Artefact is a project I’ve been cooking up for nine months since starting Smithery. I’m delighted to say it’s very nearly ready.

It is a card-based thinking system. They help you organise ideas on your own, create new ideas with others, and tell stories about ideas.

Overly fifty testers have been putting them through their paces, and they’ve proven very useful for everything from creating user journeys and mobile apps to telling stories on a stage, designing organisation training programs and pitching movies.

Essentially, Artefact is a deceptively simple way to change the way you work.

“TELL ME ABOUT THEM IN DETAIL, PLEASE.  GRATUITOUS DETAIL.”

Gladly.

The cards are made specifically to order. They were wrangled by my good friend (and general master of atoms) Tim Milne of Artomatic, and manufactured down in Devon by Axminster Printing. The boxes that hold them are from Moo; Lisa and Gemma there massively helped out here, so thank you both.

Artefact cards are a 250gsm clay coated reference card, with a 5mm radius corner created by platten-cutting the cards.

Platten-cutting is like using a pastry cutter. A very sharp, heavy pastry cutter. It’s shaped to pop the exact piece of card out again, and again, and again. Each card is cut individually, so that the finish is consistently perfect.

Each cutter has a unique fingerprint; a tiny hole left at the edge, so that the cards are easily freed from their steel creator. It means that each card is ever so finely marked with a unique identifying ridge along one side. I’d now know an Artefact card wearing a blindfold. Me, that is, not the card.

This all means that each box is like opening a fresh pack of playing cards. Except, of course, there’s nothing on them…

One side is a white as pure as the driven snow, the other has been dipped in sunshine, otherwise known as PMS012 Yellow. Combined with the finest market pen to grace this earth, the Sharpie 1.0mm fine point, you have the perfect combination of clarity and definition.

“HOW SPECIFICALLY COULD I USE THEM?”

I would suggest having a read of this wee instruction manual, which is still very much a work in progress but you’ll get an idea of what it is. It has lots of ideas not just from me, but from all the testers too.

If you want the normal PDF, download from here.

If you want the iBooks format for iPad, download from here.

“I WOULD LIKE TO BUY SOME”

The first limited edition batch of 100 bundles will be offered first to people on the mailing list, which you can sign up to here:

(just type your email into the box and hit ‘return’)

Each bundle will come with two boxes of cards, two Sharpie fine point pens, and a few other special things we’re making. So one for you, and one for a friend, maybe.

Exact cost TBC, but with VAT and shipping it will be around £30 I think. The plan is to use all the profits from Artefact to keep pushing it further, making bigger and bigger production runs, and bringing the cost down as I do.

I hope I’ve managed to pique your interest enough to sign up above. All that’s left for me to say is…

I’m sorting through my old pictures here and there, when I get a chance.  30Gb worth of unsorted pictures isn’t that easy to get through.  But better to start now…

Anyway, I’m discovering all sorts of interesting moments in time.  Like this, from The London Paper, on Wednesday 25th July 2007… oh the irony…

A perfect illustration of the coffee point I made in the MTPW presentation, I think.

(via those lovely folks at Hiut Denim)

On the flight home from Croatia, I was doodling around some ideas that occurred off the back of the MTPW presentation.

This is one that’s interesting enough to keep pushing at.

Everyone goes clockwise nowadays.  Make People Want Things.

So go anti-clockwise.  Against the tide.  Dave Trott called it predatory thinking during his excellent talk.  Do what the others aren’t.  Make Things People Want.

I was honoured to be invited to talk at IdejaX in Croatia this year.  I’m just back home to lovely chunky broadband, so thought I’d upload my slides.

It’s a completely new presentation, based on a lot of the blogs posts I’ve been writing of late, and all the thinking I’ve been capturing and remixing on Artefact Cards since Autumn last year.

I’m pleased with how it went, but realised afterwards how densely packed it is.  So shall be expanding the world and the thinking over the next few months.

If you go through the slides and think ‘ahh, it’s just like this example here’, I’d love to hear about it, so use that comments box, folks.

This is Apple’s welcome note to new employees.  It made me think back to Sennett’s description of Antonio Stradivari which I mentioned last week.

People will only want the things you make as much as you want to make them.

(via Laura)

(This is Part III of an ongoing series: Part I here, Part II here)

What do marketers know about making things?  Marketing folks and their agencies are simply the airy-fairy brand whisperers, are they not?

