Todd Heller, Founding Director — Hellers

Is you business Brand Ready?

Six simple questions that help you determine the health of your brand, born out of over 23 years of dedication to brand excellence.

The Designers Institute Black Pin for Outstanding Achievement is given to the individual who has made a lasting contribution to the design profession and to design in general.

In making the award to Annie Dow, Cathy Veninga, CEO of FDINZ, says “it is an honour to turn the tables and give something back to someone who has given so much to the design industry over the last 25 years.

Annie’s tenacity, her passion for design, her smarts and her generosity have not only enabled her to grow her own business, but provided opportunities for generations of New Zealand designers to grow their own talents. At 25 years young, Dow Goodfolk is a highly awarded studio, a highly regarded strategic business and a highly respected ‘proving ground’ for many, many committed designers.”

Annie has been a leading industry voice championing the work of the design community, and her mantra of ‘Design delivers value’ is legendary within the industry. Annie is a passionate and vocal expert on the value of branding and believes creative and strategic excellence brings clients a healthy return on their investment.

Prior to founding Dow goodfolk in 1994 with her late husband Greg, Annie worked in Sydney and London. This international experience included a period as Art Director at the London Stock Exchange and at Pentagram, where she discovered her passion for product and brand. Dow Goodfolk originally specialised in the FMCG space and over the years we have designed some of NZ’s most well-known brands, many of which were profiled during our recent 25^th anniversary celebrations. Today we continue to be seen as a highly regarded strategic brand and design agency, consistently delivering commercially and creatively successful work for our wide roster of clients across the FMCG, consumer and corporate sectors.

Like one of her favourite designers Phillipe Starck, Annie Dow feels privileged to be working in the creative services industry, where she aims to make life easier for people. Through their simplicity, Starck’s designs are user-friendly Annie says. “He likes to create simplicity and being simple and effective with little clutter is the Dow Goodfolk philosophy”. Dow says further, “through this clarity of approach, combined with an insights led philosophy that puts the customer at the heart of  everything we do, we have developed a method of working with our clients that consistently delivers on their investment.”

A final word, from Cathy Veninga, who has admired Annie throughout her career.

“Annie is a survivor who’s fought hard for the respect she has as a business woman, and is valued by our industry as a strong advocate for design generally, and also for women in design.”

As we all remember to tote our reusable bags into our local supermarket, and as some very significant manufacturers commit to packaging change – Countdown, Foodstuffs and Frucor Suntory recently joined the NZ subsidiaries of Amcor, Danone, L’Oréal, Mars, Nestlé, PepsiCo, The Coca-Cola Company and Unilever in signing the ‘New Zealand Plastic Packaging Declaration’ and affirmed that they will work toward using 100% reusable, recyclable or compostable packaging by 2025 or earlier.

Packaging formats are going to be rocketing up the agenda for all businesses in the next 6 years or less.

We sat down to chat with Lawrence Olsen, Managing Director of Exemplar – a packaging solutions provider for NZ and Australia – to find out what’s hot and what’s not. And apparently plastic is not necessarily a not! Bio-based packaging standards are currently unregulated, and as this kind of packaging does not fully break down, they are not necessarily our magic bullet.

Lawrence shined a light on the cold hard realities dictating positive eco packaging change for today’s businesses.

What’s potentially not hot:

1. Manufacturing machinery

Eco packaging options have been developed and available for some time now, from the ability to endlessly recycle the same plastic, instead of creating more, to hybrid compostable and plastic solutions, to fully compostable options.

But the brakes come on if a business cannot adapt its plant to the already available eco pack formats.

2. Shelf life

Even more critically, many of the seemingly desirable pack solutions above do not provide business-sustainable product shelf life. Which leads to food waste, a whole other planetary problem.

Eco packaging that supports good product shelf life is a special area of development for Exemplar. He is advising those businesses savvy enough to be investing in change now that although set up costs can look high, the payoffs further down the track are lucrative, as other businesses seek alliances and supply deals with these pioneers. He has seen it happen.

Here are his next 2 hot points:

1. Eco pack education

Current national understanding of what to recycle and how to recycle it would likely get an F grade at Eco School. For example, compostable bin liners need to be composted to home compost bins. And if you don’t have one, as many don’t, those liners go straight to the landfill. And who is doing their compost bin properly anyway? Certain recyclable packaging needs to have the lids binned but the containers recycled, and debates are rife over whether you need to keep the lids on or off your milk, water and other beverage bottles.

He would like to see a more consolidated effort from our government leaders – local and national – to help clarify what is currently a very confusing array of options and instructions.

Businesses, too, can help by devoting more care and attention to educating their customers about how to best handle their own empty packs.

2. More infrastructure

In New Zealand we are limited by our current recycling plant infrastructure in how much and what types of products we can recycle without having to send these offshore. Opportunities are a-plenty in this space. The demand is only going to increase.

Lawrence says, packaging is not the enemy, and can save more than it costs. It’s the way we dispose of it that is the problem, so consumers need to get on board and be part of the solution.

With the changes being made by some of the largest retailers, legal changes being implemented at government level, and the only growing consumer demand for eco friendly products, this is the land of opportunity. Let’s all get on the bandwagon of change.

