The ability to pick up on detail and nuance is great for building relationships; everyone appreciates being heard. In work relationships, active listening is a trust machine partly because the picking up on detail signals that you care.

When it comes to the world at large, the bombardment of stimulus is enough to pull most of us into autopilot mode. So I started keeping notes of interesting things and stories, then stringing them together and pouring the lessons from one into the next (or what happens when you let down your guard and pay attention to stuff).

Think of it as branding story-advice-mixtape you can read. This one is all about branding and business.

1. Cleaning up Kebap

Last week, I read that Noon Mediterranean filed for bankruptcy. I remembered reading about it’s ‘launch’ a few months earlier, which read:

Verts, the Austin-born Mediterranean fast-casual chain, changed its name to Noon Mediterranean.

Why? Co-owner and founder Michael Heyne said that people didn’t understand the original name, a reference to doner kebabs (which isn’t even available on the menu anymore).

I remember making a note to watch that space because the move was so bizarre. They grew by serving doner kebabs. They hit a speed bump in 2017 so they changed the unique name, nixed their signature dish, rebrand as a generic lunchtime restaurant named “noon” and serve all sorts of mediterranean salad-bar-type stuff. The good folks at Verts/Noon are an HBS case study in the making. Surely there are some operational things people can point to. But this was a live story about how a brand can measure the market.

Takeaway: Pay attention to cases that seem predictable, particularly if you feel strongly that the outcome is obvious. Take note of how things unfold.

The prevailing wisdom is that bland brands are inoffensive and ineffectual; like a beige couch, they’re a compromise everyone can agree on, but it will never fully delight anyone. The brand failure of Noon contains important information to test that wisdom.

Testing your assumptions is the only way to build true mastery, the truer your premises the more sound your understanding is.

2. We Want to Watch People Eating Pizza

Keep up with research and you get to learn from cases developed as research. Google researchers seem to have finally dismantled the “chewing on camera is a no-no” taboo (finding, among other things, that “Bite and smile is not the only way to show a pleasurable food experience.”) Here’s an excerpt:

Ben Jones, creative director at Unskippable Labs, explained that there are certain axioms among advertisers that are never really put to the test. For example: “You can’t show somebody chewing food and looking at the camera.”

If everyone sees this as an obvious “third rail,” then no one puts it in their ads, so there’s no testing to see if chewing and looking at the camera is really a problem. By creating a fake pizza brand, Jones said his team suddenly had “a very different kind of freedom to be wrong.”

While this type of insight-from-research delivers ‘cleaner’ conclusions, I take this kind of material with a grain of salt. This is research that Google conducts because it’s information that its advertising customers would find useful. But it also conveniently serves up new ideas for breaking with convention, possibly driving incremental spend from food advertisers. Real life cases involving real risk taken by real companies still provide purer insight IMHO.

3. Your Mother was Right

This story started as an irritant. Over the past couple of months I’ve met with a higher-than-usual proportion of people who want their brands ‘styled’ to fit what’s trendy in the market: “so and so is getting lots of customers by being [insert adjective here: subversive / bold / polished…] I want you to make my brand look like that.” It’s not an uncommon request, and on the surface, it’s not a bad approach: you want to do “x”, and someone else is succeeding at “x”…looking at what they’re doing and emulating seems totally natural.

Except that the experience of a company is mediated by its brand. This times ten if the entity up for branding is you (as an artist, for example).

The problem is that a brand is a personality — a human scale story and way of being for a company, it’s what ties everything together. Now let’s go back to high school for a second (I know, I know, bear with me.) There’s always someone who was socially successful who had emulators, copycats. People who would mimic their gait, style, etc. In the best cases they were moderately successful and gained some status.

That’s not to say that copycats have no place in business. They can be good business as long as they trail near the original. But it’s extremely rare for the copycat to outperform the original at being themselves or at being relevant. There is no real freedom for the brand to lead the way and chart its own path. Keep in mind that authenticity increasingly matters to customers.

By extension, design studios who serve up what’s asked without asking questions are forfeiting their responsibility. It strips the work of integrity and eliminates the opportunity to create value for the client. It doesn’t demand intellectual rigor, creativity, testing, development or any of the invisible pieces that imbue truly legendary design with its effortless value.

Brands only become touchstones if they are deliberately themselves. Some brands might be a poor market fit (I speak from my own nerdtastic high school experience) so they won’t make it in the market — it’s not sustainable but finding a genuine brand that’s a good market fit is also part of what we do.

In practical terms, copycat brands are terribly difficult to maintain for the same reason that lies complicate life. You have to keep track of things that are not rooted in logic, experience or strategy. No internal logic = keeping track of lots of layers that may bear no relation to one another.

