Alina Wheeler works with leaders to accelerate brand clarity, awareness and loyalty. Her disciplined process has been used successfully by large organizations like Vanguard, and non-profit organizations like Thomas Jefferson’s Poplar Forest. She is the author of Designing Brand Identity: An Essential Guide for the Whole Branding Team, which deconstructs the branding process into a disciplined five-phase methodology. The third edition is published in seven languages, and is used as a resource by universities, design and branding firms, entrepreneurs and corporate marketing departments.In this audio interview with Debbie Millman, Alina Wheeler discusses branding, her father (who was a sea captain), strategic imagination, color coding souls, the Gap logo fiasco, how hard it is to be a client — and her new book, co-authored with Joel Katz, Brand Atlas. (02.25.11)
Remembering Alina Wheeler:
In 2011, Debbie Millman interviewed Alina Wheeler. The interview is now here.
Debbie Millman: The words brand and branding come from the practice of singeing a cow’s hide with a hot iron stamp in order to tell one ranchers’ heard from another. It’s easy to forget these humble origins, but in the world of products, services, and corporate identity, branding still serves the same old purpose. What makes me distinguishable from you? Alina Wheeler is a branding consultant who describes her business as managing perception. In her books, she demystifies branding and the branding process. Her latest book is called Brand Atlas: Branding Intelligence Made Visible. And we’ll talk all about that and then some in today’s interview. Welcome to Design Matters, Alina.
Alina Wheeler: Thank you. What a pleasure to be here.
Debbie Millman: Oh, it’s great to have you. So I understand that you are the daughter of a sea captain.
Alina Wheeler: What a researcher you are.
Debbie Millman: Tell us about that.
Alina Wheeler: Yes. My father was a sea captain and he was an extraordinary man who was a great storyteller and I adored him and more than anything else, he inspired me to be who I am now.
Debbie Millman: So did you spend a lot of time at sea with him?
Alina Wheeler: No. In fact, I did travel to Yugoslavia with him on a ship once, but it wasn’t until I was 18 years old. So during my childhood, he really traveled around the world nine months of the year and we communicated via letters. And then there was a very intensive three months where he would regale me with stories about what happened in the various ports around the world.
Debbie Millman: Wow. That’s incredible. Now I also understand that you didn’t speak English until you were about six.
Alina Wheeler: Yes.
Debbie Millman: What was your first language?
Alina Wheeler: My first language was Polish. This week I actually had the most thrilling moment because my book Designing Brand Identity has just been published in Polish.
Debbie Millman: How wonderful.
Alina Wheeler: Yes. Yeah. So that was thrilling. I wish my dad were here to read it.
Debbie Millman: I do too. So if you didn’t speak English until you were six, how do you think that experience of coming to English as a second language impacted and influenced you in terms of how you view the world through language?
Alina Wheeler: I care very much about clarity. I care very much about understanding because in the beginning, when I first came to school, I didn’t understand anything. My mother basically traveled with me through my whole childhood and then I was thrown into this American school. So the notion of not understanding is actually very frightening to me. And I think when I hear any kind of foreign accent, it’s very comforting to me now, almost like a cradle, being rocked in the cradle. So I’m very aware of the fact that English wasn’t my first language and writing is actually very difficult for me.
Debbie Millman: You’re kidding, given how prolific you are as a writer. So if somebody were to ask you what you do for a living Alina, what would you say?
Alina Wheeler: I would pause and then I would say, my business is strategic imagination.
Debbie Millman: Really?
Alina Wheeler: Yes.
Debbie Millman: And so why the pause?
Alina Wheeler: Because I do so many different kinds of things-
Debbie Millman: That was why it was hard for me to even imagine.
Alina Wheeler: That I would pause and say, well, which one do I really want to talk about? But I’m really fascinated by identity. I’m really fascinated by how people and organizations and communities express who they are. So anything that I can do around that. And it’s why I wrote Designing Brand Identity, it’s why I wrote Brand Atlas, it’s why I do the kind of consulting that I do.
