In the first of a series of interviews with inspiring female leaders, Wolff Olins’ global COO, Sairah Ashman, interviews Zena Bruges. 

Zena Bruges is managing director of The Future Laboratory, a business that helps clients look into the future to understand how consumers will behave. After studying at Edinburgh University, she has led a number of successful creative consultancies.

What are the most significant shifts influencing your business?

The need for speed and flexibility.  We’re increasingly working at an accelerated pace and need to be agile in our business planning, so we can adjust and adapt easily.  Clients are relying on us to help them understand what the world will look like in 2, 3 and 5 years ­ it used to be 10.  Consumer tastes change far more swiftly now with product innovation and cycles needing to keep up.  This is definitely influencing the needs of our clients and how we work.

What do you see as the key growth accelerators for you over the next 12 months?

We’re sitting on a product that not a lot of people know about, so we’re very focused on raising our profile as a way of unlocking growth.  We’re also looking at expanding into new markets where our offer is attractive and effective ­ which means mature markets rather than developing ones.

What role do you see brand playing in helping achieve your goals?

We’re hugely aware of the power of brand in the marketplace ­ for ourselves and for our clients.  Studies continue to reinforce this and and it’s especially the case for younger generations.  Brands are very much an integrated part of life. Like you, we believe brand is an entire experience and not simply a corporate identity.  Staying true to this philosophy as we promote ourselves and grow will be critical.

 What or who inspired you in the early years of your career?

I spent an early part of my career in New Zealand.  It exposed me to a really positive can-do spirit and gave me a sense that anything is possible.  My boss at the time was also really good at helping me stretch, giving me room to deliver, encouraging me to trust my own judgement and to just get on with stuff.  It’s really stayed with me and stood me in good stead as I’ve set up and run multiple businesses ­ that sense that everything is possible.

What advice would you pass on to others just starting out?

Be entrepreneurial.  Think about what’s good for the business you’re in. And what could be a new business ­ even if you don’t want to set one up. Develop ideas and be an opportunity spotter.  Be curious and confident, but never arrogant.  And have fun!

Sairah Ashman is global COO of Wolff Olins. 

…Or so the new “Take Off” advertising campaign for Acela Express would have us believe. And maybe they’re right. According to the New York Times, 75% of travel between NYC and Washington DC occurs on Amtrak trains. And Acela ridership specifically accounts for nearly 3.4 million passengers on Northeastern corridor rail transit every year.

Here’s a video from the campaign:

When Acela was launched in 2000, it focused on business travel with its offer of speed, efficiency and flexibility. Today, the new “Take Off” advertising campaign hits this proposition well, with a sharp elbow-jab toward the Northeast corridor airlines that comprise the main competition for the business travel dollar.  But the “Take Off” campaign pitches Acela even more ambitiously – it speaks of “reimagining business travel”. We wondered if Acela is really doing that and what it would take.

To create a brand experience that delivers on that promise, Acela needs more than a well-articulated ad campaign. They have to start looking for ways to use innovative spaces, better services, and powerful partnerships to shift the current perception of business travel time from “wasted” to “optimized.” Here’s how we’d get started…

The basics matter

In some ways, today’s Acela merely represents the basic standards that business travel should be delivering. What could their “reimagined” business travel look like? Could Acela be the ‘ultimate mobile office’, and what would it take to be that? Maybe it isn’t so much about luxury or premiums, but about the most reliable basic necessities.

Could Acela ensure that every passenger has a super clean and comfortable seat that doesn’t remind you of the 3.4 million other passengers who are using them? And of course…a working power outlet, maybe even two per passenger?

And how about consistently reliable hi-speed Wi-Fi? While both the Delta Shuttle and many express bus services also offer Wi-Fi, Acela’s ‘ultimate mobile office’ would need to go the extra mile to deliver a fast, consistent service. (Easy for us to say, as we don’t have to figure out the location of cellular towers, router reception, demand load, etc.) Acela could look for an opportunity to partner with a best-in-class mobile Wi-Fi provider, and create an utterly compelling Wi-Fi delivery that locks them in as the go-to choice for Northeast business travellers. Trenitalia’s Frecciarossa, Italy’s state-owned TGV, gets high customer ratings for its Wi-Fi Internet, an experimental network available through a co-operation between Trenitalia and Telecom Italia.  

Delight with fresh food and dining

Given that many busy business travellers often have to travel during mealtimes, quality, healthy food and beverages could go a long way in this “reimagination” of business travel. Would a franchise partnership with Whole Foods or Le Pain Quotitiden enable Acela to differentiate from the low-grade food options served on most airlines? Acela’s café car facilities, compared to airplanes and buses, could provide their brand a real advantage. The ‘ultimate mobile office’ might even offer its first-class passengers the option of hot or cold gourmet meals served directly at your seat. They could take a cue from Virgin Rail’s Intercity line in the UK and the TGV in France for example, which both offer a gourmet food service that creates a distinctly enjoyable travel experience.

Optimizing the space advantage

Given that air or bus travel makes most think of cramped and stuffy space, could Acela maximize its comparative space advantage to help reinvent business travel? We played with some more ideas to put space to work in a way that would change the game.

Conference Call Pods:

Acela’s Quiet Cars are wonderful – no need to blast music in your earphones to drown out your fellow passengers’ important discussions or telephone calls. But given the reality that business travellers do indeed have pressing matters to discuss, could Acela take full advantage of the space offered by a train and provide a car fitted with sound-safe conference call pods? 

Executive Meeting Room:

As time-optimization is high on the list of priorities for all business travellers, wouldn’t it be cool if you could simultaneously nail a key meeting or presentation whilst traveling? Could Acela offer executive meeting rooms equipped with conference table, Okamura or Aeron inspired seats, and a large-format HD screen that connects to a PC for video projections.

