That was two decades ago. These days, Deep Design often deals with the corporate brand, and must uncover what makes it tick in its own special way. This inevitably begets close encounters with the company’s Vision and Mission statements, hanging lifelessly in the conference room (or above the photocopier in the utilities room). A polite attempt must be made to decode its vague and impenetrable corporate speak. It can then be safely forgotten, for assuredly no one from the company will remember or care.

And every now and then, a company might ask to have one of these things crafted. Deep Design takes arms against the problem: please find here, not advice on how to build one, but your columnist’s experience of what seems to go wrong when a group gets down to it. Why the result, so often, is empty bombast, without the capacity to inspire or guide; why it lies ignored and forlorn.

That’s an opportunity lost, because words matter. They can indeed provide an unwavering compass, a reminder that reinforces better thoughts and action, especially in times of uncertainty, and last a decade or more.

Some definitions follow. A Vision is an aspiration for the company’s future destination, a ‘some day…’ statement. A Mission sets the course for the journey, a “today, we…” promise. A company might also add Values—non-negotiable choices, irrespective of reward or disadvantage. Or a Purpose—why, beyond the obligation of profit, the company exists.

The words must be short, sharp and capable of triggering images and action. Yet, this is not a mere copy-crafting exercise. Words matter only if they flow from the depths of intentions, when they have consequences.

The words must be short, sharp and capable of triggering images and action. Yet, this is not a mere copy-crafting exercise. Words matter only if they flow from the depths of intentions, when they have consequences.

Without consequences, the statement ensures its irrelevance; it will make no one’s job harder, no one’s stride quicker, because participants have no skin in the game. The surest sign is an absence of fear, because an outcome is guaranteed, and failure is ruled out. The tacit, collective responsibility is to ensure sufficiently imprecise language.

In this condition, expect the words to be borrowed, not owned, and at worst, from the vision statements of the most admired firm du jour.

While listing Values, quality, for example, is a perennial. Every business aims at it, but is the word a given? Qifaayat, a budget home goods brand, may define quality differently in both criteria and degree (neat, reliable, and just good enough). This brand need not enshrine quality as a Value. It might leverage its own way of doing business and express a Value like “domestic happiness for everyone”.

Getting to a value or a purpose demands questioning one’s business recursively: why does Qifaayat care about affordability, and in turn, what does affordability enable? Introspection is necessary to select an idea from a bunch of facts.

But group discussion dynamics favour competitive aspiration (I’m more ambitious than you). Introspection is suppressed, for it is best done alone and without the need to impress peers, or put up a brave face to consultants. Nothing wrong with ambition, but you reach there tomorrow from here, today. Unanchored ‘positivity’ is empty. Leadership is needed to facilitate honesty.

Even when a future position is rooted in reality, the talk may precede the walk. Spotting this needs maturity. Indeed claims, slightly in advance of capability, may be a tonic, and some businesses thrive that way. But mind the dose, heeding Henry Ford’s warning that one cannot build a reputation on what one is going to do.

Conversely, we see the failure to appreciate the company’s unique strengths altogether. Apart from pessimism, a false understanding of uniqueness may underlie this. Uniqueness is not absolute but governed by context (such as the competition and the category and the combination of special circumstances). Recognising it takes patience, and an appreciative mindset. Often an outside eye may do the job better.

Groupthink is also hospitable to consensus, a good thing if it is not compromise, or an attempt at completeness (include every attribute just to be safe). The latter two will result in a weakened vision. There’s often genuine cause: everyone’s participation is essential if change is to be subscribed to. But in that guise can come special pleading on behalf of a narrow interest, which poses a leadership challenge, especially when the pleader is an important person.

The statement must be precise and clear enough to be falsified, that is, possible to observe as being false. JFK’s “man on the moon by 1960” is falsifiable; “expanding frontiers of space” less so. Such specificity and measurability will be casualties in the face of compromise, the unwillingness to confront or appreciate today’s position, and the raging hormones of ambition uncoupled from reality.

The statement must be precise and clear enough to be falsified, that is, possible to observe as being false. 

All these are defects of process, mindset and the right conditions for discussion. But the most serious issues may be structural, stemming from the company’s leadership, and beyond the reach of the facilitator. The CEO must take honest personal counsel.

The first is a fear of fixity: the apprehension that clear statements reduce optionality and cramp the business’ freedom to operate. More serious yet is a lack of agreement, not on what the statement is, but what it does, its role in the company’s daily life. Will it be displayed (how, where?) Will we begin meetings with it, or quote it to resolve arguments? Will it influence our systems of reward, our allocation of money and people, our marketing?

An answer may be to avoid blue sky thinking. Instead, let the business run till the facts are in. Let the group form an appreciation of the company’s phases of success, and a theory of what it did right then. After reflection, define it and resolve to make the company even more like it already is, when at its best. This may be the best way for the vision and mission to be more than just a wordy decoration.

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First published in a slightly modified form ‘The Vision Mission Exercise’ in Business Standard, 16 June, in Deep Design, a fortnightly column by Itu Chaudhuri.

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This column, too: we labeled Apple, AirBnB, Google and their increasing tribe as ‘digital darlings’. In their wake, we noted, traditional behemoths like P&G and GE have made design more central, and made products, development and innovation (thus design) central to their resource allocations and hierarchy. Nowadays, these grey gentlemen are far less bashful in their approaches. The elevation of design seems like the new orthodoxy. In innovation cultures like the Silicon Valley, it may even be passe.

The digital darlings represent the school of creative disruption. It is based on the new realisation of the centrality of user/customer experience, via human-centred design (in the jargon) rather than on physical products; so goes the narrative.

The digital darlings represent the school of creative disruption. It is based on the new realisation of the centrality of user/customer experience

This narrative needs flesh and detail. Deep Design brings it to you by examining the intriguing phenomenon of large management consulting firms acquiring design companies, while tis no surprise for product firms to do so. It provides a fuller explanation of what design can do for business.

The facts: in 2015, McKinsey has made a large acquisition of Lunar, a highly regarded, 375 strong product design firm. Accenture too has a similar albeit smaller acquisition in Fjord, a service design firm, and owns several agencies besides, as does Deloitte.

Design and management consulting are profoundly dissimilar. Most fundamentally, design is in the making business, rather than the advising business. Design synthesises different strands of observed reality in order to imagine a better future. It acts via a new relationship between product (for example) and users. The result might be computers that run on pictures, and which housewives and their kids can use; or taxis on demand from a company that doesn’t own any, from a magically visual screen on a handheld device.