Debbie Millman: So is this something that you always wanted to do? Did you always have a fascination with brands?
Alina Wheeler: It started in the second grade at the Sacred Heart of Jesus. When they asked us to color code our souls, black, if we had sinned a lot, white, if we had been pure, red, if we had just sinned a little. And I think it was at that point that I had a fascination with color coding and brand architecture.
Debbie Millman: What color did you code your own soul?
Alina Wheeler: It was a checkered pattern.
Debbie Millman: Really? I love it. And of course, you didn’t color in the lines, I’m hoping, although what lines were the soul? Did they actually create a picture of the soul that you had to fill in?
Alina Wheeler: Well, there was a diagram of the soul and each day had a soul.
Debbie Millman: Wow.
Alina Wheeler: I know.
Debbie Millman: That’s progressive for a second grader.
Alina Wheeler: I think it’s bizarre actually.
Debbie Millman: And I actually understand a lot more now about why you decided to do work in identity. So let’s go back to what you said about your title or how you would describe yourself. How would you describe strategic imagination?
Alina Wheeler: Strategic imagination is really aligning the goals of an organization, whether they’re business goals or community goals with creativity, so using creativity to solve real problems.
Debbie Millman: So back when you were in the second grade and you were becoming aware of dimensionalizing the aspects of a soul, how did that then become the entry into your ultimate career path? How did that idea about identity then become something about corporations or culture?
Alina Wheeler: Actually, many years later, I ended up going to the university of the arts and I was in illustration major. And I didn’t even know about design, if you can believe that. So I was an illustration major because I was very interested in telling stories. And it was not until the last semester of the last year that I was introduced to design. Sometimes art colleges are silos or they were in the ’60s where the sculptors didn’t talk to that painters, didn’t talk to the photographers, no one talked to art education. And certainly the designers never talked to the illustrators. So I was very lucky in my fourth year to have a teacher, Stephen Tarentel, who introduced me to the idea of design. And then a few years after that, I was introduced to Joel Katz and he was a designer in the very formal sense. Studied at Yale, understood all of the issues. And he and I ended up forming a partnership of Katz Wheeler.
Debbie Millman: And that was your first brand consultancy, so to speak?
Alina Wheeler: Yes. Because we did a lot of different kinds of projects, but a lot of them had to do with identity. And for me, whether you were doing an annual report or a book or an information system, for me, it all came down to issues of identity. Who are you? Who needs to know? Why should they care and how will they find out?
Debbie Millman: So had you not had that experience, it’s very likely that you would have been an illustrator?
Alina Wheeler: Yeah, who knows what would have happened or a sea captain.
Debbie Millman: Telling stories. So what made you decide to actually pursue branding as a career?
Alina Wheeler: I think when I looked at everything, that was really the common thread, regardless of what we were working on. It was really about who was that organization and what stood in the way of a project being successful. And often what stood in the way, and this was a moment of epiphany for me that when the process was successful, when people around the table respected each other, and there were clear goals and a clear mandate, the project was always a success. And what I realized early on is that if I could develop a process, a disciplined process, I could accelerate the success of almost any initiative.
Debbie Millman: Your book, Designing Brand Identity reinvented the idea of a marketing textbook. And it really seeks to demystify branding and shed light on the range of tools used by people in the branding business experience practitioners. And you have really set the bar for marketing textbooks since the publication of your book. But why did you originally decide to write Designing Brand Identity?
Alina Wheeler: I had to have it on my shelf. It didn’t exist. So the world was filled with all of these brilliant tomes on marketing and branding, David Aaker, Philip Kotler. And then at the other side, there were all these exquisite design books, books about trademarks, great books on naming, books on information systems, but there was nothing out there that was really about the process. How do we revitalize the brand? And the thing that frustrated me is there were things that I thought were absolute, but nobody talked about critical success factors. Nobody talked about decision-making. If you’re not on top of the decision-making process, no matter how brilliant the work that you’ve done has been-
Debbie Millman: That’s living in an isolation, in an isolation tank.
