WRITER’S WARNING: This is a long post. If you’re not crazy about reading long online posts, download the post as a low file size PDF.

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A black book (or web page) is opened.

Samples of creative work are viewed.

The book or page is closed.

Decisions are made.

Rinse. Repeat.

As a creative professional and educator, I have always pondered the meaning and role of the creative portfolio, what it means to those who are creative professionals, and also to those who are not—those who interact or recruit creatives. For art directors, copywriters, and designers in multiple disciplines, the creative portfolio is their lifeblood. It’s where they show their work. It’s their default resume and principle means by which to land jobs. And, in the end, it defines their careers. The reason it defines their careers is because creative directors, hiring managers and recruiters use the “book” or portfolio to judge a creative pro’s worth. But how much can we really tell about someone from their portfolio, and how defining is it? To me a creative portfolio is solely this:

An artifact that illustrates the degree to which a creative person has been “allowed” to be creative.

Since I put allowed in quotes, let me define it a bit. Unless you are a street-corner musician, a poet or a self-styled starving artist, creative professionals are almost always more obligated to be professional than creative. They work for design companies, ad agencies, or corporate in-house creative teams. This means that their creativity is constrained by their employer. Creative people are further constrained by the clients of their employers. For services companies, this means external clients. For internal groups, this means other functional units within the company. In effect, the sum of these constraints equals the degree to which a creative person is allowed to be creative.

Process and Environment

These constraints don’t simply lie in the necessity to conform to a creative brief, design specs or customer requirements. From a broader perspective, all individuals who judge the work of the creative person subjectively form constraints. These include creative directors, account executives, marketing clients, engineers, technologists and many more, including the end-customer if a company is creating correctly. In the end, the work of the creative is not a measure of their creativity, but rather an artifact of their particular environment’s creative process. It’s important to note that when I say environment, I don’t mean the process itself, but the space within which the process acts itself out. Let me illustrate this with an example:

I

A copywriter and art director team, from a Chicago advertising agency, come up with an idea for a 30-second television commercial for a consumer package goods (CPG) client.

II

The idea is shown to their creative director, the creative director’s boss, three account executives, and two clients who are marketing managers/directors. The client then takes the idea and shows it to four more people including their boss. The idea gets altered in numerous ways to meet the ideals and requirements of all who have touched it. Next it goes into production. A director, actors, producers, editors and numerous others touch it and alter it before it is a final product that goes into the copywriter’s and art director’s creative portfolio.

In the example above, the first part contains the environment in which the creative process is acted out

1. Chicago

2. Ad agency

3. CPG client

The second part is the process. Most creative professionals understand this process, or one similar to it. Most consider this a system that is acceptable and known. And though creatives, being creative, might occasionally moan about it, they mostly resign themselves to its machinations. However, what very few people consider is how drastically this scenario changes when you change the first part, the environment. So let’s take the exact same process and make the following environment replacements:

Chicago to Portland, Oregon
CPG Client to Athletic Shoe Client

Now, even though the process is probably very similar, the environment has drastically changed. For instance, Chicago has traditionally been a conservative advertising city. Portland has not. CPG clients are often conservative marketers. Athletic shoe makers typically are not. CPG companies often flock to Chicago agencies due to their CPG expertise and conservatism. Athletic shoe companies do not. CPG companies typically employ the kind of person who can understand and conform to the sort of strategic branding these companies do. Chicago ad agencies typically hire creative professionals with portfolios that fit their current client’s style.

Change the Environment, Change the Creative Product

Now imagine the process above taking place in the new environment. If the exact same copywriter and art director were involved, with the exact same process, would the outcome (creative portfolio artifact) be different?

Faster than you can say swoosh. You can bet your recession-proof savings on it.

Country, city, type of office, type of client; these are the environmental elements that designers, art directors and copywriters work within, and that contribute to the formation of their creative product, and thus their creative portfolio. And this is why a creative portfolio only tells part of the story regarding an individual’s creativity and creative potential.