Workout Car:

Building on our imaginary executive meeting room, could Acela further optimize its space advantage and offer a fitness car? Maybe partner with Equinox Fitness or CrossFit and install stationary exercise machines so travellers could optimize their time and workout while traveling instead of sitting still.

Legendary service

One of the great things about an Acela journey is the low number of service announcements compared to the seemingly never-ending in-flight announcements suffered on your average flight. Could Acela further focus on reducing travel stress and become known for memorable and delightful employee service? Could they model a program on the Ritz Carlton’s “Legendary Service” training program for employee and customer engagement? Or survey their passengers to really understand what comprises the ultimate in service on-board Acela?  Per our service-announcement point, they might find that less is more. 

21^st century rail travel

Rail travel in the US has a long way to go to catch up to European and Asian standards, and perhaps that is more a political question than brand experience. But hi-speed rail tracks that are designed for hi-speed trains would really help Acela deliver on its core promise of speed. And ensure it could truly differentiate from the legacy of Amtrak and freight trains! As the US becomes increasingly conscious of carbon-foot printing (again some way to go to catch up to European standards), hi-speed/hi-efficiency rail travel could give Acela a valid advantage in offering business travelers the greener mode of transport. 

Acela brand potential

We wanted to play with the possibilities that a meaningful brand experience could deliver, and imagine what it might really take for Acela to “reinvent business travel”. By providing innovative spaces, services and powerful partnerships that enable business people to travel and work more efficiently, Acela could potentially reinvent the current perception of business travel time as wasted, and reinvent business travel in a way that delivers high value with a low carbon footprint.

We’re onboard, are you?

Angela Riley is a Strategy Director at Wolff Olins New York. 

By Zia Patel and Mayanka Sharma

In India Infosys is a 21^st century Icarus- like Icarus they were highly ambitious and wanted to fly high. They were a firm which soared above everything else but soon lost its wings and fell steeply.

In 2006, though Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) was larger on paper, it was Infosys that was considered the poster boy of India’s IT industry. It was known for delivering excellence while conducting business in a legal, transparent, and ethical manner. It epitomised corporate governance in Indiaand was a favorite of investors, job seekers and clients alike. Infosys was aggressive, innovative and growing. TCS, on the other hand, was a huge but ailing incumbent facing stiff competition.

Fast-forward to 2013 and the difference in the condition of the two companies is stark. Infosys is struggling to maintain its growth as well as margins. Market value of the firm has fallen by 20% in a short period of one month. Attrition is alarmingly high at 20% and management itself doesn’t appear much optimistic. TCS on the other hand, has turned the tide to become the undisputed leader again. What happened in the time span of a few years? 

Recession happened, some argue. Others say that as the world is becoming more technologically advanced, IT is becoming a more dynamic industry in which to work. Firms need to adjust accordingly, in order to sustain growth and remain profitable.

TCS restructured itself into a simpler but more customer-centric organization. It started utilizing its workforce better, improved employee engagement, decreased its dependency on its US-based clients and became more innovative and aggressive. Margins improved as operations and management became crisper. Not only did it survive the recession, TCS used it to prove its resilience and strength.

The turnaround stories of greater technology giants like IBM and Apple need not be retold. These firms were hailed initially as innovation masters but suffered with crises of identity and purpose.

Infosys has good resources in terms of employees and cash reserves. Many Fortune 500 companies are its clients and although investors are quite skeptical, they are not yet hopeless. If IBM, Apple and TCS can do it, investors want to believe that Infosys can do it too. It might not be wise to use the approach taken by other firms, because one size fits none. But what then could be the way forward for Infosys?

Learning from one’s own mistakes is good but learning from one’s own success is better, though rare. All Infosys might need to do is to go back to the future it aspired to create. The firm that started as Infosys Consultants went on to become the best-of-its-class software service provider during the next phase of its growth. As the IT industry evolves with cloud computing ensuring that more emphasis placed on software than ever, Infosys could also enter a new phase of possibilities.

It still has the potential to deliver on its initial promise of providing complete solutions and not just isolated software to its clients. Infosys started as a dream, a vision. It would be a dream come true for all stakeholders if it became a global IT consultancy brand that gave innovative solutions to its clients and hired best talent world has on offer.

As branding is increasingly more about purpose, would Infosys offer a reason for its existence and success which clients, markets, employees and people around the planet would not be able to resist? In the world of Indian IT, where ‘cut, copy, paste’ is employees’ inside joke for innovation, could Infosys be the game changer? We all have our fingers crossed.

Zia Patel is Head of Strategy Wolff Olins India. Mayanka Sharma is an intern at  IIM Lucknow. 

By  Nick O’Flaherty

Yahoo is the slowest-growing U.S. Internet company in its class—a trend the company is furtively trying to reverse. With Marissa Mayer at the helm, and former Goldman-banker-turned-‘Chief Development Officer’ Jacqueline Reses at her side, Yahoo has been busy restructuring and acquiring  - but with Q1 results showing a 4% dip in sales and profit rising only 36% there is still a ways to go.

In recent months, the magnifying glass on Marissa has kept the company even more tight-lipped than usual. Obviously a company in Yahoo’s position can’t reveal all of its strategies, but if the leadership have a clear purpose and vision for their brand, then it’s time to leverage the attention, and start to tell that story. Here’s a way to go about it:

First, define your journey.

We know Yahoo wants to win in mobile and personalized content, its last six acquisitions have been about building the capabilities, products and people to help get them there. Those bets are good – and are an indicator that Yahoo is moving from click centric to consumer centric, but it needs to reconcile the fact that at its core it’s still an ads-for-content company– and that core is not doing so well.