Alina Wheeler: Yeah. And then I found that there were some really smart people, CEOs of organizations who were brilliant, who were innovative, who really just didn’t understand branding. And they were embarrassed to buy it and they would close the door and they would say, “Lina, I don’t really get it.” And the other thing is all these brand consultancies well, not everyone can afford the large brand consultancies, what about the rest of the world? So I wanted to develop a process that worked for you if you were an entrepreneur in a garage like a Jeff Bezos imagining the future, or if you are a midsize company or if you were a nonprofit or if you were consumer brand, because at the end of the day, I feel that it’s the same process.
Debbie Millman: So talk about that process. Yours was really the first book to deconstruct branding into this universal discipline five phase methodology.
Alina Wheeler: First of all, I’m a big believer in one page. So what I mean by that is if you can communicate something in one page, you’re going to be able to talk to a lot of people who have short attention spans or who have busy agendas like CEO’s or the board and all of that.
Debbie Millman: Like just about everybody right now.
Alina Wheeler: Right. And I wanted something that had clear decision points. So I developed a five phase process. The first page is research and analysis. You’re a sleuth, your shrink, you’re interviewing, you’re doing audits. You’re looking at all the existing research, you’re establishing the goals. And in phase two, you achieve agreement about who you are, what you stand for, how you’re different, why you’re irreplaceable. And if there’s any kind of naming that happens in that phase. And then at the end of the phase where there’s agreement about the brand, that’s when you do a creative brief. So the phase three is what I call designing identity. The designers are ready, they’re at the edge of their seat and they’re designing the future. They’re playing back and they’re saying, this is what the future could look like. So at the end of the third phase designing identity, you are achieving agreement on basically, what is it going to look like? What is it going to feel like? What’s the experience going to be?
Debbie Millman: So basically the criteria for success?
Alina Wheeler: Yes. And then the fourth phase there’s agreement, and then there’s a deep dive, I call it creating touch points. So you’re going into legal, you’re creating the whole look and feel, and in effect, you’re creating the language. And then the fifth phase, and that’s when everybody is ready, when can we have our business cards? When can we launch? When do we send out the blast email? The fifth phase is Mount Everest, right? That’s managing assets. So the fifth phase is when you’re creating guidelines so that everyone can participate in brand building. You’re doing an internal launch to make sure that everyone in the organization understands, why, why are we doing this? How are things going to be different? Why is this good news? And then there’s the external launch.
Debbie Millman: So five phases and they sound extremely logical and quite intuitive in many ways. How does something like the gap logo fiasco happen?
Alina Wheeler: Oh, well, it was a fiasco on so many different levels. I’m not privy to the inside conversations, clearly they were not my client. My sense is that they didn’t do their due diligence. Didn’t do phase one, where they were doing audit. So you do a competitive audit, you do an internal audit-
Debbie Millman: Now, when you say audit, what are you looking at when you’re auditing? What are you auditing?
Alina Wheeler: When we do an audit, we’re looking at voice, we’re looking at all of the expressions of the brand back in history. We’re looking at the evolution of the brand, the history of where they’ve been. A competitive audit, I mean, you’re looking at best practices sometimes within your industry. And then another part of the audit for me is living inside of the customer.
Debbie Millman: How do you do that?
Alina Wheeler: So I love to do a room where it’s the customer’s world and you experience what they’re experiencing. So I don’t know what went wrong. Clearly, I don’t think they were listening to their customers. They weren’t listening to the marketplace. And certainly in terms of what happened, it was just frightening to me, it was frightening and I was angry because it was one of those things, regardless of whatever conversation I was in, like with a midsize engineering firm, well, we don’t want to have the gap experience. So it was an experience that I feel effected everyone in branding.