Throughout my 20-year creative career I have known and worked with numerous wildly creative individuals who do NOT have wildly creative portfolios. I’ve also known many creatives who blossomed and evolved once their environment changed. For some it was simply a change of workplace. For others, a whole new city or country or client industry precipitated the evolution.

Ive League

There’s a rather famous example of this not many people know about. The lead Industrial Designer at Apple, Johnathon Ive, has become a legend for his design and design stewardship of Apple’s groundbreaking iMac, iPod and iPhone designs. But Ive wasn’t always the hero at Apple. In fact, during the years when Steve Jobs was away from company, Apple took a nosedive, and the company was at its all-time lows in stock price. Despite the fairly wide acceptance of Mac by creative professionals, Apple looked as if it was going the way of the Dodo. At that time, Ive was there (he started in 1992), designing, and building a (mostly unimpressive) creative portfolio.

Then his environment changed.

Steve Jobs returned in 1997 and put the focus of the company on industrial design. He opened the floodgates for folks like Ive, a brilliant designer, to show just how creative he can be. This one change in environment changed a middling creative talent (if you only looked at his creative portfolio) and allowed him to achieve a level of creativity closer to his potential.

IVE BEFORE JOBS' RETURN

A creative portfolio is an artifact that illustrates the degree to which a creative person has been “allowed” to be creative.

IVE'S PORTFOLIO AFTER JOBS' RETURN

Seeing Behind the Portfolio

The implications for this sort of perspective about creative portfolios stretch from creator to creative co-worker to recruiter. I think that most creatives would agree with much of what I’ve outlined, perhaps even with an apathetic shrug. But to those who float the periphery of the creative world, these notions are perhaps far more important.

Outside of creative professions, job hunters are judged on their resume, their experience, their education and how they come across in an interview. This is the normal world. But not for creatives. Creative professionals are mostly, and often solely, judged on the content of their portfolios. Given this inevitability, I would plead with those who critique portfolios and make hiring decisions (yes, you too, creative directors) to open their minds to a creative’s potential as much as their portfolio. I humbly request you start with these three simple guidelines that help you see behind the creative portfolio to the real creative professional.

1. Read between the lines.
Look at creative executions with an open mind. Try to see through the end result and consider the process and especially the environment.

2. Listen, don’t look.
Listen to the creative talk about their work and probe deeper into how it got there. Don’t just scan it and take it at face value. Typically, there is far more value hiding behind the face.

3. Remember that creativity is born before it is recruited
Creative professionals are creative by nature first, not profession. What you see isn’t all there is. In fact, the typical creative portfolio is usually just the tip of the creative iceberg.

With these guidelines, I guarantee you will better understand both the work and the mind of the creative professionals you come in contact with, and be able to better gauge creative potential. In today’s creative world there are a handful of wunderkinds out there who are tearing up the awards books, and making names for themselves internationally. But these handful are not the only ones capable of creating extraordinary work, they merely represent the ones who have been allowed to.

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As always, your comments are welcome–BV

Check out this short but illuminating TED Talk by advertising executive Rory Sutherland. In it, he portrays consumer perception as an often manipulated and rarely common sense commodity. It gets to the heart of how the economy is dependent on where we place our values. Both funny and insightful.

Brand on the Inside

External focus on the corporate brand image is also mirrored inside the Japanese corporation.

According to Tokyo marketing veteran, Mineo Kamiyama, most companies think “product brands should only be managed by people who know the product”. This is somewhat different from Western practices where Brand and Marketing managers are often marketing professionals first, and product experts second (with the exception of many B2B marketing and sales organizations, which would espouse the Japanese way). For better or worse, this means that the average Japanese Brand Manager, despite their usual lack of marketing savvy, is often left to his own devices when it comes to marketing strategy and tactics. Furthermore, the energy behind those strategies are often directed at new product development, line extensions and packages redesigns, things that Japanese managers see as getting quick, quantifiable results. In other words, new, different, whiz, boom, bam! Unfortunately, brand strategy and brand building tactics don’t have the same immediate effect, and are therefore ignored.

