The central problem of brand-building is getting a complex organization to execute a simple idea.

The central problem of brand-building is getting a complex organization to execute a simple idea.

Designers don't actually solve problems. They work through them.

A brand is a person's perception. Of course, it makes marketers nervous to think that marketing is out of their control, but that's why the discipline of branding has emerged.

In a sense, traditional business is design blind.

Cultures are naturally resistant to change. The same shared mental models that allow large numbers of people to work together efficiently can also keep people from imagining new ways of working together. In many corporate cultures, new ideas are viewed as heresy. But it doesn't have to be that way.

Convincing isn't really possible in an age of customer control. Customers hold most of the cards today. They have good visibility into their choices, and they can easily share information with each other. Not only that, they don't like to be sold. But they do like to buy. Your job shouldn't be to convince customers to buy, but to help them buy what they want.