Takeaway: it’s important to encourage clients to commit to building their own brand. It’s a much bigger ask than to simply copy a style because it requires clarity about who they are, what they stand for, what role they want to play in the market and how they plan to do it. The brand has to originate from within, its logo and identity should then be tailored to fit it.

4. Design Typecasting IRL

A very talented friend who designs brands took on a restaurant project that went a little viral. He naturally started getting contacted by other new restaurants. He made a second restaurant, also very successful design-wise, with an extensive brand application — the style ended up having some things in common with the first. Soon, he was flooded with messages from restauranteurs all over the world wanting to work with him, asking him to make them versions of what he’d already done.

Copycats come in wanting to look like other brands. But what about companies that want you to transform them into a clone of something else you made?

Now, this might be slightly irritating if he specialized in, say, editorial illustration. He may get sick of the style and change and people would riot as they do whenever a famous artist changes their style. Brand design entails a mix of business therapy, sensibility to strategy and intense research. It’s the design equivalent of method acting, so it requires style agnosticism.

Back to the story: this designer became known for something, and now everyone wanted a piece. At first it felt like success; he had a style and a calling card, he never had to spend time pounding the pavement chasing business.

But soon he grew bored and anxious. When tried to sell projects that required something different, he was swiftly rejected. He was stuck.

In the end, he manage to get ‘unstuck’. But to do it he had to go back to making passion projects (read: free self-generated work) to build a more diverse portfolio. After a decade in the industry, he had to go back to building from scratch. It worked.

It worked. He’s back to chasing projects and not just letting them trickle in.

Takeaway: working in brand design is tricky. Being style-agnostic means it’s harder to establish a reputation folks can trust without having a quickly recognizable style. For most of us, it means we have to accept that we won’t ever stop doing the chasing.

5. Brand-Building for People who Build Brands

I came across a monograph about Unimark, the legendary brand identity company co-founded by Massimo Vignelli. As you’d expect, it includes information about their most storied projects. But it also includes lots of juicy anecdotes retelling the many missteps that led them to close up shop after a few years — a sort of business post-mortem wrapped up in design lore.

Vignelli would often remind clients that the brand is the product. It’s not a bad maxim: the brand is the full breadth of the experience a customer has with an offering. To me, brand is the interface of the product: the design, the language, the customer service, the ads… even the user reviews.

The visual brand extends to every visible touchpoint: from the website to the ads to the napkins and receipts to the box you use to mail things. That’s why things like branded packing tape have a market.

But when your company develops brands (as ours does) it can be difficult to decide the precise point at which your brand ends and the brand you’re presenting begins. Do we use a template that looks like us, or do we present the full force of their brand in a document styled just for them?

At Unimark, Vignelli and his (all-male panel of) partners created legendary design systems; including the signage for the New York City Subway.

Early in the studio’s history, I wondered how companies like Unimark presented their work back in the day — eventually I decided they made custom materials for every account, surely they of all people went the ‘extra mile’.

My careful analysis showed that varying templates would eat up time and end up costing our clients. I lamented our inability to be purists who thought only of world-breaking design, line, momentum, whatever. I resented having to negotiate rates, develop process and then refine process and then laugh it off when creatives rolled their eyes at process and sneakily brought up my MBA as if that somehow tarnished my creative credentials.

But Unimark was a failed business.

A great brand can do a lot for your company, but it cannot fix a flawed business model. And poor process compromises the business model. Many, many, many creative businesses fail because they fail to acknowledge and design the business side of their business.

A more recent take comes from Eli Altman’s “Run Studio Run”, where he states quite plainly “your process is your business.”

On Sunday, it hit me: in businesses like mine, in which the customer experience is inextricably linked with process, our process is our brand. It may even be a more important part of our brand than our public channels. The clients and partners experience In-House Int’l not just through the designs they receive, but more broadly, through how we handle process.

And it goes both ways: the experience of your brand is a part of the process that makes up your business.

Takeaway: a design studio’s brand comes across to clients through our process. Process is part of the brand, so design process to align with brand and business goals. There’s nothing inherently virtuous about chaos. There’s nothing creative about being unprofitable (if anything, living up to the cliché of the starving artist is deeply unoriginal).

Special thanks to Lope Gutierrez-Ruiz for directing me to the Unimark book and whose systematic observation of the world (and prolific use of Google Keep) have always helped inspire my curiosity. To Dan Driscoll who for posting about Pizza research. To hear more (and juicier) stories about creativity, business and failure, please vote for our SXSW panel.