From the outside, its efforts could be seen as a series of quick fixes to magically shape shift, while it leaves its core business to languish (maybe Yahoo Stream Ads will change this!). As a perpetual optimist, and believer in Marissa - I don’t think this is the case - and the Yahoo journey of transformation is well planned. They just haven’t let anyone know about it yet. Let us in! We want to know where the business is going, why – and how the legacy business will play a role along the way. We’re not asking to give away all the secrets – but get us excited, and admit when you’ve gone off the path a bit. A bit of honesty and humility would also be welcomed in a world of platitudinal investor chatter and empty press releases.

Defining a brand purpose that explains Yahoo’s role in the world will show customers that this journey is rooted in the needs of real people, and it will motivate and focus the business along the way.

Second, remember what made you great.

Most companies begin with an ambitious leader on a mission to solve a problem, to fill a gap in the market, or bring a genius idea to reality. They are new, exciting, different. Customers flock to them, everyone wants to work for them, they grow at a dizzying rate, they go public, get rich, they are hugely successful, mission accomplished – or is it…? Wait, what was that mission again?

But it seems a law of physics— as many businesses get older, bigger, more diverse, more complex, more siloed, have more mouths to feed, and increasing pressure to serve shareholders – they slip into a gentle, sometimes imperceptible, state of decline. Think of a struggling Starbucks in 2008, before Howard Shultz returned as CEO to bring them back to customer-centric strategies and their original, neighborhood feel.

Yahoo’s problem, similarly, was not adapting its collegial, quirky, creative DNA into a sustainable competitive advantage. And now more than ever, with all of Marissa’s focus on the new, she can’t afford to forget the old. Not only is it disheartening for Yahoo’s legacy employees to see the focus on the new kids and their toys, there is a treasure trove of value in Yahoo’s history and culture that seems to have been neglected.

They were once the pioneer who defined the creative, non-corporate culture of Silicon Valley. To consumers, Yahoo has never been “evil” or abused its size and power (when it had it) and many want to see them win. Channeling the atmosphere of a younger Yahoo will set the right conditions for their new people to thrive and work together with their existing teams. That DNA will lend them credibility and authenticity not just with talent, but with audiences and advertisers too. Its low ego and willingness to collaborate are exactly right for the next era of this tech company’s growth.

Finally, build your brand on collaboration.

Collaboration is fundamental to Yahoo’s DNA, and it’s key to winning in tech. Already, Marissa has made overtures to partner with Apple to take on Google which is a great first step.  But it’s not just about business collaboration – it’s collaborating with the public too.

Yahoo should take a cue from one of its contemporaries in the tech world, Mozilla— a brand that’s built entirely on collaboration from inside and out. Mozilla’s mission to promote openness, innovation and opportunity on the Web is their ultimate decision-making filter. They have a global community of thousands of volunteer contributors whose opinions and perspectives are at the center of all their business moves. Moreover, they trust that community to be stewards of their brand – to share it, improve it, and love it like their own.

Yahoo needs to realize that people have a stake in their success too. And if they want to understand what would “make their daily routines truly delightful,” they’ll need to get way more intimate with their consumers. Beyond users, beyond clicks. A passionate partnership that leverages all of the ways a brand can listen to and work with its audience today is the best way to build products and programming that are thoughtful, relevant and attention grabbing.

Despite the media scrutiny of Marissa, I feel people are genuinely excited to see where she can take Yahoo right now  (I know I am!). And the path could be a bright one by clarifying where you want to go and building a brand purpose to get you there.

Nick O’Flaherty is strategy director at Wolff Olins New York. A version of this article originally appeared on iMedia Connection.

By Zia Patel & Aditya Julkat

Touted as the ‘People’s Car’, when Mr. Ratan Tata unveiled the Nano in 2007, it was expected to be the next big thing for the Indian automotive industry. All the ingredients were there to make it a huge success but somehow it never took off. Some said it was “too cheap for its own good” while others tagged it as a “poor man’s car”. Though most would pin the blame on the poor marketing strategy and the negative PR, Tata lost the game on the operational front as well. Delay in deliveries, long booking periods and design problems have plagued the Nano ever since the first car rolled off the assembly line in 2009. Some feel that Nano is a lost cause for Tata, or is it?

Despite its poor performance, most people actually still want Nano to succeed. However, the underlying problem is that those who want it to succeed the most are the ones who are not buying it. A car is an aspirational product for most Indians, especially for the ones that Nano targets—two wheeler owners looking for an upgrade. Nano makes sense for them, but no one wants to be associated with something that is considered cheap. Tata is struggling to change this image. Maybe Ratan Tata himself driving a Nano is the only solution, but most of us know that’s pretty unlikely to happen.

What the world needs

Tata cars are very popular with taxi operators across India because of their high reliability and mileage. When Nano was announced, many even expected it to be a welcome replacement for the popular ‘auto rickshaws’. Tata has often tried to break that stigma and design cars that are more appealing to families, but in the process they may have overlooked an opportunity. In this era of growing traffic congestion and the green revolution, could Nano have all the right ingredients to be a smart solution to the modern world’s public transport needs?

Who thinks you’re special

We see another opportunity in European and American markets, where the microcar segment has growing popularity. Unlike India, where the length of your car sometimes seems directly proportional to your social standing, European and American markets might welcome the Nano as a symbol of innovation and usefulness. And, instead of looking at it as an opportunity to ‘take India to the world,’ Tata should look to ‘bring the world to India’. In our experience, we see a natural tendency for Indians to prefer foreign brands and tastes.  If Tata could make Nano a hit abroad and then bring it back to India, the Indian consumer might start to see it in a new light.

What is the Nano really for?