To make the corporate situation even worse, most Product/Brand Managers don’t remain as such throughout their careers. In Japanese companies it is common to implement internal company-wide staff rotations so as to develop generalists. Senior Account Directors become Research Professionals, Creative Resource Managers become Media Planners and a Regional Sales Director replaces a 3 or 5-year veteran to becomes your brand’s next Brand Manager. Lucky you.

To complete the picture, on-the-job training and personal, spoken-only role handoffs are very common. And written brand guidelines or manuals typically don’t exist or are summarily dismissed. According to Kamiyama, that means that a product’s “brand strategy essentially changes at the same time the product (or brand) manager changes.”

In the end, this all happens because top management sees their product brands as a pale shadow compared to their corporate brand. Time is certainly spent on brand image, but the majority of it is for the corporate brand only. That’s where top management sees value, so that’s where they put their energies and their best marketing people.

Change is coming…sort of.

Some would say there is no need for change; that this is the Japanese way. It’s different yes, but why mess with it. For the most part, at least in terms of how brands are managed, I agree. (However, I would disagree with HR practices, i.e. building the generalist and sacrificing the expert, on-the-job training and the misc. politics that circumvent better marketing practices. But that’s another blog, for another day.)

I don’t think the whole system should change, but I do think that Japanese companies can easily inject more product focus, better brand continuity and more brand consistency into their product marketing efforts. This may also help Japanese companies to be bigger players internationally. For the last several years the top 100 worldwide brands have only contained 6-8 Japanese companies—surprisingly low for the world’s second largest economy.

A Western-style brand strategy has worked on a few occasions in Japan for both companies and product brands. For instance, both Softbank, the telecommunications giant, and Uniqlo, Japan’s version of The Gap, started, gained notoriety and became successful without a large corporate parent company. Pocari Sweat, a sports drink and Healthya, a wildly popular green tea drink in Japan also succeed by branding their names over their respective parents Otsuka and Kao Corp. These last two companies went out on a limb, but unfortunately, are of the minority who are trying product marketing and/or the House of Brands model over the traditional model. You can barely find the Otsuka or Kao names on the Pocari Sweat and Healthya bottle and many Japanese people don’t know who makes these drinks. Yet, both brands were product marketed to wild success. And there are several more examples like this (though, not a great deal more).

When in Rome…

In the end, one must work within the confines of their discipline’s environment, be it geographic or otherwise. And though I have long since realized this, I also know that organic change happens very slowly—and in Japan, even slower still. So if you work with brands in Japan, it is good to understand what makes them tick here. And though it is also important to practice the when-in-Rome mentality, one must never forget that Rome fell, or maybe only its brand did.

I love these two ideas for combining standard communication tools (pens and markers) with digital applications. Look for this sort of thing to pop up more and more. By using tools that people are already familiar with, both physically and cognitively, these sorts of digital apps increase their chances at adoption as well as loyalty.

The Pulse SmartPen, by LiveScribe, uses a pen with a built in mic, speaker and memory. By using special paper, you can record and replay whatever you hear when you are writing. An interesting solution at lectures, meetings or brainstorming sessions.

The Sketch & Save, designed by Pavel Balykin, provides a 2-cap tool with Flash USB on one side and a pen or marker on the other–a multipurpose, multimedia notation and memory tool.

Idris Mootee recently commented on the topic of business strategy and design convergence, what he called “Integrative Creativity”, over at his Innovation Playground blog. Tempted to comment on his post, I opted to weigh in here instead, given the natural soapbox (right brain/left brain) this blog affords.

Like two slow trains on two very long tracks, design and business strategy have been heading towards each other on intersecting paths for some time now. In the last 5-10 years they seem to be picking up speed and they are finally starting to get close. Some design schools are teaching how design can better integrate into business. Some B-Schools are teaching design and innovation. Few schools are thoroughly integrating the two, but it seems only a matter of (a little more) time.