Design and management consulting are profoundly dissimilar. Design is in the making business, while management is in the advising business.

Management consulting is predicated on continuity, optimising the present. It analyses situations in the light of cases: data on how peer or near peer firms as similar as possible to the client acted, and what resulted. This industry knowledge makes the consulting practice formidable—they know too much. They may suggest a broad class of actions, but never intervene to engage with specifics inside the client’s messy complexity.

It’s realistic to propose that these times present a challenge to management consulting. Industry and customer data from sources old and new (social media for example) has never been more available, and with new tools for analysis, they can substitute for knowledge of industry frameworks acquired over decades. The knowledge advantage between clients and a Mckinsey may be melting, but this age may be also rendering what’s left less relevant.

That’s because it’s an age where industries are digitally disrupted, where consumers, users and suppliers can cause shapeshifting transformations to both markets and supply ecosystems in a wink. Technological changes seem too extreme to handle even when their building blocks are known. Neither the iPhone or the iPod introduced virgin technologies, but had decisive impact on their industries. Today’s building blocks are artificial intelligence, augmented reality, blockchain, and the internet of things.

Management consulting likes certainty. It uses deductive methods (if-then) and industry experience (as-is) to pronounce the one magnificent conclusion that’s ‘not wrong’, preferably infallible or at least unfalsifiable. Authority is prized; clients are vanquished with intellect. Its preferred output is a presentation deck, with a recommendation from a set of known possibilities. It’s final.

Design methods tolerate uncertainty, and are happy with mere validity. ‘Can work’ might be preferable to ‘it is so’; certainty is an illusion, and proof is hubris. Its methods lean more on what-if than if-then. An imperfect solution illustrates the question better than an analysis. Design’s preferred response might be a cheap, rapid prototype, and there are more where they came from. Tentativeness? That’s confidence.

Forcing order by sheer will and intellect may not be appropriate in a storm, because it assumes that waves stand still, so to speak. Change affects not just the client industry, but is part of a mesh of interactions (the motor car needs petrol, and petrol leads to…). The laws of speed dictate that a perfect response will be redundant, so it’s better to be premature than late. Accumulated knowledge about slow-changing industries may be far less valuable. That’s why a yet-to-be product may be a better response to choppy waves and the onrush of technologies.

Management consultancies may acquire design companies as insurance against this threat. Design firms might find it safer to be allied to a major practice, rather they clash with them for the ears and purses of the same clients. They also enjoy the consulting firms peremptory access to client and industry data that they are often denied in the normal course.

Usually consulting firms don’t fold the acquisition in, or absorb it, fearing a clash of cultures and values. Neither do their clients, (digital darlings excepted) acquire design firms themselves. Even the best intentioned can fail—the celebrated firm Ideo merged with their best client, who returned the firm to its founder two years later.

Companies may be comforted by inserting a layer of predictability that a consulting practice brings in between themselves and the design firm. They could doubt their own ability to extract value from the design way of working, which is a competence that a design-led culture like Apple’s embeds. Perhaps clear, deep voiced, instructions are preferable to response and conversation.

It’s not likely that design consulting will influence the main management consulting business to the degree that a new type of consulting grows. Complex life evolved this way, by the merger of simpler forms, but the process took aeons.

Meanwhile, there’s an opportunity or threat to be responded to first. A solid, thoroughly validated, presentation deck in a six months or a observant but speculative prototype in one?

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First published in a slightly modified form ‘The Business of Consulting’ in Business Standard, 26 May, in Deep Design, a fortnightly column by Itu Chaudhuri.

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You don’t know me, but as Chairman of this company, I created and gave you your job. Congratulations on being the first Indian CDO in India of a major company. It’s up to you now to make my gamble work.

It wasn’t easy to convince the board. Yes, we all agree that many young companies who put have CDOs, designer CEOs or otherwise put design on top have galloped past their more eminent peers. We all agree our company, like General Motors a while ago, is in a stale rut of ‘good’ products (water heating and other systems for the well-appointed bathroom) that contribute thinner and thinner margins. Yet people, and so companies, resist change, and hawkish colleagues will be be watching you closely, half-hoping you fail.

I’m writing to tell you what you’re up against, and what you’ll need to do survive, thrive and then lead.

Establishing yourself

First, take heart from your strengths. I chose you because you show a spark for the creative side of business. You think strategically, but are also tactically adept. And tactful: a diplomat of sorts, patient and aggressive as the need dictates. You will need to draw on your grasp of the facts and operations of organisations: you had better grasp ours quickly.

And as a design thinker, I hear you have that trained empathy for consumers (you call them users). You will now need to turn that towards your peers on the board and in the company, as you do the two things I describe next.

Secretly, your colleagues fear design, and thus designers. They see both as unaccountable, dependent on mysterious inspirations, and beyond reason. You will have to demonstrate, every day, that your ways are different from those of the ‘star’ designer. You have methods that you can spell out and repeat, not a black box. They are akin to a conversation, not a personal cult. The method thrives on customer data and market realities; so it seeks, not shrinks from the input of your colleagues.

Gradually they must realise that your approach is responsible, and that your proposals may be be bold and beautiful, but never whacky or offbeat as ends in themselves.

Weapons

Here are your weapons as you take these on.

The first is your unique ability to observe the customer use our products and services, and get into her shoes in a way that quantitative research or even most interviews do not. Your eye swoops on the interesting, relevant bits, perhaps the user’s hesitation or her expressions. Even such non-conventional customer data are undeniable. But their interpretation is not, and here you will have to help your colleagues to entertain valid hypotheses, when certainties can’t be found.

unique ability to observe the customer use our products and services, and get into her shoes in a way that quantitative research or even most interviews do not

The second, and you will need to develop it if you haven’t already, is to speak about design goals in the language of finance. Every design intervention has a finance impact — on revenues, costs, or intangibles. In turn, these come from, say, higher volumes or greater margins, which in turn, may arise from our customers’ changed behaviour. Apply a reasonable guess of how design impacts that behaviour step, such as “15% more likely”.

From here, the financial value of your step is standard finance. Project revenue (or your chosen measure) over, say five years. Next, using the net present value of the design intervention using an appropriate discount rate.

Don’t worry about how tenuous it sounds. You will be surprised at how convincing it is to the management. Tip: illustrate the behavioural scenario above in story form, with visual support — models, films, recordings. That’s something your colleagues competing for funds can’t do as well. And keep that straight face on.

Once you are in…

…it’s time to remember what your role really brings to the table, in shaping the company’s and the board’s work. Treat it as a guide.

