Writing Brand as Patterns and the evolution of experience design – In conversation with Patrick Newbery

MS: I remember coming for my interview at Method, full of chutzpah saying “I've got this idea which is really interesting” you said to me “well it is really interesting, but your idea is just a piece of the idea I think I’m working on.”I really remember thinking who the heck is this guy, what does he think he has? I Guess that's the beginning of the book on experience design? Do you remember that?

PN: That, oh yeah, and I think it was interesting because it was prior to Experience Design because we hadn’t yet been asked to write the book. The notion of experience design was one that we had talked about at method but it didn't necessarily have a lot of traction or shared understanding. However what you came to the table with, was something that resonated with my understanding of brand strategy and the opportunity that was coming about with the digital age. It was really more of an observation of what was going on in the world and a way of making sense of it. You could either say the old model of Brand is playing out this is just some variation, or you could say no there's something new going on here.

MS I was coming off the back of sitting with some smart minds that were transitioning from conventional IXD to UX. They were thinking about what role does UX play in a larger sense of business. I guess it occurred to me that a lot of the things that we were trying to deal with were about ecosystems, interfaces and some level of differentiation.

PN: I think they were two different factions, the graphic designers who were now designing in digital that began to get fascinated with the tools for creating a cool presentation layer, traditional kinds of designer minds that were more focused on what could be done in this new medium and UX minds that were more on human factors,  but their focus was almost brand agnostic. Both were saying software is the brand, but neither understood or represented the how.Your thinking was the old-school notion of capital B Brand, what that meant from an experience standpoint, as well as what's changing on the ground in terms of how you apply it. Digital was moving from being just a marketing channel to a value delivery channel, which was super interesting. The economics of business became software driven value chains and software-mediated customer channels. All of a sudden now Brand and Digital became much more important but UI and UX really didn’t understand how to connect to it.

MS: One of the things I predicted which probably didn't come true was that you would have more branded UI. That you would contravene Christopher Alexander's great thought about the universality of function. Designers ended up copying each other and created similar and consistent interfaces. I find it hard to tell if I’m in Linkedin or Facebook in the native applications. I don't think many designers have taken on board the idea of building the interface as a branded object 

PN:  I think it was also driven by the market demand, because basically the market wants the latest thing and what you saw coming out of web 2.0 was much more standardization. Every digital property looked and behaved the same way and there was a very weird kind of schizophrenia in that like you can't tell me that the experience matters if the experience isIndistinguishable. How can it be important to the brand if it's now the same as everything else. Conversely, when there's existing patterns out there, reinventing the wheel means having to do a lot of coding to create interfaces that people aren't really wanting to interact with. If you look at it from a business standpoint you'd say well that's the cost of maintenance it's hard to evolve or migrate. 

MS: You're absolutely right to say that what we considered innovation in interface design was largely missing product thinking.

PN: Yes it was. 

MS: The layer in front of the product made it more complicated. The work that I'm doing now is largely focused on product strategy or long-range product planning. It is much closer to brand thinking because we have to show the product is creating differentiation for the business and how it creates value. Whereas, when we were thinking about branding within the interface it was largely copyable.

PN: So there was a there was an article I read, uh, I think is over a year ago now that was talking about the demise of flash marks the end of the creative internet and i was thinking ‘no, you guys have missed the point because flash is more of the response to what the market was buying and it says the design always reflects what the market wants. What the market wanted was new channels, new mediums, cool stuff,  but as you move towards doing more business actually you need more repeatability, more scalability, more usability and the net result was an argument for standardization. It made it easier to get to market. The market in a sense was commoditizing Brand.

MS: If you look at something like Spotify, it's intriguing how the product functionality is your brand relationship.

PN: Yes, somebody pushed very hard to build a product that had a good relationship between the user, the corporation and the data points and how we listen and share. I'm not saying that the design of Spotify is bad or good, it's just largely generic.In a sense I think what you just described is much more in line with the thinking that I had when you arrived at Method. Which is about how Brand works, how it fulfills value. Functionally, emotionally, aspirationally. It's got to hit at those three in order for it to be effective. What we see with Spotify is the product is doing it and the presentation of the product becomes somewhat less important.Maintenance costs are the reason why you would have to be very careful about over investing in the presentation layer because you have to make sure differentiated value is more important than the differentiated experience. And that it’s more protectable, you can't trademark an interface.