There’s a lot for Tata to be excited about, still, Nano’s Achilles heel is a lack of clarity on its purpose. Since Nano’s launch, Tata has let the media and the rest of the world drive it they way they liked. What Tata needs to do is to go back to the drawing board and answer three key questions- Was the original idea brilliant? Is it still relevant to today’s context? And can Tata take this thought and make it work across segments? Apart from answering these questions, Tata can also take inspiration from what Mercedes did for Smart.

This will be the hardest truth to admit for anyone at Tata but the key to bringing a sputtering Nano to life may be “Going back to the future” and finding its true purpose.

Zia Patel is a senior strategist at Wolff Olins Dubai. Aditya Julka is a management student at IIM Lucknow and is interning with Wolff Olins.

Is trolling the new branding?

Buycott is a new app designed to support voting with your wallet. 

Created by Los Angeles-based developer Ivan Pardo, the app helps people scan the barcode on a product to see which companies own it, and avoid companies whose principles they disagree with – such as those owned by the Koch brothers, or who oppose labeling GMOs. The app provides contact information for each company, and includes a family tree of corporate lineage, linking smaller brands to the bigger ones that own them, and as Fast Company points out, “reminding consumers that seemingly indie brands are owned by much larger companies” – i.e., that size is often a branding effect.

Buycott’s “knowledge is power” approach to consumer activism reminded me of the recent New York magazine profile of Buzzfeed’s CEO Jonah Peretti, in which I was surprised to read that Peretti had actually started out as an internet artist and activist. In fact, his first notoriety came from culture-jamming Nike in 2001, by trying to make a pair of Nike iD sneakers that said SWEATSHOP. The resulting email correspondence, in which Nike repetitively refuses, went viral.

Since then, Peretti has reconfigured the line between activist and capitalist. An interesting moment in the New York magazine profile describes how he had created a mass-email tracking program called ForwardTrack, and although it was originally intended for liberal political groups and charities, “when Procter & Gamble wanted to adopt it for use in connection with a detergent promotion, he confessed no hesitation.” 

I realized I’d first heard of Peretti in the excellent book Brands: The Logos of the Global Economy by Celia Lury, where his Nike iD sweatshop stunt is put in historical terms. Coincidentally enough, the same chapter in Lury’s book includes an earlier, much weirder run-in between Proctor & Gamble and viral activism: the 1985 redesign of their 134-year-old logo in response to rumors that it as a mark of the devil. (When viewed in a mirror, the man’s curly beard was said to resemble a devilish 666, which is totally true if you look at it that way.) After a multi-million-dollar anti-rumor campaign that included private investigators, lawsuits, and a toll-free hotline, the company gave up and changed its logo to today’s plain old P&G.

At the time, the decision was described by marketers as “a rare case of a giant company succumbing to a bizarre and untraceable rumor” (New York Times News Service). Today, it’s clear that it was an early example of trolling – an effective, asymmetrical assault levied by an anonymous source on a visible public body. Which might not be so different from how branding works, itself:

 “Traveling anonymously, without clear meaning, authority, or direction, rumors colonize the media in much the same way that commercial trademarks do, subversively undermining the benign invisibility of the trademark’s corporate sponsor while maintaining the consumer’s own lack of authorial voice.” –Intellectual property expert Rosemary Coombe

To put it another way, rumors, trolling, and corporate branding have two important features in common: anonymity and amplification.  

Whitney Phillips, an anthropologist who wrote her PhD thesis on trolling, has a lot of great perspectives on this topic. She did an interview in The Awl that does a good job of showing how the new landscape of branded content is troubling what we take for granted in “authentic” media – specifically the elements of spontaneity and immediacy. Phillips defines memejacking as “the process by which marketers attempt to tack brand identity onto an existing meme, like some sort of unholy game of pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey” as well as TheBuzzfeed Effect (paging Peretti) as the behavior of a“nest of insanely influential organizations acting as ex post facto gatekeepers who have the power to make a meme by saying that something IS a meme—a process central to any smart ad-revenue-based business plan.”

The difference between memes and brands, of course, is that brands usually have a much more intelligible source, if you know where to look. And it’s precisely this possession, in the case of corporate branding, that the Buycott app is designed to figure out, cutting through the information soup to the money source. Let’s see if it works.

XOXO,

Gossip Girl

Future Patrol is a series of macrotrend posts by Emily Segal, a strategist at Wolff Olins New York. 

By Lisa Smith

If you haven’t heard of them you’ve probably been hiding under a rock. BuzzFeed has been around for a while, but has really come into its own in the past few years, with a growing number of top journalists calling it home. BuzzFeed is a media/news company that’s actually built for the social age—their audience is growing in large numbers of unique visitors daily, they’re physically expanding globally, starting to create original video content with a POV, and working with brands and their agencies to create great social content/advertising for their platform that really spreads all over the ‘social web’. It makes the rest of the media industry look like a bunch of dinosaurs.

I visited BuzzFeed this morning as part of OpenCo NY and learnt  from Jonah Peretti, BuzzFeed’s Founder and CEO, that their business is built on understanding human psychology and that people are literally crazy. BuzzFeed knows we don’t have unified interests, we behave very differently on Google vs Facebook for example, search is a private guilty pleasure, but what we share on Facebook is about identity and telling the world who we are. They know that we often contradict ourselves, everyone has a bit of OCD, histrionics, narcissism (especially Kim Kashadarian & Kanye), ADHD and oppositional defiant disorder. And according to them, EQ (emotional) content is more important than just IQ (intelligent) content… hence the immense popularity of stories like ‘25 Most Awkward Cat Sleeping Positions’ that was so popular and shared all over the internet.

So, this is a message to all the other media agencies out there, many of you need to wake up! It’s time to get off your high IQ horses to deliver content that is powerful and emotional, but also caters across content categories to our ununified selves—BuzzFeed’s main demographic is 18-34 year olds and if you don’t provide content that’s relevant to what these audiences want and share you won’t stand a chance in this ever growing mobile social world.

