Brandchannel announces that your Master Brand strategy is dead. Master Brands were so millennial anyway, long before Web 2.0 and UGC drove brand messaging up the wall with its po-mo Cluetrain messiness. As this notice issues from the famously inward-looking industry itself, we can assume the trend has been underway for some time. Here is the full paper (from Straightline). For those who don’t work the consumer-facing side of marketing and design, the Master Brand concept was driven through the influence of giant marketing consultant Interbrand‘s strategy of establishing a mono-megalithic brand that subsumes other brands in a brand family relationship. Since corporate value accrues to the highest-level meaningful brand, the Master Brand presented a way to manage message, visual and corporate brand identity, brand creep – and it attempted to roll up consumer perception to the brand owner as much as possible. A proliferation of brands dilutes the corporate …
Seeing Things
After about a month of dialogue with Bob Goodman and Eric Reiss, facilitated artfully by GK VanPatter, the NextD Journal publishes our ramblings as “Things you See.” A “brief” excerpt gives you a flavor for my bits: Looking at the evolution of practices which we play into, I see several converging trends that originated from quite different inspirations: Information Architecture, Design 3.0, Innovation management, and organizational transformation. These are not inherently related trends, but have become interconnected now from the conversations WE have about these issues. Our communities of practice have brought these trends together, not businesses or authors in the research literature. We are creating new design ecologies within our own practices turning the focus of design from the product or service both to the user and back into the organization itself. As GK implies, this is not about creating a new design focus, a new What. Good design …
Dialogues: Structured & Mapped
Checking up on the ongoing series of NextD interviews, I was taken by the recent Jeff Conklin interview on Rethinking Wicked Problems. The Conklin interview discusses the nature of (Rittel and Weber’s orientation to) wicked problems. He also describes the use of IBIS, developed by Rittel, which has been modernized in their process called Dialogue Mapping. Essentially they have created a basis for collaborative facilitation across stakeholders of a significant issue, drawing up the emerging consensus using visual display of contributions via software and F2F meeting engagements. Many old-timers in the systems thinking community have used IBIS in complex design processes, and there are many connections among those in the formative years of practice: Rittel, West Churchman, Harold Nelson, Hasan Ozbekhan, Christakis, and Erich Jantsch. The Interactive Management community of practice that has grown up since the 1970’s has followed the work of Aleco Christakis (Dialogic Design) and John Warfield …
Three Dialogues in search of democracy
The New Democracy Workshop is an ongoing working group at U of Toronto consisting of new media and social democracy researchers. We held dialogues last week on personal healthcare and innovations in dialogue. Peter Pennefather presented the basics of Collaborative Diagnostics. How medical procedure aimed at directing decisions about therapy should be explicitly democratic and how trends in the health care system to recognize patient autonomy may allow such a dialogical approach to emerge. Peter argues that when procedures and personal care records within the health care system become more transparent, the prospects for such an emergent democratic dialogue will be I shared about our current thinking in dialogue practice, including Web-based applications in e-dialogue. Working from a new presentation on structured dialogue, our method for democratic, consensus-based dialogic design based on social science and collaborative cognition is articulated. I presented a case for moving dialogue beyond the Understanding phase …