First, you provide a horizontal force that joins silos; for example, the teams you lead carry over design ideas into marketing.

Second, you make the company think about (eco)systems in which the products work. Remind them that Edison’s light bulb was really a means to get homes to buy electricity, not only a replacement of oil lamps. Seeing the systems, and the interactions that make it up, can release the company from its short-sighted obsessions. Design is a synonym of future; product quality is of the present. I realise this is a touch philosophical, but I thought you’d like that.

make the company think about (eco)systems in which the products work.

Third, represent subjectivity and the qualitative side. We’ve dealt above with the all-important experience that customers have. But here I am emphasising desirability here, about making people desire our products, quite above their need for them. Imagine a day when one of customer wishes it wasn’t summer, because they don’t get to use our water heater. (Can you get the board to spot the product idea in there?)

When things are working

Finally, I offer a few signs that things are going well, assuming you are past the survival and settling down stages. Or, treat them as things to make happen. They are about spreading a design culture within the company and the board, beyond the new game changing products and services that are regularly emerging.

Design is researched on a routine basis, with partners, suppliers and users, as a corollary of the scenario building activity.

Design is a part of brand and market tracks, and is audited. You will have to help or design the research and build frameworks for auditing it, using an extended version of the financial model described above.

Design reports to the board, not to marketing. You might wonder why I didn’t specify the reporting relationship when I created your position? I’m going to wait to see if you’ve earned that position. When you do, I’ll consider making marketing reporting to design.

It’s customary to end with wishing you luck in your endeavour, and as I do, I know that I have never been more sincere in doing so.
— Your Chairman

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First published in a slightly modified form ‘Dear Chief Design Officer’ in Business Standard, 20 January, in Deep Design, a monthly column by Itu Chaudhuri.

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business is getting very, very attracted to design

Let’s start by looking at the shapes this movement has taken. According to a survey of 400+ companies, startups are very likely to have CEOs or CXOs to influence design decisions, and those businesses appear to quantifiably benefit from design.

But top management can go further than being involved in design, and actually invest in it. In 2016, General Electric, an icon of US industry, announced a new headquarters, three-fourths of whose employees would be “digital industrial product managers, designers, and developers”. For a corporate office, that number shows an unprecedented proportion for the design function, broadly defined, and its unusual proximity to the power centre of an industrial company.

Or it could actually invite designers to the top. Most of the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) 2016 list of most innovative firms has designers and design in positions of power: the likes of Apple, Google, Tesla, Samsung regularly feature on it. Several have designers in the founder group (Airbnb’s Joe Gebbia, Pinterest’s Evan Sharp) or as CEOs. Yet other companies have designations like Chief Design Officer (3M, Apple, PepsiCo, Philips) or Executive Creative Officer, or just Chief Creative.

But good businesses have always used design, if not its language. IBM was a design leader decades before today’s design darling, Apple was born. What has changed? An accelerated rise in design consciousness, and concomitantly, its visibility. One can speculate on the causes and the period of this change.

Design has countered commoditisation since at least the 18th century: consider Wedgwood’s famous china ware, a manufactured product carefully designed to meet a series of precise design objectives. To be sure, the same forces of commoditisation keep pace with the thousands of products that appear, washing over them, and making innovation the most prized attribute of modern business. No industry typifies this like information technology.

The top ten of BCG’s innovation list concentrates these prodigies in a tight cluster. These companies either make the tools, like Apple or Google, or embed them into their services so completely that firms like Amazon or Uber may be better seen as technology companies than as supermarket or taxi businesses.

Deep Design’s speculation is that this digital breed has given design this status by employing it in a manner that other industries seek to imitate. Design is now seen by the admirers of these digital wunderkind as a synonym or a precursor to the holy grail, innovation. (While there are overlaps, design and innovation are not identical, but more another time).

Design is now seen by the admirers of these digital wunderkind as a synonym or a precursor to the holy grail, innovation.

In this hypothesis, the digital breed was driven to develop an explicit vocabulary for design to enable its minting as a currency of business, which is now cashable in the boardroom. The vocabulary comes from the field now called user experience or UX. Of course that is, in some sense, what designers have always done. But labels matter: UX points to an outcome, while ’design’ appears to refer more to the activity than the result. The new label expands, and makes more tangible, the older rubrics, ‘usability’ and ‘human computer interface’.

But labels matter: UX points to an outcome, while ’design’ appears to refer more to the activity than the result.

Of course, it’s not wordsmithing alone. UX lays out its methods like a recipe. It makes the tacit knowledge of designers explicit, and re-frames designers’ instincts as a series of steps. It commandeers research from psychology’s cognitive sides. (Both the NASDAQ and Apple’s market cap have more than doubled since Daniel Kahneman’s 2011 bestseller Thinking Fast, and Slow, which made cognitive biases part of every executive’s gab book. And since Kahneman’s 2001 Nobel, Apple’s worth has grown 180 times).

This totally rational emphasis made UX, read design, acceptable to engineers, who actually build the stuff, and may see designers as exotic anarchists. It gave business managers (a good many of them from engineering backgrounds) faith in the predictability of the design outcomes and a means to participate in the process. Design’s mystical ‘black box’ has been broken open, and made to serve new masters. Further this association with technology and business confers approval in a uniquely modern way. This all may apply only to the digital domain, but to business, what else has mattered more in the last two decades?

Increasingly, businesses become more and more virtual, less physical. This makes experience, which is at heart a messy, psychological concept, easy to contain in the palm of your hand, viewed as episodes, each leaving a data trail amenable to analysis.

Design and business have followed the suits. In current design speak, UX defines customer journeys that map how a user (previously: consumer) interacts with a brand. Experience is a universal paradigm; it’s intuitive, from user experience, to imagine customer experience, the emergent new face of marketing. PepsiCo’s Chief Design Officer, Mauro Porcini, exemplifies the new argot: people “don’t buy, actually, products anymore, they buy experiences”.

Experience is a universal paradigm; it’s intuitive, from user experience, to imagine customer experience, the emergent new face of marketing.

Boardrooms have adopted design in two ways. The first is to improve design buying, making the company’s investments in, say, product design or communication, more effective. The second is to spread design culture across the company, in the role of a new approach to solving problems or seeing opportunities. To do either, designers will have to face a boardroom, peopled by stalwarts of an ancient regime, so to speak. The qualities they will need in these waters and their experiences thus far will make for a fascinating study.