Lisa Smith is Design Director at Wolff Olins New York. 

By Owen Hughes 

Last week Anne-Sophie Chabeau, a design student from ESAL in Belgium, emailed Wolff Olins and asked if we could help her with a project she’s working on by defining design in one sentence. In the spirit of curiosity we opened the question up to the designers here and – despite the fact that we’ve all got more pressing things to do, like designing stuff – it sparked a bit of a debate. So we decided to open it up to Twitter too, with equally varied results.

Most designers have probably thought about this at one time or another. Maybe it’s part of a bigger existential question, or maybe it’s just because your mum’s asked you one too many times what exactly it is that you do. Graphic design grand-daddy Saul Bass said ‘Design is thinking made visual’. I think it’s got to be much bigger than that. Richard van der Laken, director of the What Design Can Do conference says ‘Well, everything is design. Except nature of course, although creationists might challenge me on that. Everything that man has touched is, in essence, designed.’

Which is why there isn’t one answer –  because the field is so wide. For me, if design is about anything it’s about trying to make life better – whether that’s designing a wristband that helps you track your physical activity, a way–finding system that makes your journey easier, a film title sequence that makes your heart beat a bit faster or even jewellery that can save your life.

I believe that’s where the heart of it is – design is making things better. Designers make this happen in a myriad of ways, but there are some practices that underpin it all: really understanding who we’re designing for, challenging accepted wisdom, making creative leaps into the dark, making smart use of new materials and technology, reusing old materials and technology in new ways and staying true to a clear guiding thought at the core of it all.

Thank you to everyone who sent their design definitions to us. As few of the responses are below. 

Owen Hughes is a creative director at Wolff Olins London. Follow him at @OwenDHughes 

By Sam Liebeskind

“He thinks he’s tough (his favorite movie is The Godfather)…but really, he’s not (Shawshank Redemption is a close second)…and he definitely has a sense of humor (Caddyshack rounds out the list of favorites).”

That quip - along with a few other gems- came from a talk with Bonobos’ VP of Marketing, Craig Elbert, during last week’s OpenCo event in NYC. 

This retailer’s spot-on understanding and articulation of its audience is one reason Bonobos is a rising brand, one to watch and learn from over the next few years.  

Here are a few others:

They’re online first and foremost

This may seem obvious now, but it’s amazing how few retailers actually treat the web as #1.  For Bonobos, the original insight was realizing that many men don’t like the pressure-filled, often overwhelming experience of shopping in a brick and mortar store (it’s not laziness, it’s more like aversion).  So they started all-in online, making sure to go well beyond the costs of entry.  Things like Bonobos’ customer ‘Ninjas’ (all college graduates) and free shipping/returns help to alleviate the otherwise “high-friction” situation of ordering an expensive, fit-sensitive item online.

They’re experimental

Sensing that some men do, in fact, want to feel certain items before ordering them (“There are two things people like to touch before buying: suits, and Tupperware”), Bonobos made an early small bet, turning the lobby of their NY headquarters into what they call a Guideshop.  The thinking was: why not invite people in, let them have a beer, and give them a one-on-one consultant and a casual environment in which to try on clothes.  The approach proved successful – both in terms of purchase metrics (Guideshop visitors place double the average order value, and come back to Bonobos faster for a second purchase) and in helping the company better understand their customers. Craig Elbert told us at OpenCo “before the Guideshops, we just knew the majority of our customers were guys…now we can actually have conversations and learn.” They’ve since opened 5 more experiential spaces (in addition to a much publicized partnership with Nordstrom).

They’re smart about sub-brands

Bonobos has already shown an eye for spotting new opportunities.  After one employee realized there was nowhere for him to buy “Arnold Palmer inspired, bad-ass classics,” Maide was born.  While clothiers like Nike and Callaway are making performance-focused items, Bonobos is bringing fitted style back to the greens.

If you’re not following these guys on twitter yet, be sure to check them out: @bonobos (for announcements, general brand talk) and @bonobosninjas (to see how they’re using twitter as a two-way conversation tool)

Sam Liebeskind is a strategist at Wolff Olins New York. Follow him at @samliebeskind

By Karl Sadler and Jody Hudson-Powell 

Karl and Jody spent half an hour this lunchtime getting to grips with a new invention toy/tool called a makey makey. 

It’s a simple piece of electronics based on an Arduino Leonardo micro controller that lets people from all ages explore new ways to interact with computers.

We thought it’d be neat to toy around with the idea of an interactive poster, and Jody has just created a lovely one for the do the green thing campaign. 

Borrowing a bit of tin foil from the kitchen and a projector, the idea here is that a print based poster gets layered with a video graphic. By touching the poster, you control which movie is playing.

The software is a simple application built in processing that listens for a signal from the makey makey and plays back a movie file.

Super simple prototype, but the make make is already a fun new addition to the studio and smart new way to think about how and what we make here.

Karl Sadler and Jody Hudson-Powell are design directors at Wolff Olins London.

By Sairah Ashman  

At Wolff Olins we love a good cause and the chance to hang out with interesting people who are trying to do some good in the world.  Henry Dimbleby popped in yesterday to tell us about the work he’s doing to help improve school lunches in the UK.  It was powerful and inspiring stuff.  Henry co-founded the healthy fast food chain Leon with John Vincent back in the day.  So he knows a thing or two about creating healthy, tasty food in a hurry.  Together they’re helping lead a review into school lunches as part of the School Food Plan.  

Did you know that current research suggests 25% of children will be clinically obese by the time they leave school?  Potentially setting them up for a lifetime of poor health.  At the same time the benefits of a healthy school produced lunch are self evident.  Increased concentration, improved grades, better behaviour, more of a community spirit.  The turnaround at Carshalton Boys Sports College is an amazing example of what can be achieved when you put food at the heart of a school…I’m still reeling from all the stats.