MS: I remember I wrote in ‘Brands as Patterns’ that the interface will become a primary identity element. And I think that was entirely wrong because you can't trademark the interface. But what you can do is build product and product functionality that is IP.I’ve experimented with this equation, the brand is the outcome of the experience divided by the promise. and i think you're exactly right and saying that it's the experience of the entire product divided by the promise is what we really understand as the brand. If you have a top heavy fraction you’re always in the good zone. If it's a bottom heavy fractions the promise remains largely unfulfilled, the interface doesn’t deliver the value.

PN: What percentage of apps do you have on your phone that are just beautiful objects that you never touch, because they don't offer any value? I used to try to sell off of that. There were times where I’m pretty sure I talked the client out of the deal because I showed them an application that was really beautiful, but I said after you use it once you won’t use it again.

MS: Maybe what we’re describing is the Patterns of Product rather than the Patterns of Brand. I think it's kind of interesting to say that Brand as patterns probably isn't a UX thought, it's probably more of a product management thought.

PN:There was a comment on amazon for the Experience Design book that gave it four stars but the writer said ”most of this is 101 for a good product manager”

MS: My recent project at Tile was entirely with the product team, working for the VP of product, doing long range product product planning. I had major imposter syndrome, can Ireally pull this off? But it was so much fun because it felt intuitive. Creating a connection point between this and that and how they move forwards. Versioning felt entirely normal to me, a kind of pattern-like thinking approach that I naturally understand.

PN: If you call product planning, value creation, yeah. The analogy is so clear, then all of a sudden you realize from the technology standpoint it's not what you build, it's how build it and how you're timing the build. Because you have a cone of certainty that only goes out so far out and your cone of optionality goes out very broadly but you don't know what's going to be real. The intersection between what you actually do based upon certainty and how it positions you for optionality in the future that you have to watch out for.If you don't factor the right things then you find yourself too far outside of the mainstream of optionality. If you go too far out saying we're going to do all this stuff you've got no provability. There's no guarantee that you're going to get there and if the future changes you will find yourself outside of the future optionality.

MS: Also for differentiation, you can be so differentiated that you're outside of optionality you can't deliver. You must find differences in what's doable, that's the sweet point in any product plan. Timing it right, so it can actually be delivered as a quality experience before anybody else. It’s surfing that odd wave of ‘I think it's probably going to be we're going to be able to do this’. 

PN: There's a whole part of product management that is making sure you've got a tidy foundation. Making sure that everything works and it’s all connected. 

MS: People tend to vastly underestimate the power of management. There's a correlation between product management and brand management. They are both business based, value based.

PN: If you look at it from a CPG standpoint, the product and the brand generally tend to be the same things. The holding company that is making the decisions and making the bets on brand management. CPG companies want to reduce the financial burden of the product ingredients and maintain the brand value. Retain the product market fit

You can define it as parity/differentiation cost. When you look at brand management, in many cases, you’re building a flagging brand. Plugging in value into the opportunity space in a managed way. The management is all based upon the business decisions but the brands themselves go above and beyond the product purpose in interesting and non-intuitive ways. 

The Brand and what it stands for are explicit value opportunities that we can extend from. In the market they sit the same.

The idea is that you charge a little bit more for your product, This maybe it turns up in things like Tesla when you get a better version of the software. But my product and engineering friends would largely see it as fluff that you were charging more for the product than it was worth purely because of x y or z. That isn't really a product differentiation 

MS: Well that's the base definition of brand isn't it 

PN: Well but I actually think there's a ton of product benefit which is to say I think you're absolutely right to say ‘could we take the underlying technology, repackage it, charge a little bit more for it?’ This is subscription design, it's service design. 

MS: I think that brands are in a very different place than they were when we first met. I think that one of the things that I see is kind of missing from the equation is that people don't understand what traditional brand managers did and how close that is to product management. It’s regulation, governance.

PN: The notion of elasticity of demand yeah okay because in a situation of something like face cream, I’m making a decision probably every month with laundry detergent maybe twice a month with cookies once a week. 

With cars every five years every five years yeah the more that you move into a service-based economy begins to flatten out, because now I don't need five checking accounts. I don't need five checking accounts this month but I might next month. 

MS: It’s the netflix dilemma. Will I pay for it this month? Do I not next month? Once you've sold the product it now moves away from being considered a purchase to becoming a liability or an obligation. You have to continue to sell the product.