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First published in a slightly modified form ‘Visionary Position: Design on Top’ in Business Standard, 25 November, in Deep Design, a monthly column by Itu Chaudhuri.

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Design, properly understood, is inherently social. Designers make objects and symbols, for the eventual use of other people, to fit into, or sometimes transform socially determined situations. So an invitation to ‘share a fresh perspective’ at a consumer summit, to an audience of marketers, should hardly have caused unease.

But inquiry is born from unease; in this case, from Deep Design’s dawning realisation that designers don’t really deal with consumers. They aren’t trained for it.

Marketers and designers want to work together more closely, but they lack a common view of the humanscape. Wherever the marketer can speak for the consumer, he has the mike, so to speak.

Design, to use the current argot of the trade, is centred on users, or humans—a carpenter using a drill, a reader scanning a newspaper page, book or website, a mother manoeuvring her toddler into a high chair. It addresses the unchanging human system: the body and its limbs; a sensory apparatus dominated by sight; a logical tendency, subject to a fickle attention and the twitches of the lizard brain; perhaps some rudimentary notions of pride.

Finally, design’s problem-solving orientation focuses on the user’s behaviour in the context of interacting with the designed solution, not an inner drive. We care about a score of things: from whether her task got done, to whether our work left society better in some way. But not whether this user was insecure about her future, socially constrained, or struggling with being modern: a user is a user.

Joy to the world, the consumer is born

Advertising created the consumer, or a person viewed purely by a propensity to buy, use up, and buy more of something, when industrial capitalism started to produce increasingly better but increasingly similar products. Human ingenuity responded by creating new needs, (like the ability to impress friends at a party) and fears, (like the failure to be a good mum). Not much design here; and while the human traits assumed here are fairly universal, it does introduce psychology into the mix.

More sophisticated efforts from the time of Cheskin’s sensory marketing have co-opted design, realising that a product’s visual imprint can transcend its function. These marketers were not just after simple beauty, but saw form as whispering to a consumer psyche, per the psychological fashions of the day. So Bernays’ stunt of getting suffragettes to simultaneously light up cigarettes, during a march down a Manhattan avenue, was meant to convince women to overcome their unconscious (Freudian) fear of the cigarette’s ‘phallic’ shape. Post-war American cars were endlessly re-designed, to engineer their appearance to work with the consumer’s hidden mental apparatus, arguably to appeal to masculinity and power.

But consumer theory is a braid with two strands. One strand is empirical, quantitative and cognitive. It aims to tease out the best approach to (for example) segmenting markets, studying things like demographics, spending power, geography, and physical constraints to buying. Rather like applied economics, it deals with the consumer’s rational side, offering benefits like efficacy or economy that are universal. Complexity notwithstanding, a great deal can be made out by careful statistics and reason working hand in hand, to some degree of certainty.

I have a feeling

The other strand hypothesises the consumer as an emotional being who is an actor in a social, cultural and economic drama, to explain or identify her deep motivations and anxieties. It uses data, but interpretively, and also pays heed to trained impressions. Its findings are qualitative and uncertain. It seeks validity, postponing the need for certainty.

Of particular interest are the consumer’s values and culture. This is an attempt to extend our knowledge of the consumer including but beyond his observed behaviour in the context of our product or brand, but a deep orientation that influences his actions, at various if not all times. The idea is that a brand’s values can resonate with that of a group of consumers, and make them loyalists. (Go back to paragraph 3 and appreciate the contrast).

These groupings offer a kind of alternate market segmentation, cutting across income classes, social class lines (defined by entitlements like access and status) or communal ones (such as religious, ethnic or national). For example: the multitudes that see in a Trump or a Modi a corrective to a historical power grab by a mealy-mouthed elite. Or others who belatedly learn ritualism from a previous generation to compensate for the Indian-ness they see evaporating from their lives. Each grouping, united by attitude, offers multiple predictions, not for a single, narrow product or context, but with multiple economic, social, cultural and political possibilities, with lasting implications.

Design speaks up

It is in this second strand that designers can come into their own, not in their accustomed role as downstream providers of expression, who take their cues from marketers. Instead, as intelligent observers and interpreters of culture, especially the visual. They are uniquely placed because they pour products into the stream of culture, as well as fish in it for reference and inspiration.

Designers can observe how people express themselves visually: the fashions and codes their choices seem to converge on. How we decorate our homes (why is a comic book style print of Meena Kumari doing on that cushion cover?), and how the groom’s niece dances at a sangeet function, why not? And yes, how they buy. Then, they need to join the dots: what does this say about people and their responses the forces shaping their life? The anthropologist Grant McCracken, who studies culture and commerce, sees this as the source of design’s power in the boardroom.

Alessi is more

Or take the Italian household appliances maker Alessi, which commissions famous designers for its products, and has several iconic products among them. The business scholar Roberto Verganti, who has studied the methods of innovative Italian businesses, points out that these icons are not merely awards-circuit darlings but broad commercial successes. They command significant price premiums and disproportionate volumes, for years together. That last criterion implies deep attachment, not an acute social contagion with a brief, steep peak.

Alessi’s method relies on trusted interpreters, who identify large cultural swells (a fatigue with a joyless modernity, for example) and select a designer based on the likelihood that his temperament can speak to that mood. Their choices may be surprising: Alessi’s best known classic, a kettle, came out of a collaboration with the American architect Michael Graves.

The challenge for marketers with this type of thinking is to tolerate the uncertainty of a payoff, in exchange for its size and longevity. Innovative products or market strategies need more than a jaap of the Steve Jobs naam. Designers need to be able to not just observe and imagine, but to convincingly interpret and act. They can start by convincing themselves.

So, I accepted the invitation. Will you?

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Everyone loves a logo, or loves to hate one. Designing logos is the most easily understood example of the graphic designer’s work. Among the additions to visual culture since the 19th century, the logo ranks with television and cinema. Stand in Tokyo’s Ginza or New York’s Times Square and you will be overrun by them; in India, we experience a booming town through the sprouting of familiar logos on its streets.

Yet the logo is under attack. Dead, say bolder commentators, or irrelevant, say the more nuanced: it is a product of evolution, and eligible for extinction. The London designer Simon Manchipp found them “a hangover from old-school thinking… an old-fashioned approach to differentiating”.

Ironically, to the extent that this view is valid, the logo is under threat from the same processes that made it so successful in the first place. Though logos are ancient in the sense of marks that denoted community (the cross, the shaivite tripundara or the swastika), the modern logo is a creation of trade, media and transportation.