They don’t like getting their hands dirty with the nitty gritty of products and services.  They’d much rather talk about brands as if they are some floating, mysterious gas or spirit, as they’ve done endlessly over the decades…

“[A brand] is a complex symbol that represents a variety of ideas and attributes.  It tells the consumer many things, not only by the way it sounds (and its literal meaning if it has one), but, more important, via the body of associations it has built up and acquired as a public object over time”

Garner & Levy, Harvard Business Review, 1955

“A brand is simply a collection of perceptions in the mind of the consumer”

Paul Feldwick, 1991

Perhaps marketers have had a tendency to forget at times that they’re welded to a thing; a product, a service, something definable and describable.

The thing that they’re supposed to continually add more value to, so that it can be sold at a higher price over a longer period of time.

Whilst thinking about Make People Want Things beats Make Things People Want, I’ve found it helpful to think about things as having two parts to them; substance and essence.

Substance is about the atoms of a product, or the seconds spent with a service.  It is the concrete reality that everyone’s experience would identifiably share.

Essence is more akin to the feelings around that thing; the people who made it, the other people who value it, the more abstract attributes that attach themselves to the concrete realities.

I’ve been thinking about this construct operating over the three eras Yochai Benkler describes in Wealth of Networks; pre-industrial, industrial, and network.

In pre-industrial times, the essence and the substance were essentially the same thing; one was inextricable from the other, the maker and his or her product were one and the same.

Think back to Antonio Stradivari from the previous post; as soon as he departed this earth, the things produced by that workshop lost a crucial something, and the business eventually died.

Then, in the industrial era through mass production, we discovered  the ability to endlessly replicate the idea of one maker.

In a way, the essence was stripped from the substance of his first product, duplicated and attached to every unit produced.  That duplicated essence evolved into the ‘brand’, especially when the original maker was no longer around.

It’s a little bit Cold Lazarus, in some respect: companies seeking to make a fortune by broadcasting the ideas of a long departed mind.

Anyway.

Now, the skill and the art behind that form of branding is compression.

Take the complexity of everything that happened in the creation of the product (the experience of the creators, the materials sourced and used and so on) and turn it into something that worked as a replicable pack, or within seven words on a poster, or in thirty seconds in television.

Simplify and transmit as quickly as possible.

And whilst it started being a technique around simple packaged goods, over the last thirty years the art of brand compression has crept into just about every sphere we can imagine, by and large because marketers and agencies encouraged it:

“It’s still early days: the word “brand” is still associated mainly with packaged groceries.  But there are signs of hope.  In the dark recesses of the human mind, in the city and amongst accountants, it is becoming apparent that the traditional balance sheet is giving a very partial view of a company’s worth.”

Stephen King, Strategic Development of Brands, 1988

They were right to do so, perhaps, in the world they could perceive; in a stable market where your options for broadcasting were TV, Print, Posters & Radio, there was no reason to think that the same powerful branding techniques and tools could be used to continually add value to the things that had existed for decades.

Then, as we know…

Everything about the world changed.  You might have noticed.

Yet the techniques and tools around branding, around the essence part of anything, have by and large remained the same; focus on compression.

The thing we thought of branding itself as being has become substance and essence in messy, unending flux.

How do you apply the compression, consistency and simplicity to a brand when it seems that every time you blink everything about it has changed?

If you follow such matters, yes, the visual is a nod to the New Aesthetic, specifically thinking about a form of brand planning that only robots can see and make sense of.  That rabbit hole is explored more throughly here, and here…

In short, think about the complexity around their products or services that any company or brand can now look at, instantly, virtually anywhere, in real time…

How do you process the fact that you’re meant to be looking after a neat little brand onion with four words in the centre in the face of that?

Now, in reality, there has always been a constantly changing, organic nature to the substance and essence construct.

It’s just that the internet has allowed it to be supercharged, with the myriad forms of expression we all now have in our lives.

Additionally, our brand tools and techniques were never really that dynamic; compare the verbatim quotes on a quarterly brand tracker with the daily tweets for the same brand.

Rather than fight against the complexity, we’ve really got to embrace it instead.

“We are born of complexity, shaped by complexity, and interact with a world that is inexorably growing more complex.”

Bud Caddell, What Consumes Me

We can embrace complexity because we no longer need compression for a brand.

Where once we had to squeeze everything down to 30 seconds, we can now stretch anything out as wide and deep as the internet allows.

It gives us an opportunity to reframe the way we think of adding value through essence to the substance of products and services.

I’ve talked about two ideas around this before, the Labour Theory of Brand Value, and Story Quarry, which it’s worth bringing together now.
—————-

The labour theory of value takes its roots in the thinking of Adam Smith, and is evolved by Karl Marx.

It’s the idea that a thing is worth the sum of the labours it took to create it in the first place.

