Perhaps influ­enced by the organic craze a few years ago, com­pa­nies are break­ing apart their prod­ucts into its com­po­nent parts and high­light­ing them. Mont Blanc’s “your secret ingre­di­ent” does a great job of this.

What others did you like?

Traditionally, restaurant websites are synonymous with bad web design. Ugly layouts, poor image quality, and worst of all, music. Ugh. A tiny Dallas deli shows the big guys that simple and good is better than flash overload.

Jimmy’s food store is one of those neigh­bor­hood places that only the locals know about. One of those places that has been in the same loca­tion for 40 years (43 to be exact). While most things in Dallas get bull­dozed and rebuilt into the next shiny thing, Jimmy’s has remained. When big box gro­cery stores replaced all the indi­vid­u­ally owned stores, Jimmy’s remained. It’s one of those places serves the com­mu­nity rather than makes buck­ets of cash. That’s why I was aston­ished at their beau­ti­ful new web­site www.​jim​mys​food​store.com.

For those that don’t know me per­son­ally, I’m an usu­ally hard critic when it comes to web­sites. I believe that 99% of what’s out there is crap. Badly designed. Badly writ­ten. Badly coded crap. Going online to me is like going to the DMV. It’s nec­es­sary, but one of the least enjoy­able things a person can do. So when I run across excel­lence, I do a little dance of joy and share it with my friends.

Here’s what makes I really like about this site:

• The site cen­ters on the prod­uct. Jimmy’s sells food and you can tell that instantly. This site gives me no idea.
• Under­stand­ing this from the begin­ning, money was spent on pho­tog­ra­phy of the most impor­tant things, the food. The family pics are a great touch, but less impor­tant. In eco­nomic times like this, it’s great to see focus and priority.
• As a result, the menu pho­tog­ra­phy is beau­ti­ful. You have a great under­stand­ing of tit rather than the typ­i­cal PDF ver­sion most places have.
• The site reflects the family-​centric nature of the store. The store has been in the family for gen­er­a­tions, all of which you can see online. Even if you’d never been there, you can rec­og­nize that family is impor­tant at Jimmy’s.
• You know what you don’t see? Pages and pages of text. It’s not nec­es­sary. Even the his­tory of the store is done in bullet points.

Now, I would have chosen some­thing other than the stan­dard Ital­ian color palette, but my guess is that it was dictated to the designer and they did the best they could with it. A fan­tas­tic thumbs up to Rhonda Warren at Col­or­Box Design - www.​color-​box-​design.com for the work. Great job.

Contrary to Cheryl Crow, sometimes a change will not do you good. Designers and marketing experts have a natural desire to change things to keep them fresh. But sometimes the best possible customer experience is to keep what works.

I was sure my browser had lost its mind this after­noon when I launched Google Reader to catch up on my RSS feeds. What hap­pened to the color? Why don’t things look the same? I closed down and restarted and it still wasn’t look­ing right. That’s when I noticed the banner at the top explain­ing that Google had updated the design of Google Reader.

Old Google Reader

New Google Reader

The new google reader is bland, col­or­less, and not nearly as visu­ally appeal­ing as the older ver­sion. In the related arti­cle, they explain the rea­sons behind the changes:

Google is all about speed, both under the hood as well as in the user expe­ri­ence. So, in order to make Reader act and feel more speedy and respon­sive, we’ve removed some visual clut­ter, sim­pli­fied some fea­tures and given every­thing a bit more breath­ing room. 

My sug­ges­tion would have been to find a way to make things faster with­out taking away all the visual ele­ments. If speed is the only goal, this is the fastest load­ing web page.

So join­ing the Face­book redesign as both con­fus­ing and poorly done, we can add Google Reader as one for chang­ing and taking some­thing appeal­ing and useful and scal­ing it back to look like 1998 again.

Some­times the best thing to do is nothing.

If you’ve been focused on play­ing the new war­craft expan­sion, then you prob­a­bly missed the Motrin social media back­lash over the last week. I’ll recap you.

Motrin posts a new commercial to pro­mote their drug’s ben­e­fits to mommy’s:

Mommy blog­gers all over freak and call for the death of every­one involved:

and google blog search

Motrin then apol­o­gizes and takes the ad down: www.​motrin.com

What a crazy little crisis in the ad world. I’ve been catch­ing up on the genius of Mad Men lately and how dif­fer­ent it is today. There was no way for the adver­tis­ing to get such imme­di­ate and unfil­tered feed­back on one of their ads. It shows us 3 things:

1. Social Media has power. At least in the negative

The Motrin ad was imme­di­ately picked up by Twit­ter moms and cre­ated an imme­di­ate groundswell. That google blog search pro­duced over 34k blog arti­cles that men­tion the ad. Mul­ti­ply that times 10 for the read­ers who didn’t post. And remem­ber, the ad is a week old.

2. Some big brands still aren’t using social media to listen

Motrin could have tested this ad with some key users or influ­en­tial mommy blog­gers before release and beta tested the reac­tion. Lis­ten­ing is more impor­tant than speak­ing. Baby Jesus tells us that.

3. People care about advertising. But perhaps only if you offend them

If Mad Men has taught me any­thing, it’s that really good adver­tis­ing isn’t noticed. You don’t think about the ad, you only think about the hap­pi­ness (or what­ever desired ben­e­fit) the ad por­trays. Unless of course it back­fires. Then you’re the worst com­pany ever and I’m never buying your prod­uct again.

That is, until you have a headache from car­ry­ing your baby around.

There are two main (and one upcom­ing one) tools we use at Mar­ble­head to verify and adjust our web­site designs. These tools help val­i­date designs, iden­tify where the user is con­fused, or is acting dif­fer­ent than originally planned. They have helped tremen­dously on our own site changes as well as for our clients.

1. Google Analytics

First is the known stan­dard, Google Ana­lyt­ics. It’s a pretty robust tool for slic­ing up web traf­fic data, was a huge upgrade over their pre­vi­ous ver­sion, and in accor­dance with Google phi­los­o­phy, is free.

2. Crazy Egg

Second is a lesser known tool called Crazy Egg. Crazy Egg tracks where the users click on a web­site. It’s great for val­i­dat­ing place­ment of ads and deter­min­ing whether designs con­fuse or clar­ify infor­ma­tion for the user. A Crazy Egg report for our client The Van­Zant Group home­page looks like this:

Which shows that the main place people go is the About Us page. Pretty typ­i­cal for a relationship-​based con­sult­ing firm. We are using this design to influ­ence the 2.0 ver­sion of the site. Cus­tomers are telling us what works and what doesn’t.

3. Yahoo Web Analytics

The newest tool will be Yahoo Web Ana­lyt­ics. Why should you care about Yahoo’s tool? Is it the same as Google? Nope. And you should care if you need some­thing sooner than day old data. Yahoo will be a great option for clients when you need real-​time data. You can see how ads and designs per­form as cus­tomers inter­act with the site. Yahoo will also allow cre­at­ing cus­tomized reports since the raw data is avail­able to slice (as opposed to Google’s aggre­gated data. You can’t break it down dif­fer­ently than they already have). Will Yahoo’s power appeal to every­one? No, but it cer­tainly pro­vides a way to get faster feed­back on higher traf­fic sites. It’s coming soon…

Thanks to egghead Eric T. Peter­son for demys­ti­fy­ing the math. It’s not all BS like my friend Bob Hoff­man thinks!