PN: The nature of the role that brand plays or has played I think is completely shifted and I don't think that we've quite caught up with in different industries. If you look at say mattresses, Sealy, Posturepedic, all the old guys from 20 years ago, can’t understand Casper, all these ‘Neo Brands’ are brands that are not brands.They haven't had any investment that you would usually associate with brand building yet they have the product notoriety. 

They haven't really created any function of tradition. The product experience is brandand. The brand is the vessel of the product experience but doesn't promise you anything more or over the product experience. ‘How quickly can we give the appearance that we are a real brand?’ 

There’s no differentiation and in most cases either there is extremely low elasticity aside from getting the next customer there's no value to having a brand. In many cases the brand is either inconsequential in terms of its sustainability and will never exist because the economics of the model mean that you're driving for customers rather than establishing a legacy. If you don't figure out that sustainability you're going to go out of business 

In addition, the more that we move away from Brand as a connecting product and service we actually make switching a lot easier.

The other thing we do with brand as service is it becomes increasingly obvious that the brand you're doing business with actually does not control the full experience. There's many situations where you realize oh I'm dealing with a brand and it’s in fact another company who have been outsourced to. The role of Brand is really shifting.

A couple years ago I was doing a work session with Mondelez which is the holding company for consumer packaged good snack Brands and we were trying to do a customer journey framework to see how to leverage the brand and the SMO said our CEO does not believe that Brand loyalty exists. He wants me to know how to get in front of the customer at the point of decision, because I can't rely on Brand loyalty to beat the right price point. 

MS: I’ve seen stats, sixty percent of people have Brand loyalty up until the point of decision. expand and it's increasingly so with younger audiences or customers

”Moving On 2012,’ a MegaTrends report by WSL Strategic Retail, revealed that 80% of millennials looked for the lowest price possible when shopping and that 60% are more inclined to bypass their favorite brand if a cheaper alternative is available.”

MS: I love the idea of ‘Products as Patterns’, brand families as product ecosystems. There's a lot of synergy. But I think the biggest failing of ‘Brands as Patterns’ was that it was stuck in the design layer, the interface layer. It's probably a product of being within a service business at the time of writing it. At that point I'd never been outside of a service business that largely I was thinking about how to help clients iterate interface.

David Acker had written Brand Relevance almost at the same time as Brands as Pattern. In it he had coined the term relevance but he didn’t push it as a metric as valuable as Consistency. He didn’t think about the digital age as a switch. He referenced Brands as Patterns in a piece for Prophet when he was talking about managing Brands over time, although he didn’t link it to function. I've never seen relevance measured effectively but i do think that relevance and consistency are good bedfellows 

PN: That's, I think, the thing that's most positive about a brand of Patterns, managing across time and function. A negative was that the thinking was trapped within the interface layer. 

I think branded products, or ‘Products as Patterns’ is a really nice idea but I think the relationship between relevance and consistency weren’t talked about when we considered brand or product or ux. We were trying to build products. But building a product that's relevant to the user at the time they need it, that's the secret sauce. Not building a product that you can make because the engineering allows you to make it or the technology allows you to make it.

MS: All of those conversations about Steve Jobs holding back the iPad until it made sense is product management, but it’s also Brand management. He always wanted to deliver something that had value, nothing should detract from the Brand, even if the product would be an innovation. 

PN: The counterpoint to this is if you look at Amazon, Uber, Facebook, or Google and to a degree unfortunately Apple, if you look at some of the top brands in the world the ones especially associated with technology and technology services essentially have taken Brand away from being the reason to being just the identity. The value is separate. I can hate the Brand but take the value from the product with no ongoing brand loyalty. There's really no optionality. Through their market strength they converted Brand back to branding. 

I feel like Brand management— the way that Brands as Patterns or Experience Design would imply—largely doesn't exist today and I'm not sure if it's coming back. I don't see many folks creating significant additional value today this way....

Going back to ‘Brands as Patterns’ I read a quote from Marty Neumeier recently ‘Brand is the gut feeling that people have about you and what you do and therefore you can't have a brand without having a market’. I think that the reason that dynamic actually exists is because of the way that humans and value systems and belief systems function. It's very natural for humans to adhere to belief systems that give them value. 