(You can see why Marx liked it; it’s a great idea to protect the worker, if the efforts of his labour can only ever be sold for what they’re “worth”, as opposed to what the market dictates.)

It eventually falls down when modern economic reality determines that somethings only worth what people will pay.

Which of course is why brands evolved as discussed earlier; to add as much value as possible to the essence on top of the substance.

And the way that the brand would be developed would be by paying a trip or two to story quarry.  Story quarry is where you go to dig up interesting things to use about a company or brand in its marketing.

By and large, because of the need for compression and simplicity demanded by a mass media world, you would go and look for the biggest, chunkiest big of marble you could find.

Why?  Because you were after something with which to make big, impressive, inspiring things to look at, which a lot of people would find the same sort of value in.  Essentially you were trying to craft the essence to fit on top of the substance, and drop it down on top.

The thing about a story quarry though is that it’s made up of all sorts of interesting things.  It builds up, layer upon layer of strata, a complete history of everything you’ve done.

Nowadays, you can show people all the parts of your company you threw out of the story before that didn’t make it in because they weren’t big enough.

Where you sourced raw materials, how you processed them, how does what in the factory, little stories that happened in the making, what you do with the money besides make more of the thing… make everything that comes out a talking point for people who’ll care.

All of it adds up to the labour theory of brand value; constant, tiny, incremental layer-by-layer additions to the essence and the substance.

Perhaps, done right, it’s not just about your company, not just about your founder or creator, the one super-maker whose essence you want to capture and replicate ad infinitum.

Matt Webb’s post on Instagram as an Island Economy is a great read to understand how value (and what value!) can be created in such an incremental, piece-by-piece way.

Matt also links to John Lanchester’s piece in the LRB on “Marx at 193”…

“This idea of labour being hidden in things, and the value of things arising from the labour congealed inside them, is an unexpectedly powerful explanatory tool in the digital world. … When you start looking for this mechanism at work in the contemporary world you see it everywhere, often in the form of surplus value being created by you, the customer or client of a company.”

John Lanchester, Marx at 193

I could probably endlessly exemplify this line of thinking at this point, because there are so many interesting and diverse companies around on the edges of industries that do this.

But this post is long enough already.

So let’s just talk about Field Notes, which I think I first came across at a Playful conference perhaps…

In an age when everyone walks around with one, or two, or even three devices that could theoretically replace notebooks, we’re drawn to ones that we love more than ones that offer pure function.

Field Notes is a US brand of notebooks who effortlessly demonstrate the labour theory of brand value, the continual additive approach to building a layered approach to the substance of what they make.

Their films that they make to coincide with each special edition release are a great example of how to use the endless space of the internet to fill your essence with ever more life.

Watch this one, perhaps, where they talk about their original inspiration, the US farmer’s field note books:

Every Field Notes customer could spend a lot less on very similar note pads, if you were just comparing them at the substance level.

But it’s the essence of Field Notes that makes them more valuable.  And that essence is added by everyone who works there, every additional nook and cranny you find to explore in the Field Notes world, and every customer who carries their Field Notes with pride.

I’m not even sure I’d know how to start describing Field Notes.  But I believe in the company, in their products, in their brand (if that’s what it is).

I believe in the things they make.  Because I believe it is true.  And the more layers I unpeel, and discover more delights, the more I believe.

How many household name brands can you say that of?

“The internet is biased towards fact.  People don’t want myths.  They don’t care about your brand mythology, they care about where your product is made and what’s in it.”

Douglas Rushkoff

(Parts IV & V to follow soon…)

(this is Part II of an ongoing series… Part I is the ‘Easter Island’ post  here)

I’ve been extending the thinking behind Make Things People Want beats Make People Want Things aphorism, and for simplicity’s sake (and perhaps slightly for want of a better plan) I’ve started pulling apart each word and thinking about it that way; Make, Things, People & Want.  I’m going to talk about each separately.  So, here we go…

In the beginning, there wasn’t any marketing.  There was making.  The people who produced the things were, by and large, the marketing story that went with them.  The success of the marketing was inherent in the things they made.

In his book “The Craftsman”, Richard Sennett (Professor of Sociology at LSE & renowned musician) talks about the workshop of Antonio Stradivari, craftsman-hero of 17th & 18th century Italy.

The instruments he produced are know by the latinised version of his name, Stradivarius (the record price paid for one is $3.6 million…)

Throughout his working life, Stradivari saw a great number of highly accomplished craftsman come through his workshop, including his own sons who never married, but remained married to their work instead.