But more importantly, individuals from one side of the fence (or brain) are clearly attempting to straddle it fairly often these days. Business executives are seeing design as more than lengthy processes and “shiny” deliverables. And designers, from all disciplines (graphic design, advertising, ID, interaction design etc) are realizing the need to integrate their thinking and environment with corporate and business strategy.

This group of “straddlers” is the most important in the short term. Show me an MBA or seasoned business executive who is newly interested in brand identity, sketching or experience design and I’ll show you a business organization that is going to soon change their perspective on any number of topics. Find creative and design professionals who go back to school to get an MBA, and you’ll have found individuals more suited to understand that which they create, and who can work better across functional units, bringing more iterative processes and methodologies to bear.

In the long term, schools will bring these disciplines together more and more. But school, especially undergraduate studies, is a place to discover who you are and where your passions and talents lie. As a college instructor for more than 10 years, what I clearly saw in my classrooms was a funneling of energies to an individual’s area of interest or skill. This funneling would eventually lead a student to declare a major. Although exposure to both right and left-brain subject matter is essential, it won’t significantly change an individual’s desire to do what they do best. However, it will provide them with the foundation to switch gears and straddle brain hemispheres more easily. In the future, these individuals won’t struggle nearly as much as those of us trying to do the same today.

The Power of a Parent

Another big difference between brand strategy in Japan lies in the typical brand portfolio structure. Western companies embrace the House of Brands model more, where many unique brands fall under one large corporate brand. In Japan, a Branded House, where the corporate brand and the product brand are often one and the same is far more prevalent. This structure was initiated post-WWII by keiretsu. A history lesson I won’t go into here. (But please feel free to read about it in the link) This structure, and the history that formed it, was one of the catalysts for placing far more importance on what the corporate entity is doing, and far less on what the product brand is doing.

You’ll find a perfect examples of this in the typical 30-second TV commercial. Most companies feel that the corporate logo at the beginning and end of the commercial is just as important as the product messaging in the bulk of the commercial. In fact, by putting the logo at the both the beginning and end, advertisers are invoking the primacy and recency effects, thus insuring those logos are the most memorable pieces of their communication, rather than the information about the product. But this idea is not relegated to the Branded House model, nor is it solely symptomatic of it. Some House of Brand companies in Japan also hold the corporate name in much higher esteem than any of their product brands.

In early 2009, I gave a seminar about brand portfolio development to an MBA alumni group from Kobe University. The discussion became rather heated when I challenged this focus on corporate branding over product branding. A couple attendees related to this corporate focus as a cultural artifact as much a marketing principle. They explained that in Japan it was traditionally the family name that was important, and the your given name was no more than an identifier within the larger scope of your family. This is still true today, and it is a big reason why most Japanese company’s product brands are treated with disregard or apathy.

This notion has been tested. There have been new product launches by big companies that attempt to “go it alone”. In other words, they try to launch new products or services without their big corporate logo attached. The vast majority of these products simply never take off, or are mired regardless of design, price or differentiation advantages. The companies then re-market the product, tacking on the corporate logo and corporate endorsement, and the situation is vastly different. This is Japanese society telling companies that they will trust them if they’re big and successful, and if they know their name. Otherwise, forget about it. The repercussions of this are clearly evident for product brand strategy, not to mention entrepreneurial efforts.

In the next, and last part, I will show how internal operations drive a different viewpoint on brand, and wrap up with a look at where things are heading.

This is Part 1 of a three-part post. Come back in a few days to read Part 2.

When in Rome… I don’t even have to finish that phrase. One automatically knows what it means. It stands for something through its meaning, concept and constant repetition. It has become a universal brand statement for living, traveling and working abroad. But when it comes to living with brand strategy in Japan, I have a difficult time obeying the old maxim.