Debbie Millman: I feel that any of these retreats that brands have now, when they come out with something new and then immediately re call them, it is bad for anybody in the branding business or the design business, because people then become afraid of change. But I was so surprised by the reaction, not that I felt that the logo was particularly good or bad, the new logo, but I also didn’t feel that the old logo was particularly good or bad. And I couldn’t understand the brew ha ha over what really felt like a fairly nondescript logo to begin with going to another fairly nondescript logo. And so I wonder if you have any insight as to why there was such a strong and almost mob mentality about what happened?
Alina Wheeler: Well, they had a lot of brand equity and they didn’t look at their brand equity. And again, I really hate when someone sends out a symbol because you very rarely experience the symbol by itself. For me, if you’re going to send something out, you send it out within its context and you send it out with excitement and pride and you do an interesting launch.
Debbie Millman: Well, I do think that any company with a major identity of any type will need to now have some sort of launch strategy because otherwise I think they leave themselves open to this again-
Alina Wheeler: Borage. Absolutely. Mob mentality.
Debbie Millman: The mob mentality. It’s really incredible. But it’s interesting because I remember years ago back before diet Pepsi was light blue, there was dark blue for Pepsi and white for diet Pepsi. And I remember the first time I ever saw the light blue diet Pepsi can and oh, I spend my whole life in branding and packaging. And when I saw it, I was really taken aback by it. And I didn’t know if I liked it or not, but more important than that, I felt uncomfortable with it. And it was that discomfort that was really fascinating. Why did I feel uncomfortable about this change? Forget whether I liked it or didn’t like it. And I think a lot of people have that sense of dread or this foreboding and seeing something new that they can’t quite explain that then somehow backpedals into fear and anger. And I don’t know why that happens.
Alina Wheeler: I think because one of the functions of brands is assurance and you’re sure that you’ve made the right choice and assurance also has to do with familiarity. So if I’m walking down the street and I see you and I recognize you, it’s a happy moment. And I think the same thing is true, whether you’re in the supermarket or you’re on the web, it’s this notion of acknowledgement and familiarity and assurance.
Debbie Millman: I want to talk a little bit about your opinion about why Apple is so coveted. Do you think it is design? Do you think it’s technology, do you think it’s something very specific about the way that they brand their products?
Alina Wheeler: I think it’s everything. I mean, for me, the best brands are irreplaceable. So number one today, I can’t imagine my life without Apple. And certainly I’m 62. I mean, a lot of my life was lived with before the iPad and iPod and all of that, but they understand me. They anticipate what I need. They delight me. And I love going into the Apple store. I mean, it’s beyond the cafe experience in terms of the energy and certainly leveraging design almost no one does it better. Occasionally I teach and I always ask everyone, well, what’s your favorite brand? And I say, can you tell me some that are not Apple? Because every conversation that you’re in with every client, every student, that’s the best practice right now. And I want to challenge everyone to come up with an equal.
Debbie Millman: Well, it’s so interesting that you say that, especially given the way in which you’ve tried to forward the methodologies of branding, but one of the things that I find so ironic about so many clients that covet the Apple visual language is how reluctant they actually are to utilize it. So it actually, isn’t all that difficult to imagine taking a lot of stuff off the pack and letting the brand be hero or the product be hero. And yet so many clients and so many brands are actually loathe to do that. Why do you think there are so few companies that actually have used the path that Apple has taken to try to do some of the same kinds of things with design?
Alina Wheeler: First of all, I think it takes a lot of courage to step outside of your comfort zone, or certainly if you’ve been successful to give up what has made you successful. So the next thing I really want to study is courage. And the other thing that I’ve been thinking a lot about, because I’ve been a client recently, it’s really hard to be a client, it’s so hard. I don’t think I ever realized how hard it was-
Debbie Millman: What was hard about it?
Alina Wheeler: Well, the voices about my designer is telling me, I have to say less, I have to let go of this stuff, but I feel so passionate about it. I don’t have the courage to let go. So that’s why I believe in the process. I believe that if designers build trust with their clients, that their clients will find their Apple. And what I believe is that in every corporation, there is this extraordinary brand that some of them have not yet discovered, have not yet sent out into the world.