The central part of the workshop was the man himself.  Stradivari’s eyes and hands were all over that workshop, guiding the production of every instrument with either a word or a stroke (Tony Faber’s book Stradivari’s Genius highlights just how).  His workshop produced the finest stringed instruments, all by hand, that perhaps will ever be played.

Now, you’d have thought that with such a fine reputation established, his sons, trained all their lives by the master luthier and with the family name to trade on, would have made a decent fist of carrying on the family business.

Yet within twenty years, the business had failed.  And not because the instruments they made were poor.  As Sennett notes:

“They were able to trade on his name for several years, but the business eventually foundered.  He had not taught, he could not teach either of them how to be a genius.  The work of theirs I’ve held and played was excellent, but no more than that.”

Richard Sennett, The Craftsman

————-

Genius is not easily taught.  Much as in the same way that Stradivari’s sons failed to build upon the creator’s legacy, so the inheritors of many companies have failed to build upon theirs.

But they didn’t necessarily need to.

20th century companies have been fortunate to grow through an age where the spirit of their first maker could be captured in an essence; a name and a slogan, and a set of attributes could be extended long after the creator themselves had shuffled off this mortal coil.

A lot of companies and brands still bear their names; Kellogg, Ford, Gillette, Heinz, McVities, Cadbury’s, Proctor & Gamble, Kraft, Unilever and so on.

What we’ve seen from companies like these is less in the way of the ingenuity, drive and spark that started them off, but an increasing dominance that allows them to work out ways in which to make the things they are geared to deliver relevant for whatever culture they find themselves in.

Minimum Viable Effort, if you will.  “What’s the least we can do to maintain momentum?”

Yet further extending the life of a company beyond the creative force that started it has become harder and harder.  We have entered an age where the creators and makers are front and centre of their companies again.

Part of it is because there are suddenly so many newer companies around, and they are a lot more likely to have the founders at the helm, or still involved.

This is not just true of tech companies and Silicon Valley start-ups, of course, but of a lot of other companies too.

Having the founder in a company means the culture is still going to be dragged back around what they like, and crucially what they don’t.

Thousands of decisions every year will get the seal of approval, and millions of other decisions will be made by others (knowing what the answer would be if they even asked…).

Dyson springs to mind as a great (and maybe too rare) British example.  James Dyson relentlessly sets a tone with the company that you wouldn’t hear in his long established competitors:

—————

But what happens with companies who aren’t fortunate enough to be steered by founders?

Rather than fix long term problems in their companies, one misguided response to the cult of the maker by established incumbents has been to ‘hire in’ talent to fill that role.

Except it’s not talent that might be able to do the job required.

Think of Gwen Stefani, product designer at HP.  Or Jean Paul Gaultier, packaging designer for Diet Coke.  Lady Gaga, creative director of Polaroid.

Or Will.I.Am, another Creative Director at Intel.  When he’s not too busy judging singing competitions on television.

I’m not surprised you can’t quite believe it, Will.  Neither can that nice Intel lady.

Ed Cotton raises a vital issue around this:

“…these appointments are expensive and force the brand to focus it’s attention on the efforts of one individual who certainly isn’t likely to represent the tastes, interests or desires of the majority of their consumers.”

Ed Cotton, Influx Insights

Yet no matter how misguided it is, it’s an easy answer for a marketer to sell to a CEO.

Which is largely because, I think, increasingly the modern marketer is seen by the CEO as the ‘promotions guy’.

Nowadays, the typical CEO is far less likely to be less focussed on customers or product, but much more focused on the efficient way to keep the business running.

In 1996, 24% of CEOS from the UK FTSE 100 companies were from a financial background.  By 2008, it was up to 31%.  Today, in 2012, it’s 51% (Source: Robert Half CEO Report).

It’s an astonishing shift, and one everyone across the marketing discipline no doubt recognises.

And it means that the pressure on Marketing Departments and their agencies is increasingly to make the most profit from existing products and services as possible.

“Make People Want Things” comes the cry from on high.

——————-

Actually, for all the modern elements driving this state of affairs, it not a particularly new problem.  I am drawn back once more to Stephen King of JWT (who I seem to be reading, rereading and referencing a lot of late) who in 1985 a paper called “Has Marketing Failed, or was it Never Really Tried?”.

King describes four types of marketing that aren’t really marketing at all.