Trade and modern transportation ended local monopolies: suddenly, the village washing-soap maker was competing with imports from another district, and needed more than his initials on the product. Traders (wholesalers and retailers), being closer to the eventual customers, had bullying rights over manufacturers. These gents fought back with differentiated products, now with ‘maker’s marks’, regaining control over the customer and thus, terms of trade. These marks became the modern brand logo. (The tussle continues; the behemoth Amazon is a retailer).

Advertising speeded and sharpened the change in the design of these marks to answer the need for visibility, compactness and differentiation. It’s easy to make too little of the difference between these new logos and, say, the coats-of-arms and heraldry of earlier centuries. Those early marks served to identify, a deliberate act accomplished by reference to convention. In the modern mark, recognition, a more spontaneous form of knowing, along with ownability and recall, that marketer’s favourite, are additionally necessary.

Those early marks served to identify. In the modern mark, recognition, along with ownability and recall

By the middle of the 20th century, the power of the visual trade mark was firmly acknowledged, and the forerunners of the modern brand consulting firms were born. The logo became big business, a store of both value as well as meaning. This is where things started to change.

This turn in the logo’s fortunes was linked to the evolution of the language of marketing, and then a new understanding of the brand, approximately in the last quarter of the 20th century. The brand was now not just the name of the business, but an evocation of new ideas—benefits, values, promises and other more or less emotional fragments, tied by association to its name and other ‘signifiers’, like the logo. Oh, and It had a personality, like a human.

The logo’s fortunes was linked to the evolution of the language of marketing, and then a new understanding of the brand

This bundle was, said the gurus, at once embedded in the product or business and also, separately, an abstraction, capable of being explicitly managed, and concretised at will, into an entirely different product, again a late 20th century phenomenon. It gave rise to a new notion of the corporate brand, now as progenitor of brands, and thus to the concept of brand architecture. Also, the brand could also now be separately valued as an asset.

This complexity now required the logo to distill this bundle of properties, and made it a strategic decision: big business for consultants. But this wasn’t all.

New, geographically dispersed brands, including the modernised corporate brand (so went the thinking) now needed a consistent visual appearance, implemented via a centrally mandated visual system: a set of graphic assets, such as colours, and typefaces and added graphics, governed by rules for correct usage.

Crucially, corporate and other brand owners were convinced that these visual systems were also central to the bundle of associations that made up its brand, this new, mystically powerful lever. In other words, not just visually consistent but ideationally and emotionally linked—enter another new word, coherent.

Over the next decades, these visual systems grew in sophistication and ingenuity. In addition to ensuring recognition, they now cover the style of imagery, and the mood of the communications, across product design, retail spaces, advertising and more. Often not rigidly consistent like their forebears, they may go by names like ‘brand world’ or ‘experience’. The argument: sufficiently well executed, brand worlds obviate the need for a logo, while still delivering a powerful whiff of the brand, so to speak.

These visual systems grew in sophistication and ingenuity. Sufficiently well executed,brand worlds obviate the need for a logo, while still delivering a powerful whiff of the brand

There’s another strand to the anti-logo argument. Logos, by themselves, have no meaning, but derive it from the businesses they mark. Mercedes’ three-pointed star gets its value from the consistently admired cars it sits atop, not the other way around. So why bother with the hype and fuss of designing them to distill the brand into the logo?

We can see these as a clash between two notions: brand as experience, vs brand as a symbol. Deep Design believes that the brand-as-symbol perspective is under-appreciated.
Symbols, as carriers of identity are inseparable from human life, from tribe to kingdom, ancient to modern. And all aspects of brand experience—even the taste of Johnny Walker whisky—whisper to our identity (and are thus signs). Taste is sensory, but also associative, and there’s neurological evidence for this: it just tastes better with the label.

Second, symbols such as logos focus organisational and social energies, by substituting a physical thing for an idea that must be defended, in war or in peace. Most of all, a logo can travel from the bonnet of a Mercedes car to an advertisement, and trigger the same feelings with incredible economy of time and space. Of course, there’s no doubt that it’s a part of a ‘brand world’.

But why design them, if any old logo will do? Because it’s easier to build an association when the logo’s content encourages it. Laboratory-reared monkeys have been trained to ignore snakes and fear flowers, but it’s far harder to do than the converse.

It’s easier to build an association when the logo’s content encourages it

Does the logo rank with television? Just look out of the window: far from a burial, the party is in full swing.

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Brands place a premium on attention, firing images and words shaped into messages to inform and persuade. Indeed, we live amidst a war for our attention, an exquisitely perishable wisp that lives in the now.

But like breath, attention is a quick burning fuel that enables the flow of communication but does not add to its stock: exhale, and nothing is stored. While thieving attention can change behaviour temporarily—quick, here!—more sustainable is a stock of deep meaning. It’s a layered, mysterious lode which reduces our need to chase ever smaller amounts of attention with ever greater resources.

The focus on what brands “wear, say and do”, a popular heuristic, leaves out what the brand or product “is”, an objective, unalterable, and irreducible factual residue that outlasts the messages put out by attention-capturing armies. Provenance, for example, can be overriding: Made in Germany is ‘German’ and therefore a high-spec engineering product.

The focus on what brands “wear, say and do”, a popular heuristic, leaves out what the brand or product “is”

Deep Design’s interest is in the visual atom of this “is”, not least because it falls on designers to shape. I call it Physique: the mental imprint of a thing’s physical image, as a sensory perception (and sight trumps the other senses). The impact of physique is automatic. It precedes, escapes and even governs conscious thought. We sense it before we ‘read’ the thing, treating it as the most reliable indicator of its attributes, whether on a shelf or on a street.

The impact of physique is automatic. It precedes, escapes and even governs conscious thought. We sense it before we ‘read’ the thing

An example is race, which if experiments are believed, still shows up as racism in modern-day US: respondents consistently took a fraction of a second longer to tag faces, choosing between opposites (e.g. dangerous or harmless) when they were African American.

Physique creates stored meaning, or what we call an image, that can be exploited later. I’d wager a new Rs 2000 note that some of demonetisation’s approval ratings are because it targets cash, which is the physique of black money.

The Automobile Story

Physique isn’t simply an image stored like a photograph. It’s the attributes that it implies that stick, and can cast a long shadow on the brand. I’d speculate that Mahindra, whose roots are in steel, succeeded with jeeps and tractors, which register as industrial, rectangular, tough and boxy. SUVs, in physique terms are gentrified jeeps, and found acceptance, but in passenger cars and two wheelers, expect a long haul. Maruti’s iconic small car is burned deeply into memory; did it make the brand’s journey to larger models that much harder? The sales of Swift Dzire, a very compact sedan, overtook its little Alto to become a top seller only in 2014.