Henry and John have spent 50% of their time over the last year getting to know the topic of school dinners inside out, eating in schools and talking to everyone with an interest and point of view on the subject.  They’ve clearly applied all the passion and smarts they have for their own business to this new initiative.  The results are due out over the summer.  I think it’s fantastic that they’ve managed to find a perfect way to contribute practically in an area they feel strongly about and can bring expertise to.  And it feels like a great model for other businesses to learn something from.  The more integrated doing business and doing good can become the better for all of us!

Sairah Ashman is COO of Wolff Olins. Follow her on Twitter at @sairahashman

By Tom Wason 

Almost 20 years after William Gibson brought us the term cyberspace, the screen is no longer the only way we experience the virtual world.

The internet is becoming physical in ways that will have profound effects on all of our lives. Now, just as brands born in the physical world have grappled with what their digital experience should be, the new wave of brands, born in the age of the internet and software, are starting to imagine how their experience could also be physical.  

Huge digital brands have made big moves into the physical world: Microsoft with Surface and Xbox, Amazon with Kindle, Google with Glass, Intel is about to begin its foray into TV with Intel Media, even Facebook has tried (and looks to be failing) with Home. 

But in the new reality of the internet of things the screen is no longer the only way we interact with the virtual world. Product design conventions, body gestures, haptic feedback and other yet-to-be explored physical interactions are starting to become a major part of how we experience brands.

Digital brands might be well positioned on some of these, but for me its hardware brands who now have the more interesting opportunity to define and capitalise on these emergent types of interaction. So where are they?

Only Apple has so far managed to merge physical and virtual experiences at scale. But despite Apple’s financial success and apparent ubiquity in the West, the reality is it remains an exclusive, premium brand. iOS ships on just 17% of the world’s smartphones (down from 23% last year). Also the real power of the internet of things will lie in the totality of its connections. If, like apple, you fence off your ecosystem, that’s going to prove pretty limiting.

In truth, it’s Samsung that dominates among the hardware manufacturers. Not content with making more smartphones, more feature phones and more TVs than any other company in the world, they are trying to become the biggest home appliance company in the world. Samsung is already physically present on more occasions across a greater number of categories and with more people than any other brand else.

The next step is for Samsung to create non-screen based brand experiences for interactions with the virtual world and make extra-sure that those experiences are coherent across its huge range of products and categories. The brand should also grow into more categories – wearable computing particularly – that will be at the centre of defining these new interactions.

This will join up the Samsung experience in people’s minds and make them more likely to consider Samsung across really disparate categories. It will put Samsung right at the forefront when people think about the internet of things, opening up huge opportunities for the Korean giant.

Tom Wason is Principal at Wolff Olins.

By Zia Patel

India is indeed a funny telecom market—saturated with 13 players, with each of them contemplating different strategies to claw market share. Along with a spew of scandals, license cancellations and price revisions, we’ve just witnessed the end an eight-year-long feud between the estranged Reliance brothers. They recently joined hands again under Reliance Jio, with the goal of providing 4G in India .

While pan-India coverage has yet to be achieved by any provider, and 3G subscribers number only 33 million, Reliance, Airtel and Videocon have already stepped on the 4G accelerator. On the other hand, Vodafone claims that it’s too early for India to go 4G. So is Reliance Jio doing the right thing? Let’s rummage through a few facts.

More people in India access the Internet through their phones than through a computer, which means that to most Indians, the availability of cheaper handsets is more significant than the service - be it 2G, 3G or 4G. Hardware is what will have a real impact for the mass market in India – which is evident from Micromax Mobile’s success so far.

Many in India would still prefer streaming a movie using Wi-Fi, calling at the lowest rates and using 2G/3G to access Facebook. 4G data packages will be priced higher, so operators will have to offer other incentives to attract customers. In this atmosphere, Reliance 4G will have to challenge Uninor’s cheap calling rates, Aircel’s cheap 3G data packages and also provide good coverage.

There’s yet another matter of concern—network compatibility. Since 4G can be deployed using different technologies, a device that’s termed 4G isn’t necessarily compatible with every provider’s network. For example, a Nokia Lumia or a Blackberry Z10 might not be compatible with the 4G network provided by Airtel or Reliance, while an expensive Samsung Galaxy S4 will be. This is why iPads in the US are bundled with AT&T, Verizon or Sprint; the device doesn’t work seamlessly across all networks.

Hence, our view is that Reliance Jio will need to carefully plan out their strategy before they rattle India’s telecom world. Reliance Communications has done this before by making mobile phone usage on CDMA networks democratic and affordable. And we’re convinced Reliance pull this off again, with a brand-led strategy. Here are four steps that also earlier applied to 2G and 3G, but have different implications in this context:

Make life easy

The trick will be to find a simple way to explain how Jio can help people and make life easier. They have got their first move right by attaining licenses in all circles – this might restrain the Indian consumer from switching SIMs while switching regions, who on an average possesses 2.2 SIMs.

Be honest and transparent

The Indian consumer might be still rallying under recovery mode from the wake of the 2G scandals and 3G stay orders. Reliance must lift levels of public interest and breed confidence in its brand.

Be clear and understandable

Perhaps the point is that it’s important to create brands that are down-to-earth and accessible in terms of tone, look and feel. Jio should be impeccable in communicating to the masses what it offers and on which devices it’s bound to work.

Be affordable

It is fair to assume that India’s expanding middle class is the primary target, which means that what they offer has got to be affordable. If it rolls out devices locked to its network, bundling with cheaper devices such as Micromax and Karbonn might be a good option, ensuring cheap voice calls at the same time.