1.  “Thrust Marketing is what happens in companies when the Sales Manager decides to change his title to Marketing Manager, though not his function.  [It is] the sort of marketing that concerns itself only with that part of the total process that lies between the factory door and and the retailer’s shelves.  It does not concern itself with what the product or brand is, its design, quality and purpose”

2. Marketing Department Marketing – “The Marketing Department was simply bolted onto the standard company organogram, with all its hierarchies and reporting lines and rigid department barriers.  They understood that the company’s success depended on studying consumer’s wants… but all too often they were given little real authority”

3. Accountant’s Marketing – “Gradually the accountants drift to the top of the organisation, replacing those whose experience has been either in the company’s products or its customers.  The result has been that manager’s objectives – including Marketing Managers – have increasingly been set in simple terms as the bottom-line figure on a profit and loss statement.”

4. Formula Marketing – “a form of marketing in which control is held to be more important than innovation.  It is much safer to be static than dynamic; and who is going to take risks when his whole future depends on turning in the results that his distant boss is calling for?”

It pains me slightly to think back over the number of clients I’ve encountered who are forced to operate like this; a relentless focus on using marketing as simply a lever for short term profitability.

But what’s the alternative?

King’s prescription is for what he calls Real Marketing, for which he outlines four essential aspects:

1. Start with the customer – “Real Marketing’s starting point is designing a product or service to meet the wants of a group of consumers.  It is adding values to the raw materials to meet the totality of those wants, both physical and psychologically.  So it embraces suitability for purpose, quality, design, brand, personality, style, availability, after-sales service, ease of repair and all other aspects of a customer’s relationship with a brand”

2. Work over time -  “The whole point of branding – that is, in simple terms, designing something special and putting one’s name on it – is to make it a little easier to be successful in the future than at present… Real Marketing cannot be divorced from product quality, product improvement, process improvement and manufacturing productivity.”

3. Using all the company resources – “Real Marketing cannot be thought of as a department activity.  It is a matter of harnessing all of the company’s resources to satisfy customers, and of linking what the customer wants with what the company is (or can become) uniquely available to provide so that it can prosper by doing so.”

4. Innovate – “What Real Marketing is calling for is more resources devoted to innovation than normally happens, and it requires a different attitude of mind.  Hierarchies, systems, rulebooks and formulae work pretty well for controlling and improving the efficiency of repeated actions.  They are hopeless for inventing, experimenting with and developing something that has never happened before.”

You’ll recognise a lot of this.

It’s very similar to the things we hear nowadays about being user centric, agile, about continual testing, about fail fast, about slowly building over time*… all the things that we keep hearing about, and all really well thought through and valuable input into current marketing thinking.

Yet this King wrote about all this in 1985.  We’ve known this for nearly thirty years and done precious little about it.

As Murray just noted today after attending the IPA’s latest Creative Pioneers seminar…

To be brutally honest, if you’re an agency chief or CMO spouting off about how you’ve  discovered that being agile or user-centric is the answer to marketing’s problems, you should be fired on the spot for ever having thought otherwise.

But besides repeating the past, what’s most apparent from King’s prescription for Real Marketing is how much of Marketing must be rooted in MAKING.

The craft, genius and skill behind the product is the single most important thing to get right, and never more so than in an age when the quality of every single product and service is subject to the instant critical or celebratory views of millions.

We must fully reappraise and reinvent the marketing’s relationship with making and remaking THINGS, not campaigns.

Making is Marketing, Marketing is Making.

(Enjoyed this post?  Read Part III in the series…)

*I’ve linked back to Bonfires & Fireworks here, because it’s yet another example of Stephen King beating someone (i.e. – me) to the punch by decades.  If you want to read a better version of all the ideas you’ve ever had from thirty years ago, then buy “A Masterclass In Brand Planning”, the definitive collection of King’s essays and speeches (link is through Amazon Associates scheme, so I  get a couple of pence if you do)

“This is the proposition that the basic and irreversible function of an industrial economy is the making of things; that the more things it makes the bigger will be the income, whether dollar or real; and hence that the key to those lost recuperative powers lies . . . in the factory where the lathes and the drills and the fires and the hammers are.  It is in the factory and on the land and under the land that purchasing power originates.”

Forbes Magazine Editorial from 1938
(on why America had yet to recover from the depression)
(soure: No Logo)

“Manufacturing’s contribution to the ecpnomic recovery and long-term economic growth extends to other economic sectors, including commodities and professional services, through forward and backward linkages and spillover effects.  America’s manufacturing companies also anchor America’s innovation ecosystem, providing demand for American researchers and a supply of R&D in the U.S.  Innovation in the U.S. cannot be severed  from domestic production; the two belong to an innovation system whose elements benefit each other and flourish or fail together”

from Value Added: America’s Manufacturing Future, 2012
(via Simon Carr)

It’s amazing how often we fail to learn from the mistakes our forebears made.

A box for one of the in-house Smithery projects. Excited.