In 2017 Parnell District School, one of Auckland’s oldest schools, were in change mode.

They wanted to grow their roll and compete more effectively against other schools.

They needed a focused story that captured their new vision.

We used Dow Labs to engage the staff and discover what they collectively believed made Parnell District School different and special.

How did it work?

The staff were given homework - to record their Aha! Moments - and we gave them a joint Making Exercise. (‘Doing’ is proven to get closer to real, not reported, attitudes.)

The results uncovered what the staff believed made Parnell District School special. And the Making activity bonded people together, people who hadn’t always necessarily agreed with one another.

Next, the task was to distil all of this into a simple, strong vision statement and a refreshed school identity.

The pupils were part of the process too. They were asked to draw how they saw their school, so we could tap into the symbols that meant something to them.

The school found its heart, its every day purpose, captured in one strong and simple statement. And an easy-to-remember kit of three values.

And a new identity was born. With a story everyone understood and believed in.

Click here to read the case study

Andy is a young entrepreneur who built his business from scratch. Typical of many startups, his business morphed as it grew, and pretty quickly his first brand ‘Wheyhouse’ was the wrong fit for his evolving products. One thing was clear to him: His second brand needed to be fit for the future.

Even with a product as good as it gets – organic, plastic-free and using fair trade-sourced ingredients wherever possible – Andy knew his brand was his magic ingredient.

Hear him talk about his branding journey, and the impact it had on his business in this 2 minute video.

I’m an account manager, my job is to help provide solutions for our clients and to work with internal teams to help bring those solutions to life.

With that being the case, I have to learn and understand digital products as much as possible without constructing them myself. Over the years I’ve developed my knowledge by being present and involved in the process as much as possible. Asking developers countless (no doubt annoying) questions, or diving in where I can, like helping create or manipulate excel databases (tedious at times, but now I understand a lot about data structure that I didn’t know before) and learning on my own. There’s so many things you’ll discover just by being curious.

It’s this sort of learning that I feel is invaluable to understanding digital and all the subtle nuances that the ‘doing’ teaches you. I’ve been curious about chatbots for a while but my knowledge was limited to a general understanding of them. I wanted to know if I could make one myself. Not being able to code, turns out to not be a problem. At least not at my level of need.

Enter Landbot.io. Landbot is an incredibly easy to use tool that allows you to create your own chatbot from scratch without needing a developer.

The basic function of a chatbot is simple. It’s a program that receives a message from a user, reads the message and then provides a meaningful answer. Think online shopping and asking a chatbot if they have your favourite chuck taylors in a size 6. A simple answer such as, yes and here is the product page, would constitute a simple but meaningful engagement.

When making it yourself (without using a true AI that can learn for itself) the challenge lies in the shear volume of possible interactions and the nuances of basic conversation. You have to understand the plethora of potential user needs and then write a script or journey for all of those if you want to create a meaningful chatbot.

For example;

Someone asks if your website has pink chuck taylor originals in size 6

The program checks the website and finds out either;

No, there are no pink chucks in size 6, but there are pink chucks in sizes 6.5.

Or No, there a there are no pink chucks in size 6, but there are blue, green, black and white ones.

The logical answer is no, but a meaningful answer should provide a more meaningful outcome. Like “sorry we are out of stock, but have options in blue, green, black and white. Would you like to take a look at these?”

So, in order to create a truly engaging chatbot experience you need to have a deep understanding of your product or service and the ability to anticipate and interpret all (or as many as possible) of your customers pain points and needs. You need to understand how they think and how to construct meaningful answers.

I guess the most interesting thing, although unsurprising, that you need to know when creating a chatbot is your customer. And what they need from you.

Design at its best is customer-centric.

Some of our favourite growth areas for this year are the likes of the smart trolley (marking the beginning of the end for checkout lanes), an increase in Voice Interface –requiring designers to extend their thinking when it comes to usability design, and the wider implementation of the 5G network, allowing users much higher upload and download speeds (cue fast and effective VR experiences that allow you to imagine and visualise your kitchen remodel while standing right there in your kitchen!)

But our favourite would have to be Google Lens.

What is Google Lens? Google Lens is a tool that allows you to use a photo stored on your phone to search the internet. Basically, take a photo of any product or item, open a Google Lens enabled app or the Google Image search engine, use the Google Lens tool and then it will scan your photo, search the internet and spit back results in real time.

Why is this exciting? Well, imagine you’re at a friends BBQ, you pick up a lovely new craft beer, you taste it, you love it, you want to know where to buy it. Just snap a picture, scan it with your app and ta da! There it is, complete with where to buy and how much it costs, along with a range of alternatives to try as well. Or perhaps you're travelling, you're staring at a landmark but you don’t know what it is? Take a snap, fire it through the app and there it is, complete with gift shop item recommendations.

Last October, Google extended access to Google Lens from only being accessible via their Pixel Phone, to now being accessible via its search engine’s image search functionality.

What impact will it have? While it’s not yet entirely clear what the impact will be, you can imagine it will be big in the ecommerce space, especially for FMCG, retail and fashion. It will also mean that your product images online will need to be as well optimized as they can be to make is as easy as possible for Google’s AI to read and interpret.

The lens is on your product, are you ready for it?