In Japanese companies, “brand” is often looked upon with disinterest, disbelief or, at times, derision. Once, while giving a presentation to a group of my clients on the subject of brand continuity and the importance of focusing on a single message, an attendee fell asleep. This could have been due to him staying up late the night before to catch up on Lost episodes. But more likely, it was because he, and most Japanese marketing folk don’t understand, appreciate or believe in the idea of traditional Western product brand strategy.

I’ve struggled with this throughout the last four years of my tenure here in Japan. It has confounded me and frustrated me while searching for an answer to this riddle. Frustration is generally derived from the general disinterest (falling asleep) but also at the complete and total disregard for what I consider basic brand principles.

To provide a frightening client example, about three years ago my company developed a new marketing communications campaign and tagline for one of our Japanese multinational clients. The campaign was doing well and the tagline was not only getting brand recognition, several countries, other than those it was intended for were also organically utilizing it. Who knows, it might have been the next ‘When in Rome”. But then, all of a sudden and without warning, our client came up with a new tagline (with another agency). When asked why they did it, they simply told us that they wanted to do something “new”. The campaign and tagline were unceremoniously trashed. And this is not at all uncommon in Japan.

So why would a company with successful messaging throw it out the window for no good reason? There are a few key perceptual differences in Japan that drive this behavior and prevent most Japanese companies from embracing the Western idea of brand.

New is Good, Good is New

Japan is a country that, despite its rich cultural heritage, treasures newness and is fed on fad. When a new restaurant opens people invariably flock to it in droves (often, it is left barren the next week or month). If someone receives a new toaster as a gift, they immediately throw out the old one. And most Japanese people would never buy things like appliances, furniture or clothes used. This focus on newness is one of the key societal reasons Japanese advertisers insist on “mixing things up” and throwing brand to the wind (or in the trash as it were).

Traditional brand strategy tells us to create something memorable and of quality and then stick with it over and over again until it garners recognition, sales and loyalty. In the West, a good brand and messaging can, and often does last 3 to 10 years, or more. But in Japan, it’s rare that a product marketing campaign is repeated for more than 1 or 2 years. If a new manager comes in, so too does a new message. If a senior executive has a fresh idea, it becomes a new message. If awareness or sales go down, they immediately think that the problem is that their message is old. And a new message very often means a whole new messaging strategy—in essence a new brand.

But of course, this is just one reason brand is the way it is in Japan.

In the next post I’ll talk briefly about how brand portfolio structure, and the importance of a name , affect brand strategy.

Trust seems to be the newest and most relevant marketing buzzword these days. Consumers have gone beyond simply perceiving branded messages or being part of a brand and the experiences it affords. They want a deeper relationship with companies. Consumers more often want cognitive consonance with the brands they interact with.

Check out this article from BusinessWeek on the topic of trust for more info. Also, view the slide show of this year’s Top 100 Global Brands for a look at which brands are keeping their heads above water in this recession, and which are losing their way.

I apologize for not writing lately.

Unfortuantely, I’m still not.

Instead, I’m recommending some great thoughts on brand leadership over at Denise Lee Yohn’s brand as business blog. Her post offers a quick lesson (read: slap in the face) to Anheuser-Busch InBev about the value of brand consistency and leadership as well as the importance of the strategic and creative process.

Don’t miss it.

Ok, to be fair and upfront right off the bat, the following TED Talk does NOT discuss marketing. But as a marketing professional, I challenge you ignore the relevance. In this short talk, Philip Zimbardo discusses how different people perceive time. He breaks them down into three main categories, “past-oriented”, “present-oriented” and “future-oriented” and breifly outlines each one, offering a couple subsets for each along the way.

As people’s perception of time is so very clearly tied to how they make decisions, these divisions appear to be an overlooked criteria for market segmentation. I’d propose a “time perception” variable in any psychographic or behavioral segmentation of a target market. Knowing this variable would help direct or retail sales immeasurably. It would also be very useful to service companies at the brand strategy level as well as point of sale.

Take a look for yourself. Anyone else have any thinking on this?