Physique need not be only visual: sound and smell can be exploited. Iodex (of old) and Dettol are two great brands whose signature smells signal their potency. Dettol retained a not identical, but clinical smell, and successfully extended into bathing soap. Iodex has sacrificed its smell (was it iodine, we wondered?), its dark, stain-prone unguent and thus its mystique; it has lost itself in a sea of similarity.

Louis Cheskin, Sensation Transference

In the 1940s, the pioneering researcher Louis Cheskin famously demonstrated in an experiment that housewives liked a meal cooked with margarine (then considered to not taste like butter), but coloured yellow, as much as one cooked in butter. Cheskin called this phenomenon ‘sensation transference’. An early proponent of the unconscious influence of form and colour, Cheskin’s elaborate empirical methods had wide success, from packaging to cars (such as predicting the failure of Ford’s Edsel on the basis of design alone).

Personal and Commercial Packaging

Naked form trumps clothes, but clothes can matter. Gandhi and Castro are two popular leaders whose clothes became part of their physique, and defined them: one pacifist, one militaristic. It helped build an aura that proved hard for detractors to attack, and seems to have given supporters the faith to ignore disconfirming evidence.

The commercial form of clothes, of course, packaging. Packaging research is starting to accept that the structural shape is as important as colour (the default no 1 in packaging). Consumers rely on it to perceive hard-to-spot product attributes, more than graphics. But the influence of physique on packaging should not be understood as simple differentiation or attractiveness. This is not to discount the effect of physique on those two parameters: surely the success of Toblerone chocolate owes much to its unique physique, especially for children.

Similarly, elongated packs look bigger than their more squat equivalents even when they pack the same volume of product, and consumers tend to prefer the taller ones even after they know that they aren’t getting more for their money. Natural cork stoppers on wine bottles ‘improve’ the wine, as does the correct glassware for reasons real and imaginary. Yet that’s not the true, subterranean power of physique.

Eventually, physique in packaging unlocks the clue to personality, that near-human relationship consumers can sense in the brands they love. Marmite’s round bottle tells a maternal tale more effectively than an advertisement. Its physique slips into your mind, unnoticed, to do its work.

physique in packaging unlocks the clue to personality, that near-human relationship consumers can sense in the brands they love.

The role of a brand’s ‘wear’ is to reinforce unalterable, favourable prior facts such as provenance and founding inspiration (which may have its own physique). Deep Design has discussed in an earlier column the success of Patanjali’s product line, underpinned by Baba Ramdev, who brings a unalterable, unfakeable physique to bear on his personal brand. Several consumers I talked to saw Patanjali’s gauche packaging as signalling an economical price. Others saw in it a lack of artifice, “not being an MNC” and by inference, a sort of authenticity.

Physique matters. Paradoxically, the more we take it for granted, or somehow look past it, the more insidious its power.

Physique matters. Paradoxically, the more we take it for granted, or somehow look past it, the more insidious its power. When we think we see it, we may talk about its attractiveness or lack thereof, rather than its primacy and the power of its imprint. We need to look deep.

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“I refuse to add to the chorus,” said DOPE, as the the Designer Of Practically Everything was known to his colleagues, “dissing the Rs 2000 note’s design. Instead, let’s treat it as an occasion to ask explore what design means.”

I looked sadly at the new Rs 2000 note my newspaper had sent for the interview. We sat in a bare, brightly daylit room, whose walls were covered with a jungle of cardboard shapes, and unrecognisable sketches made with fat markers.

There are as many definitions of design as there are animals, he insisted, and it’s continually evolving. And as with natural evolution, all definitions of design co-exist, said the DOPE, watching a linear drawing of something come to life on his laptop screen. Just as bacteria, fish and humans coexist, and even feed off each other. None is superior: all thrive.

There are as many definitions of design as there are animals, and it’s continually evolving. And as with natural evolution, all definitions of design co-exist.

Let’s use this Rs 2000 note, he said, much to my relief, to illustrate how design has evolved. He held it up to the table lamp and peered at it through a small lens.

For many people, design is decoration. This was its dominant 19th century meaning, produced by artists, artisans and ‘makers’ of all kinds in two or three dimensions. This note has several kinds of ornamentation, as though different artists were at play; older notes show a more grace and coherence.

Design is persuasion. The market and media explosions of the 20th century created design as persuasion, to sell goods, lifestyles and even ideas (join the war effort, for example).

Design is product. Industrial design extended desire to appliances and automobiles. It also made us conscious of progress, of how things work, and introduced new materials into our lives. A currency note, said, DOPE, must be durable and easy to handle, especially by ATMs (and not need lakhs of them to be re-calibrated, unless there’s a devious design there). It must be difficult to manufacture, on budget, and include an array of visible and hidden security features.

Design is discourse. As Art began to respond more consciously to the changed world of the 20th century, and ideology became the bridge between the arts and design. Constructivism, futurism and and other intellectual movements left their impress on design, unleashing a series of assertions on what design ought to be, for the first time.

International modernism, a mid 20th century bloom, called for a universal, rational approach to form. A doctrinaire modernist might give primacy to the universality of the banking function, with a clear, highly legible (in all light conditions) design, equally at home in India, or Germany. Even the Rs 2000 note could have done with numerals positioned and sized consistently with older notes, or provided a better way for the future.

Post-modernists might see a kind of imperialism in this ‘narrative’ of universal functionality. They might also argue that Gandhi’s image is a fraud perpetrated by power, advertising morality in the face of a corruption: off with his portrait.

Design is brand. In this age of commercial symbolism, this Rs 2000 note design under-represents the national brand; and second, offers an out-of-touch, backward projection of India. The Mangalyaan may have replaced dams and kisans, but the note’s design hardly projects capability or confidence. It suffers from all the gaudy, verbose clutter that we have come to expect, so what’s new?

In this age of commercial symbolism, this Rs 2000 note design under-represents the national brand; and second, offers an out-of-touch, backward projection of India.

These perspectives, said DOPE, sneaking a quick look at a dancing line on his laptop, are overlapping and simultaneous. They are not exhaustive: we can see design as culture, for example. But note that each of these is concerned with form, physical or visual.

Two relatively recent perspectives promise to transform that.

