Marc Gobe
03/10/07 14:41
Marc Gobe, Desgrippes Gobe, was gracious enough to speak to us at the Institute of Design 2 weeks ago. Marc brings a deep background in branding and advertising. Redeveloping products like Coke, Evian, Victoria's Secret and Banana Republic.
Clearly at the helm of a large and successful branding machine Marc presented key concepts of emotional branding and the role it plays in the consumers mind. His slides were simple and direct. Oddly old fashioned but with the Desgrippes Gobe star details all over them.
At any rate, he made some great points about reaching out to touch the customer. This follows close on the heels of my previous post about Starck's visceral manner of speaking about products. My favorite part was his dissection of the brand as a "champion" for peoples lives. Once soap solved the problem of the dirty child. This made the child out to be the problem. Which problem do you want your brand to be in the middle of? Careful about getting between mother and child. Now the strategy is to encourage the child to go out and live. To be dirty and its soap that allows that to happen. All of a sudden it is a champion. This the extension of the classic example of people not buying drills but buying holes. People want outcomes not products. Experiences not platforms. So in the case of soap people are buying life not soap. Pretty great.
There was an interesting hesitancy from the students in the room to engage in a dialogue about branding. We are taught to dissect the problem with structured planning methods to understand the base of the problem before creating options but Marc cut right through all of that to the meaning.
He seemed to see the human factors, field research as important but only a minor part of the battle summing up the role of designers, "Designers are not just for making form. They are incredible filters for what's going on in society." It was slightly annoying to hear the design research process being under cut by Gobe but it is clear he is a visionary and leader. He sees the final outcome of the process in real human terms. His passion did not position him to have a tools discussion it positioned him to have a human discussion. Very exciting. If anyone was at Institute of Design's Design Research Conference and heard Darrel Rhea from Cheskin speak you may remember his call to leadership. Whether Gobe's is the exact moel for that or not I think he has an empathic vision which we could all learn from.
A final point of interest was the way in which he prototyped the opportunity for Victoria's secret to move into the adjacent space of lotions and perfumes. He put regular product from the drug store into the Victoria's Secret store and waited to see if it would sell. It did. They launched.