Above all, has Jio got its timing right? Jio bringing the two estranged brothers back together was itself a surprising turn of events, and we are pretty sure it will lead to a lot more interesting things ahead. We’re certainly watching.

Zia Patel is Head of Strategy at Wolff Olins Dubai. Aditya Das, a management student at IIM Lucknow, also contributed to this piece.

Image via MPR news

By Melissa Andrada

Television. Music. Mobile. Education is the next frontier of technological disruption.

The need to evolve has led universities to use digital technology to re-think how education is delivered. We’re seeing a gold rush of universities racing to digitise their campuses to offer free online courses to the world.

However, quantity doesn’t equal quality. Few universities are making the most of this new medium. Most mass online open courses (MOOCs) consist of a ‘talking head’ in a front of white board. It’s no wonder completion rates are less than 10%.

Yet online education has the potential to be so much more. Technology enables us to create learning that encourages:

Active Participation

Learning shouldn’t just be about listening and watching, but also, doing and making. Education resources, like Codeacademy, start by throwing people into the content headfirst. With Codeacademy, you can begin coding right away without evening signing in or watching an instructional video.

Fun Adventure

Learning doesn’t have to be a dull chore. Organisations like TED set the bar high for video talks. Along with the RSA Animates, they’ve elevated the lecture to an art. They create highly curated visual stories that move both the mind and the heart. They inspire us to fall into a rabbit hole, going from video to video, hyperlink to hyperlink.

Lifelong Learning

Learning shouldn’t stop when you’re 18 or 22. Education startups, like FutureLearn, are re-inventing learning for life. They will offer free online courses from top universities whenever and wherever you like. For FutureLearn, the classroom can be a lecture hall, a mobile phone, a museum, an airport. They are building an experience that welcomes everyone to learn, regardless of age, location or background.

My ambition is to put these principles into practice – to use technology to make learning sing. This summer Robert Jones, Head of New Thinking and professor at the University of East Anglia, and I will be co-creating a course on branding for FutureLearn. Our challenge and opportunity will not just be using the medium, but making the most of it.

Melissa Andrada is a lead strategist passionate about the intersection between brand, technology and social impact. In her spare time, she teaches entrepreneurs and startups how to build better businesses at General Assembly. @themelissard

Image via Code Academy and the New York Times

By Chris Moody 

A couple of weeks ago I was struck by an incident in a city centre pub (metaphorically).

The family of a World War One, Victoria Cross medal winning solider was thrown out of the bar named after him – at the funeral wake for his son.

The group were asked to leave the Wilfred Wood because the written guidance stated one of the family members (aged just 16) had become ‘illegal’ after the stroke of 8 o’clock.

Whilst not the treasonable offence The Metro newspaper claimed it to be, it can’t have been a nice thing for anyone concerned. It highlights the perils of brands being both personal but also inflexible and the conflict of trying to assert control.

The relationship between brand and the individual is clearly evolving - from a model of corporations prescribing customer interactions – to customers acting as users and setting their own terms.

It’s a smart move to align your brand with users on a more human level, even to find a way to ‘co-brand’ with your public. But, in doing so, you have to accept the fact that we humans can be unpredictable, fickle and more than a little bit awkward. As the Wilfred Wood debacle proves; the public doesn’t always follow brand guidelines.

The personal touch can bring your brand closer to your audience. Politicians repeat people’s names like parrots with Tourette’s because it has been proved we all respond warmly to hearing our names during a conversation. Increasingly in the world of the 5 second advertisement and the 140 character conversation this shortcut to the emotional part of your cortex is an efficient strategy.

Through relationships with Nike ID or even our Facebook homepages, we are all already co-branding and collaborating daily with huge brands, on first name terms. Coke’s latest packaging work takes this a logical step forward, for the first time replacing the iconic Coca Cola Script on the bottle with the first names of potential consumers. It’s a neat example of individualisation on a mass level. While Starbucks, with their more DIY approach, have now been co-branding their logo with our names for years with slightly more mixed results (there’s nothing worse than getting someone’s name wrong - ‘Kriss’? Really?).

At least Coca Cola is trying to live in the customer’s world and play by our rules - bending their own brand guidelines. It could be better if the brand was even more generous, even more flexible, incorporating difficult or unusual names (currently there are only 150 real versions, so all the Moon Units and Zowies out there will have to be happy with just a digital can). The problems really come when organisations try to force their rules, structures and names on users.

This week London Transport announced that it would be offering brands the ability rename parts of the network. Whilst this has been grudgingly accepted, by football fans in their stadiums, it will be interesting to see how Londoners react to much loved locations losing their distinctive identity.

More troubling was the fact the Metropolitan Police released information that they already had sponsorship deals with various organisations. Whilst the Met’s armed response unit is unlikely to be sporting Rentokill logos any time soon, brands co-opting and forcing their way into personal or sensitive areas of our lives is fraught with potential upset. 

The most extreme manifestation of this is seen daily in the mass media where individuals (or even whole sequences of events) become hijacked by an inflexible brand. Last week I counted three individual logos fighting for space on a news report about a tragic murder.

News stories rendered even more distressing by the badging of footage and photography (sold by onlookers) with the shiny logos of media giants.

This is impersonal dark age brand behaviour - stand out at all costs. A brand should never have to decide if the mono version of the logo should be used because it really pings out against fuzzy iPhone shot of a scene of ‘unimaginable terror’.

If you are going to be generous with your brand and play a part peoples lives, you must act like a real person – accepting both the fallibilities and boundaries of human beings. These are the things that make life fun, exciting, unpredictable and real.

If you are going to put someone else’s name alongside your brand you need to always be asking if you are being true to their brand values not yours. If not, step away.

