Acting out for branding’s sake

For those of you who don’t know, the extrovertic offices are populated with very lively, hard-working, sociable, and yes, loud people (we are extroverts after all). Our natural exuberance was put to work by taking 2 days to turn strategic, creative, and account resources loose.

The motivation for this mayhem? Designing extrovertic.  

The goal of this project was to redesign the agency to offer a uniquely extrovertic level of service to our clients, and to create a brief for rebranding the agency to better reflect the way we work, communicate, and to explain why we exist. To develop our ideas, we broke into multiple teams. Each was named for different masters of design: 

  

   ·     Milton Glaser
      o   Famous for designing the “I Love NY” logo

   ·      Jonathan Ive
      o   Famous for his iconic designs at Apple

   ·      Charles and Ray Eames
      o   Famous for their amazing designs and comfortable furniture

The motivation behind naming each team after a famous designer was to get us thinking about elegant yet innovative solutions. Employing a design mentality means going deep into understanding how something should work and then ensuring that its ultimate aesthetic serves a true purpose. Ultimately, we didn’t want extrovertic to merely look different, we wanted to be different. In our small groups, we discussed our professional pasts and presents to discern what worked and what didn’t. Topics we brainstormed included:

   ·      How do you make a lasting impact on a client during and after a pitch?

   ·      What is the extrovertic client journey?

   ·      What makes an agency a fun place to work at?

Lastly, each team presented their findings to the agency as a whole. In true extrovertic style, some of the presentations deviated from the PowerPoint norm— some groups even showed off their acting prowess by presenting their findings in hysterically funny skits.

And the result?

With a deeper understanding of what we stand for and how we work, we developed new agency branding and updated our website (see last week’s blog post). To get a better idea of how it has changed our work and work environment, you can keep reading our blog, or better yet, become a client or extrovert and see for yourself!

-Jared

Simple On the Outside Doesn’t Always Mean Simple On the Inside.

Steve Jobs’ legacy of incorporating design into EVERYTHING, no matter how seemingly small or inconsequential, inspired extrovertic to seek out design elements in unexpected places within the agency model.

Seeking inspiration (and new ways to approach this goal), I purchased the new Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson as soon as it was available. And I loved every word of its 656 pages.

Now, if you’ve ever tried to write anything (even a blog post), you’ll know that the creative process is never simple. In fact, a key takeaway from the book for me was that simplicity requires relentless effort, revisions, editing, and reediting.

Given the runaway success of all things Apple, one might assume that the iPad and iPod had easy births. However, Jobs dispels this myth, saying, “It takes a lot of hard work…to make something simple, to truly understand the underlying challenges and come up with elegant solutions.” Isaacson notes, “Jobs had aimed for simplicity that comes from conquering complexities, not ignoring them.”

To conquer these complexities, Jobs went with his gut. While creating the iPad for instance, instead of doing consumer research to find out what people wanted, Jobs expressed Apple’s approach as, “We figure out what we want. And I think we’re pretty good at having the right discipline to think through whether a lot of other people are going to want it, too.”

In addition to the tireless pursuit of an elegant solution, Jobs encountered other speed bumps on the road to success. His former CFO Joe Graziano infamously dismissed the Apple Store concept by saying, “Apple’s problem is it still believes the way to grow is serving caviar in a world that seems pretty content with cheese and crackers."

Fortunately for Jobs, at the end of the day, his naysayers became inconsequential because he had the internal resources to see his vision through.

After spending some time processing Jobs’ situation, I began thinking about times when I didn’t succeed in realizing my own vision. Was there anything about my mindset in those situations that got in the way? How could stronger internal fortitude help me slay those “I can’t do this” thoughts that arise when facing a difficult challenge?

With a little introspection, here are a few lessons I came up with:

1.      The little voice inside your head doesn’t always require medication. In fact, I’ve found that ignoring that voice has always gotten me into trouble. In the early years of forming extrovertic, I sometimes didn’t push enough on some critical fronts. When starting a business, there will always be things that get in the way of pushing yourself to the limit. So, trust your instincts and push, push, push for a better solution.

2.      Leaders—broadcast the little voices in your heads. On a personal level, it’s not always easy to be relentless. As extrovertic has grown from a 4- to a 40-person agency, I’ve realized that success is directly linked to the performance of each and every extrovert. To gain maximum leverage, my job is to set the bar high and keep raising it.

1.      Do not be a “blame sponge.” When I was at Pfizer, during our first attempt at building a patient database, I got myself into a lot of trouble for accepting cockamamie excuses for numbers that made absolutely no sense. I blamed myself for not understanding. Finally, I found someone who could explain to me what had gone wrong and how to fix it. We then made a plan, executed it, and built a functional database. 

So that’s the tack I am going to take in my quest for simple, elegant solutions. Does any of this resonate with you? How do you bolster your inner resolve to achieve your goals?

-Dorothy