Now if you played that out in the Business setting that has happened for most of the 20th century you can get advantage out of that. Humans still have belief systems. But clients don't seem to be playing in that space anymore. It's almost the opposite whereas you can not like the brand but use the value. The product or should we say the function is forefront. if it's usable, it works, you can almost dislike the brand.

MS: Under Armour is a phenomenal example, I absolutely hate the fact they support hunting but the product's pretty good. There's a forced disassociation. We've all become that engineering guy that says ah Brand, it's fluff. We've basically been able to rationalize Brand out of its position of strength.

PN: Don't like the brand but use the product. Like the brand but don't own the product. The same thing happened to religion. I believe in god but do never go to church. I don't practice a religion but I consume the idea of it. This may be the end of the consumer mindset.

MS: When a Brand that charges a premium like Apple has shitty products like their cables it does backfire. I still hold them to their own higher value point. I’m happy that Apple made billions, and I understand  that Apple products can command that value. I will pay a thousand dollars for an iPhone but if you're going to charge twenty five bucks for a lead and a smaller more nimble brand like Belkin do a better version for five bucks, I don't want to use your product anymore. I don’t like the Brand.

PN: I  think that technology is really changing the landscape even with Apple. If I’m going to buy the product. I'm willing to pay the premium but the actual value of the product diminishes.

The Brand will continue to build content, they will continue to upgrade the O.S. but there's going to come a point in time where I have to upgrade the hardware or opt out of the service ecosystem 

MS: The way that i've described this in the past — you’re no longer buying a product, you’re buying access to a set of products and services, it’s not a product but a window into the product. It’s really not a product if the functionality that came as standard is degraded by the fact that you no longer subscribe to the parent company. It just becomes a ticket to ride.

PN: This is somewhat inevitable with the way that business is moving in terms of value creation through software and the implications of it. The continuity of updating basically moves everything towards the service based relationship which basically diminishes the value of what Brand has traditionally been. 

MS: The role the brand has played in the past is really hard to sustain because of the context in which consumption and use happens. Service-based ecosystems move the decision moment. The consideration point isn’t in the store. There’s no need to remember the product. You are already subscribed to the product.

The big question is whether anyone will continue to subscribe. This decision is based on different values than the promise. Because the promise is now subservient to the delivery of the experience and it’s happening in the same interface, sometimes on the same device. The promise holds no value in the moment of being delivered to 

PN: I think absolutely right to say that service-based relationships diminish the value of brand. If the cost of switching is low enough. If the consistency of what the service delivers is outside of your control then you really can't make a strong case for we can build strong brand relationship on service

The more that software is part of your service delivery or value creation the more you're automatically into that space. Verizon and the network. You constantly have to keep telling everyone that the product is a superior product not the brand's superior brand. And if you own a big enough service ecosystem kind of doesn't matter what your brand is yeah yeah yeah because you've already brought everybody in 

The problem of scale becomes the servitization of economies which allows this transformation of both the consumption behind brand, the value creation behind brand as well as the efficacy of Brand as a differentiator. It's still useful from a product planning standpoint. There’s no guarantee that it has the same kind of belief system dynamic in human psychology that it used to or the stickiness in the ecosystem.

MS: When I wrote ‘Interface Loyalty’ I felt that this would be an outcome. When people build loyalty to ways of doing things rather than loyalty to a product or a service from a company i.e you won't move out of Apple not because you don't like them it's just because the weight of moving outside of apple is just too huge because of the scale of them. Brand disintegrates into product affordance.

PN: When they begin to break up the monopolies which will come, that will release some of that pressure. What will that do to business? You will have to make harder choices. 

The Interconnectedness of technology systems required to deliver value today is so complex the control of any Brand that is this big becomes its achilles heel. The more that you move into a service based model, the end-to-end is really not owned from a guarantee by anyone which is horrible but there's no alternative because no company can scale big enough to guarantee it.

That's where we're going. You buy from a brand but are you really buying from a brand? Or are you buying from a brand that has been  outsourced to. Using a capability of some service provider you have no relationship with or dealing with a Brand that can't deliver the value it promises because the promise is destroyed by their third-party Relationships.

The promise is out of their control. It can no longer be a ‘promise’ –   the experience and promise relationship is really intriguing.

MS: Thank you Patrick. Mind–expanding as always. I really enjoyed picking up the conversation again. My hope is the conversations on Brandsaspatterns.com are going to be the thing that people can come back to. We should do a follow-up to push some of those thoughts further.

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