Keep Your Brand on a Swivel and Watch Your Six
The Nine Gates of Brand Intelligence In the long watch of the brand shepherd, steward and sentinel— it’s important to consider a 360º surveillance of territories. In a kind of mirrored language, it shall be called outlook and look out. If you visualize your brand as a...
Holistic Brand Design for Hospitality | A Guide to Placemaking
Spherical Design Holism for Hospitality | A Manual for Brand Placemaking Integration for Experiential Strategies and Tactics The Deployment of *Experientiality Earlier in my career, I worked on a string of projects for Disney, working with the Disney Imagineers and...
The Long Route | Getting Out There To The Brand New World
A stride at Bláskógabyggð, Suðurland, Iceland I was questioning a brand client—and we were talking about the notion of soul, the spirit of the brand a human enterprise—and the mirroring of a human maker, and what they make in the journey of a brand. Everyone knows, if...
The Fall Guy | The Metaphor of Failure
I was listening to a podcast by David Duchovny the proverbial Fox Mulder of the X-files--on failure. As he notes in his overview—a summary of his podcast— “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better,” Duchovny recites to WPR’s host Doug...
Symbolic Placemaking Strategies in Experiential Design
As you walk a journey—there are symbols in the path of your stride. As a person that has history in building places, thinking design in destinations, I tend to think about everything as a migration of symbolic content. Surely, simply, contemplate walking in a door—you...
Be Brave | The Character of Courage
The interplays in life, heartfulness and the courageous spirit. Thinking about the heart—and life journeys—in talking to my mother; we were walking the idea of courage. People, friends, family—they come and go—as we all do; it’s one in a string of challenges that we...
Brand Magic | Enchantment and the Magnetism of Attraction
I was working in a team-collaborative session, a BrandQuest, Soul Summit—an innovation forum, and we were discussing the implications of attraction. As brand strategists and designers, you know about the implications of product attraction. As we put it, first there...
Seeing deep | close and near—brand farsight
Deep perceptions, brand metaphors and the avian sentience. For most of my life, I’ve been a student of the birds. I admire them from the perspective of their calligraphic flight, fluttering and drifting, flourishing in elegant strokes in the air. I’ve cut them in...
Brand symbolism | The Cairn
Thinking metaphorically, there are plenty of symbolic allegories between the notion of brand building, design strategies, messaging and storytelling. You—brand designer, brand thinker, theorist, strategist—when you think of brand, the notion of a constructed and...
Get your hands off that! Don’t touch!
How many times—thinking about it personally—have you been told that? Don’t touch! Hey, don’t even think about touching that! Hand’s off—not for you! Please, just look—no touching! Mostly, these days, I don’t ask, don’t look around for approvals, I just touch— unless...