Were the Wilfred Wood guidelines being true to their brand? I’m not sure but perhaps they should have asked themselves…

What would Wilfred have done?

Chris Moody is a creative director at Wolff Olins London. 

WOWFILM from Wolff Olins on Vimeo.

A sweet little something about WOW, a programme we created to help us stay a little bit healthier, from eating healthier and staying fitter to managing our time and money better.

by Robert Jones and Sami Mallis

There’s no industry that more needs to change its game than financial services – and yet that seems so unlikely to do it. This is not because of the conservatism of banks, but because of the conservatism of consumers. In many ways, it’s a justified conservatism – ‘don’t mess around with my money’ – and yet things could be so much better for all of us. Cash machines and credit cards revolutionised money in the 1960s. Since then, we’ve had great but relatively small innovations, mostly from smaller players. In the mainstream, little has changed. But there are three signs of hope.

The revival of ethics

Why do we still so mistrust banks? In the UK, only one in ten people say they trust bankers to act in their best interests, according to Which?  But one global bank is trying to do something about this: Barclays. Through its Transform programme, led by CEO Antony Jenkins, Barclays is shifting its culture towards making money ‘in the right way’. Employees who don’t accept values like integrity are told: ‘Barclays is not the place for you’. The change will take time, but it’s certainly in earnest. And around the world, Islamic banks, like Noor Islamic Bank, are becoming a mainstream alternative. They don’t charge conventional interest, they invest ethically, and they share profits and losses. Ernst & Young predicts that Islamic banking in the Middle East and North Africa will double in size between 2010 and 2015. Expect more banks to take ethics much more seriously: but who will do it best?

The transformation of payment

Why do we still carry a pile of coins, and a stack of plastic, around? Here’s where there has been change, with online payment systems like PayPal, contactless cards, person-to-person payment devices like Square, and mobile systems like M-PESA. Square, for instance, now processes $41 million in payments every day. And we’re on the brink now of cashless, cardless payment, as our phones and credit cards converge with innovations like Apple’s Passbook, Google’s Wallet and AmEx’s partnership with Isis Mobile Wallet. Expect rapid change in the next couple of years. One brand will probably emerge as the standard: which one?

The modernisation of advice

Why is there still no big, branded financial advice service? Financial advice is a huge industry, and the demand is growing – yet it has shown few signs of entering the modern world. When people don’t know which advisors they can really trust, alternative sources are doing well, often with a lot of peer-to-peer content. Moneysavingexpert.com in the UK reaches 13 million users a month. CaféMom is a successful forum on family financial issues targeted at mothers. SALT is a free membership programme from the non-profit American Student Assistance to help students manage their loans and take control of their money. These examples are promising, and expect much more. But which big brand will really grab the still-open opportunity for good, sensible, large-scale, mainstream financial advice?

Robert Jones is head of new thinking at Wolff Olins. Sami Mallis is a marketing associate at Wolff Olins London. 

Image via SALT and American Student Assistance

The most ambitious architectural programme of its kind, the Serpentine’s annual Pavilion commission in London is one of the most anticipated announcements on the cultural calendar. This year it has been designed by Sou Fujimoto who has delivered a delicate, cloud-like lattice structure that is both ambitious in form and execution.

To bring an even greater sense of occasion to the Pavilion and park, and to reflect the ambition of Fujimoto’s creation, Fortnum & Mason, along with Wolff Olins and MAP (under the Barber Osgerby design house) have devised something truly different – the Hamperling.

The Hamperling is the younger, contemporary, twice removed cousin of the traditional Fortnum & Mason hamper. According to Ewan Venters, Fortnum & Mason’s CEO it gives the brand “a chance to be more eccentric but retain the tea experience". We agree, and we also think it will extend the audience, reach and relevance of the brand and offer.

Complete with food, drink, tablecloth, and cutlery, the Hamperling has been carefully designed to provide everything needed for a splendid picnic in the park, all in one simple ‘kit’. The modular nature of the design means it can accommodate simply drinks or ‘Lunch for one’ or a new take on the traditional afternoon ‘Tea for two.’

The Hamperling is Fortnum & Mason’s first step into the world beyond its Piccadilly store and is one of a series activities borne from our long-term role as strategic brand advisers. We couldn’t be happier to see it out in the world and can’t wait to try it for ourselves.

By Ameen Malhas and Besiki Turazashvili

Following weeks of speculation on the streets of Lahore, Karachi and Islamabad, with the “Follow the Link” teaser campaign, we are proud to announce that Mobilink, Pakistan’s number one mobile operator with 36 million subscribers just launched its new brand. We have closely worked alongside Mobilink on this new brand and its expression from the very start - when many of the brand ideas were just scribbles on a conference room wall.

Today, we can say that we’re very proud and honoured to have participated in streamlining and re-launching one of Pakistan’s most prominent brands. We also worked alongside a very talented set of Pakistani communication, media and event agencies which was a real experience in cross border collaboration as elements of this brand and its launch were created in Los Angeles, London, Istanbul, Dubai, Singapore, but most of all in the gorgeously green city of Islamabad itself.

When we first met Mobilink, the team was working with four iconic brands:

- Mobilink, the corporate brand

- Jazz, the mass market prepaid brand

- Indigo, the premium postpaid brand

- Jazba, the youth data centric brand

Through research, collaboration and some brave decisions, Wolff Olins helped Mobilink streamline and consolidate its brand portfolio into one.

Whilst retaining a sense of Mobilinks heritage through the letter M in the orb, the main inspiration of this newly launched visual identity reflects leadership, innovation, togetherness and positivity. The core idea of the transformation is “Being One,” reinforced by being your link to “a bigger, brighter, better everyday.”

Ameen Malhas is a stategist and Besiki Turazashvili is a marketing associate at Wolff Olins Dubai.