Design is experience. Experience designers (like UX designers) seek to map money’s journey from bank branch to wallet to exit, from the user’s point of view. But beyond this, she may muse on the experience of payment, physically or electronically, making it smoother. She might even ponder the ATM, and collaborate with a product designer to re-work it. Demonetisation as an experience? Sure, though her compulsion to prototype solutions with real users might be the deal breaker! DOPE chuckled for a minute at this.

Finally, design is thinking. Attracting interest lately is the designer’s ability to deal with incomplete information, and tackle complex situations by creative experimentation, and learning from failures. It aims to think beyond products, about systems, creating a pure problem solving process.

If such a designer thought about a cashless future, she might muse that electronic payments might not reach remote areas for some years. In the interim, imagine local-area cash, valid only in a specific off-network area and bankable in designated machines.

Perhaps the sheer mobility of cash makes it king. Networks fail unpredictably; a small bribe needs to be paid to a cop; a pushcart vegetable seller might have lost his card terminal. Maybe ATMs could dispense ‘temporary’ cash with 3-day validity, introducing friction as a solution to discourage cash.

Could this friction could be physical, giving cash a less convenient form? Maybe notes should occupy space proportional to their value. Imagine a 10,000 rupee note as thick as a sandwich, or as big as a tabloid page.

Psychological issues may obstruct a perfectly electronic world. Cash is a natural, visual means of relating to money; dashboards are not. Alternative visualisations of money may be needed to counter cognitive blindness.

Psychological issues may obstruct a perfectly electronic world. Cash is a natural, visual means of relating to money; dashboards are not.

Such apparently whacky alternatives frame the problem in productive ways, break the rut of the past, and eventually lead to previously unimaginable, working solutions that move us from an existing situation to a preferred one.

The post The Currency of Design appeared first on ICD | Blog.

“The 20th century was the Age of advertising,“ said the Undisputed Strategic Panjandrum, known with awe as USP, “right up to the Great Shift or the digitisation of everything.”

Digital advertising? I asked. Not quite, said the USP kindly.

We sat in his penthouse, piled high with books standing in counterpoint to the housing towers outside. On one pile sat our glasses: whisky for me, sparkling water for the famously teetotal advertising-marketing legend from the late Age. He took a slow sip and began.

In the Age, USP intoned, great brands were built by advertising. It delivered a consistent message, dramatised by an emotional connect, ideally with a claim of product difference. It created a personality you could ‘sense’, and also registered a distinct brand identity—logos, taglines, colours—and packaging, so consumers could recall it at the shop, and ka-Ching!, said USP, dropping an ice-cube into his glass.

In the Age, great brands were built by advertising. It delivered a consistent message, dramatised by an emotional connect.

A certain resistance to, and even distrust of advertising, said the USP, is putting the focus back on the product or service itself. But for some, it was always thus. Take banks, whose brand rests more on the quality of its customer relationships and the service than anything else.

Remember those nationalised banks with their dreary offices? Gandhiji, on the wall, saying “the customer is the purpose of our business”, while account holders queued up before officious, unhelpful staff. Though the odd genial branch manager did help, if you knew one.

A certain resistance and even distrust of advertising, is putting the focus back on the product or service itself.

The Great Shift wasn’t so much the crawling ‘computerisation’ of banks from the 1980s but the entry of private banks after 1994. The new big bank brands of today were built on polite service and pleasant branches, but crucially, on the convenience and empowerment offered by better technology (account statements on demand!), which changed consumer banking.

The biggest of these, web-based banking, has made for many more satisfied customers, at the cost of a reduced relationship with the human and physical elements that make up a brand.

web-based banking, has made for many more satisfied customers, at the cost of a reduced relationship with the human and physical elements that make up a brand.

So much so that many customers find dealing with people less desirable (and some remember old bank staff fondly). In part, it’s because your ‘relationship manager’ also pushes ‘products’, and so seems less of a banker. The mobile app has accelerated the shift, forcing extreme simplicity and giving the ultimate in granular, transactional satisfaction—human-free.

There’s a science to this, called user experience, or UX, a white-hot profession at the moment. These people build journey maps, and study how people figure out what to do, in very fine detail. How to invisibly lead them to their goals, while keeping them informed, re-assured—and thus, happy. Less is better; and anticipating what the user will want next, is best. And to do it all with a certain charm.

What this means, said USP, is that this software driven experience, is the vehicle of service, and thus the relationship that we have with it. One can say that UX is the brand. Branding? Now there’s an app for that.

One can say that UX is the brand. Branding? Now there’s an app for that.

There’s a great opportunity for brands like banks, to build themselves around superb interactions. But UX goes beyond digital and so should banks. My favourite mall is a pleasure to park in, with thoughtful, quality signage, clear visibility and all the details that let me effortlessly navigate it with assurance, convenience and even pleasure. It makes it likelier I’ll shop there.

Everything else ought to support this app-like UX, said USP, whether web sites, bank branches, staff behaviour and even advertising. While several banks have designed their web/app UX well, none has let it into the brand’s core.

While several banks have designed their web/app UX well, none has let it into the brand’s core.

Banks’ home pages still lead with advertising imagery and messaging, with interchangeable, well-worn themes. If your bank “cares for family prosperity”, let the interaction itself demonstrate it, in a few clicks. An interaction is, well, just that! You can ‘talk’ to the customer to learn and fulfil his needs. It’s salesmanship in clicks.

The best banks already have the best experiences, but there’s a lot of room for them, and follower brands, to be the fastest mover who will win in the medium term at least.

In the long run though, there are limitations. First, the logic of UX will lead to the same ‘best’ UX for all banks, which can (and should) be copied. In an ultimate, theoretical sense, UX isn’t strategic, but a moving horizon, an operational imperative that all brands must move towards.

In the long run though, there are limitations. The logic of UX will lead to the same ‘best’ UX for all banks.

Second, personality and differentiation, two pillars of the Age, are hard to own, because banking is so transactional. So where, asked USP, raising two thick eyebrows, will preference arise from, and what will you creative types do? I hid behind a raised glass.

The answer, said USP, is in the axioms of UX. Brands should sense and respond to what people want (or yearn) to do, rather than be sources of one-sided, static messaging. Interaction is about what the brand and customer can do together, not about what the brand says. The pervasiveness of the mobile is a huge gift-—not just for its reach, or to glean data. But to integrate the experience. Join up the mobile UX to the branch visit and the staff interactions.

Brands should sense and respond to what people want, rather than be sources of one-sided, static messaging. It should be about what the brand and customer can do together, not about what the brand says.

