The Beat Of Apple's Brand Strategy – Keynote and Conversation with PSFK

PSFK: How did you come to think of brands as patterns?

MS: I grew up in branding agencies understanding that consistency was king, and it was the most valuable thing you could do in any brand engagement.

But working within digital companies and startups, I found that relevance had become more important, maybe more valuable. What can you make and how quickly could you get the product to market?

I realized that relevance was a powerful force that challenged how you organized your brand, because relevance is iterative. Inconsistency is something that is pretty difficult to manage but you don't want to keep sending the same message at the same time at the same place, because it's going to make you look mechanical.

Knowing that consistency related to value for a businesses, the question became, how are we going to achieve consistency, but yet be relevant and different? I started out as a music major and art major at school in the UK and I realized through music that it was easy to remain consistent over time and remain relevant.

That’s achieved through the organization of a pattern; e.g. you play the music, but each time you vary it a little bit. To me, thinking about brand consistency as periodic variance is the way I came to the concept of branded patterns. 

PSFK: Where does that process begin? What is the goal?

MS: I begin by looking at what makes a pattern a pattern, which is certain level of symmetry and a certain frequency of repetition; it does repeat, but it doesn't repeat all the time. There is a certain level of variance. How far can it vary and still remain a pattern? I began to look at this in the abstract and then I started to take it back to business.

If you think about frequency, the question becomes, how do you manage your brand coherently over time? The world around your brand has a frequency, including the decisions of your customers, their likes, their dislikes, and their level of fear or willingness to take risks. As a result, you've got to think about your brand as a frequency. In that same vein, your communication has a frequency as well as your ability to actually create content.

In other words, your ability to deliver a brand, product or service to market relies on some interconnected frequency of demand, delivery and production. But if I don't create the right level of demand or the wrong level of production, I can flood the market with my product and people don't want it anymore.

PSFK: Can you think of an example to help illustrate? 

MS: Take the iPhone 4 as an example. I knew it was coming and I knew I wanted it, and I hadn’t seen an advert. It was about the frequency of the product. I knew when to expect it. If you look at the world just in terms of frequency, you know the customer has a frequency. There is a frequency of purchase, a frequency of consideration or interaction, and a frequency of consuming information. If you look at publishers, they have a frequency, and they’re jumping into channels that have a much faster frequency and they can't keep up.

It’s interesting to consider the development of your product as a frequency, which is to ask how quickly you can generate ideas, how quickly you can prototype and how quickly you can get them to market? 

If you start to think about all those overlapping frequencies, if any one of them that is not aligned, it is going to create dissonance. As soon as you create dissonance, it affects the quality of your intent. Organizing your operation to get the best out of each one of those frequencies, which is to say, if you only create messages at a certain speed, or create a product at a certain speed, then think about the kinds of channels of communication and the kind of content that you need to make that coincides with it.

PSFK: What is the challenge to maintaining Patterns?

MS: I guess the simplest challenge, is to say, "We've always done that, haven't we? We've always varied who we are. We always vary messages." Our answer is to say, "OK, let's do an audit. Let's look at what you actually said and see how much you do and don't." A big challenge is contending with a subset of people who think this is the status quo.

Another challenge is people who find no value in brand thinking at all. They say, “I'm just going to make a good product and I don't need brand to do anything."

Of course, the interesting thing is as your companies grow up- look at Facebook, Twitter- they're all having to deal with the problem, which is to say that as your product portfolio gets bigger and as your offering gets bigger, you have to start changing. You realize there's a core, fundamental challenge to you, which is how do you scale your belief? How do you maintain the quality of your product? Suddenly, you have to organize a brand.

At that point, you can have a powerful product, but unless it creates a deeper engagement, it doesn't really deliver on its potential value. That is something I learned in advertising. Making a product interesting and connecting people to it on an emotional level is paramount. Taking systematic minds that live in the engineering world, or interaction design or product design world, and helping them understand the power of storytelling and the power of emotional connection is the key.

If it were easy, everyone would be doing it. I looked at the landscape six or seven years ago when I started Method. In terms of brand development, no other branding company had even considered thinking of brands as patterns.