Debbie Millman: I want to talk to you about a couple of quotes from your book that I’ve pulled out that I really love. And I just want you to know if you can elaborate on some of these really marvelous lines for our listeners. You say that the best identities advance a brand. How?
Alina Wheeler: Yes. Well again, brands are about an emotional connection. They connect to your mind and your heart. So brand identity for me is tangible. Brand identity is designed. You can see it, you can smell it. You can watch it, you can see it move. So the notion of design, when an experience is designed, when a brand is designed to be authentic, it absolutely advances the brand because it makes it easy. It just makes it easy for the customer to understand, to buy, to choose.
Debbie Millman: Now, is it possible though to design something to be authentic? Don’t you have to be authentic.
Alina Wheeler: Yeah. You have to be authentic. You can’t fake it. Absolutely. Authenticity is this foundation. We know who we are. And then, I say to people, unless you spend the time articulating who you are, what’s important to you, no key messages, no look and feel, no logos, none of this is possible unless you have this foundation.
Debbie Millman: I often think that people use brands now to project an image of what they want to be, as opposed to what they feel that they are. We use brands now to transform an otherwise wobbly interior somehow.
Alina Wheeler: Well, I am fascinated right now by personal branding. And then yes, I think it’s important whether it’s a person or a product or a service to really talk about aspirations, who do I want to be? Or who do I think I am that no one else knows that I am? And I think a lot of businesses start off with a vision and then sometimes they get disconnected from why are we doing this? So to be back in touch with your aspirations and your wildest dreams, I think that’s important.
Debbie Millman: Last quote from the book and then I want to start talking about your new book. You say even the most mundane transactions can be turned into memorable experiences.
Alina Wheeler: Yes. That’s Joe Pine and Jim Gilmore. They write a lot about experience and places like INGDirect are reinventing the idea of a bank. So going to a bank, a bank doesn’t have to be a mundane experience. It can be a cafe, it can be a place where you meet your friends, The Geek Squad, American Girl. So this notion of, it’s not about the features and benefits anymore, it’s what kind of experience are you giving your customers? So clearly Apple, Jim Gilmore said something the other day, he said, “Walking into an Apple store is like walking into the inside of an iPad.” So I thought that was a wonderful thing. So it’s the experience and so much has become the same, so how can you provide something that is truly original, that sparks an interest of feeling, a place to go? It’s an experience.
Debbie Millman: So talk to us about your new book, Brand Atlas.
Alina Wheeler: My new book, Brand Atlas. Debbie, did you know that in 1570, the first Atlas was created by collaboration and it was, Mercator inspired someone named Ortelius to do the first Atlas. And maps-
Debbie Millman: I actually didn’t know that.
Alina Wheeler: Maps used to be as big as this wall. So if you were a sea captain, you couldn’t take that all. So he said, make a book of maps, help people understand where they are so they can figure out where they want to go. So Brand Atlas is a resource for people to help them navigate the brand landscape. So it’s full page, color diagrams, that illuminate concepts, ideas. So the world right now, the world is filled with software generated diagrams, visualizing data. We wanted to do a book where we were visualizing concepts, ideas, processes, and then just a very little text, 80 words, right? Little bigger than a tweet, a call to action, thoughts for consideration.
Debbie Millman: And the book will be out soon?
Alina Wheeler: Yes, it’s going to be out in the end of March and it’s going to be a real book-
Debbie Millman: Heft.
Alina Wheeler: 144 pages. It can be read in half an hour, and it’s not for the director of marketing. It’s a book for the rest of everyone that would never read a tome on social networks or brand measurement, but who needs to understand those fundamentals and how they relate to marketplace dynamics.
Debbie Millman: That sounds fascinating Alina, and I can’t wait to read it. Alina, thanks for joining me on Design Matters.
Alina Wheeler: Thank you so much.
Debbie Millman: You can find out more about Alina Wheeler on her website, alinawheeler.com. I’d like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman, And I look forward to talking with you again soon.