Ultimately these experiences will develop into a story, or a concept that forms through community consensus about a company’s journey and destination. Google has set out to organise, simplify (or own) the world’s information (or the world itself). Harley Davidson’s HOGs (Harley Owners Groups) license a sort of communal freedom.

These ideas are rooted in culture, in different ways. Even when they advertise! Culture means it’s back to people; just like it always was. Perhaps it’s time to bring back the genial brand manager and see where that goes?

And enough of USP, he said, draining his glass with an air of finality. I took my first sip of whisky and let it sink in.

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“The Nobel Committee has won the Bob Dylan Prize,” announced the Always Contrarian Everyman, or ACE, a lapsed academic I’d been introduced to by mutual friends, to help with some research on communications planning.

“Only,” he continued, “that It gave it to itself, of course.” He checked my features to ensure that the inversion had registered, peering through a pair of slightly-too-large glasses with white frames. ACE seemed to belong in the fashionable organic-desserts-only place, a haunt of the swish and the learned, waving at passers-by. Clearly, no Everyman.

Whether Dylan deserved it has been noisily over-analysed, he said—both on grounds of scope (are songs poetry?) and merit (is Dylan Whitman?). But what it means remains under-analysed.

The focus on Dylan, he went on, blinds us from spotting the real gainer: the Nobel Prize brand. (Stop wincing, ACE said, it is a brand). By giving Dylan the prize, the Nobel has taken itself into drawing rooms, hostels and the twitterscape. It has gifted itself a popular relevance not available to it before.

The focus on Dylan, blinds us from spotting the real gainer: the Nobel Prize brand… It has gifted itself a popular relevance not available to it before.

The Nobel follows a line of mighty brands that have bent low to kiss the feet of the popular. The Nobel’s relevance has always derived from authority, its own and others’. Even the Peace Prize’s popular recipients have been yoked to structures of authority; Mother Teresa was canonised by the world’s most powerful religious organisation.

What we might be approaching is the twilight of authority as a way of marketing in its broad sense. But first, let’s look at the Deep Design of authority. Start with the flavours it comes in, ACE continued, propping up the menu like a little blackboard, the ingredients of its authority, and what each tastes like.

What we might be approaching is the twilight of authority as a way of marketing in its broad sense.

At one end of the spectrum are obedience, and then loyalty, which may be demanded, enjoined on us, or enforced by governments and religious bodies like the Vatican church. Yet the papacy has softened: we have a People’s Pope, who loves football, poses for selfies and is soft on homosexuality, abortions and divorce.

But move along the spectrum, and loyalty segues into trust—the kind sought to be induced by more modern entities informally underwritten by government. Public universities and banks are examples, as are railways and airlines.

So are the Olympics and the Nobel. Until 1956, the Games logos reveal an officious face, much like government insignia. From 1960 to 1988 they are broadly modernist and contemporary, and take a celebratory leap from 1992.

The 2012 logo is a frontal challenge to the Olympics’ high-minded ideals, giving it a participative, inclusive face. These visual changes are not fashion, said ACE (stretching a leg to reveal jeans with open hems, finished with elegant white loafers, no socks).

After privatisation, universities have become more like branded corporations, competing for custom. Their identities, long ignored, now find utterance, and are now sculpted to market admissions, to suggest that university is a place to be enjoyed.

After privatisation, universities have become more like branded corporations, competing for custom

Look at the identities of the newest banks, which are searching for their place on the spectrum between solidity and assurance at one end and an extreme friendliness on the other. A case in point is the infrastructure finance and bank company IDFC which sports, in its own words, an ‘un-bank’ identity.

Finally, modern corporation and product brands are a third category, said ACE, his fingers bracketing the menu’s Gateaux section. Its authority is the most subtle.

It derives from the technological revolution of the 20th century, which harnessed electricity, gave us time-saving appliances, telecommunication, television, automobiles and computing. It’s also coterminous with the modern Olympics and the Nobel, a prize set up by a maker of munitions to recognise useful sciences (and Peace, naturally).

These brands spoke with a gentle authority, carrying the implicit assurance that you were in good hands: drive to work, punch in, work hard, and return to a home cleaned by vacuum technology and advanced detergents. It was ‘scientific’ and reassuring, and spoke through mass media.

But the modern corporation’s certainties are under attack.

Big tobacco, Big Soda and Big Food have been rigorously and popularly questioned, and found wanting on transparency and responsibility. Big Finance caused mass destruction in 2008; Wall Street has been occupied. The nudge-wink consensus on Iraq has been disowned.

Big tobacco, Big Soda and Big Food have been rigorously and popularly questioned, and found wanting on transparency and responsibility.

The enlightened new corporation strives for a softer voice. Unilever’s old ‘twin towers’ logo typifies the earlier ideal, solid, imposing, technological and certain. Its new one from 2004 is as relaxed as a spa: happily fragmented, fluid and loving it.

The enlightened new corporation strives for a softer voice.

Further, social media makes it hard to control the conversation, as distinct from the one-way messaging that advertising provided. True as it is, the rise of social media, and digitisation more broadly, is the handiest explanation, but not a sole driver.

The maturing and commodification of manufactured products and services, and greater public scrutiny will make the projection of authority less tenable. Multiculturalism ,and mobility, and the mingling of Asia and Africa into the developed world may be gradually softening Anglo-Saxon confidence.

The maturing and commodification, and greater public scrutiny will make the projection of authority less tenable.

However, reversals do occur. The 1997 British Airways rebrand included a tailfin theme called Utopia featuring ‘ethnic‘ art. It was a step too far: Margaret Thatcher covered the tailfin of the presented model with a paper napkin: ”We fly flags, not these awful things”. By 2001, the Union Jack was back.

Scores of possible drives resist the powerful consensus that governments, business and mass media construct and maintain. Eventually, they beget anxieties among groups of dissenters who may feel threatened or disaffected by unstoppable, slow but seismic economic shifts.

For example, such anxieties may drive Trump’s supporters to find resonance in his egregious misstatements, as long as he channels their fury onto Hillary Clinton, the Yale Law graduate and Washington technocrat with Wall Street connections who personifies their fears.

Communicators everywhere, whether they are governments and their wards, or businesses will need to adjust their mindset, and this will find an echo in the voice they use. To paraphrase Kipling, it may be wiser to cultivate the common touch than walk with kings.

It may be wiser to cultivate the common touch than walk with kings.

It’s a more democratic world, said ACE, spooning some single-estate cacao reduction onto his plate, where Bob Dylan can keep the Nobel in suspense by his silence. Delicious! he said.

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