The X-Interviews | Master of Brand Magic

Interview #17 - Tim Girvin on Building Powerful Brands

Tim Girvin on Building Powerful Brands

Today on The X-Mentor it’s Tim Girvin, Founder | Chief Creative Officer at GIRVIN Strategic Branding & Design.

For over fifty years, Tim has led an integrated design practice focused on fostering international collaborations and global brand development, helping organizations enter markets in the US, Europe, and Asia. GIRVIN's collaborative "thinkshops" aim to boost business growth through balanced marketing and empowered design. Their branding philosophy, inspired by the concept of fire and passion, seeks to create compelling narratives that resonate from leadership to the target audience. GIRVIN uses interactive summits, brand interventions, and charrettes to invigorate teams in brand development, strategic planning, and storytelling. Their expertise includes storytelling, strategy, naming, identity, print systems, built environments, packaging, and integrated hybrid digital media.

The X-Mentor: Tim, welcome to The X-Mentor!

Tim: Thank you, Greg. Great to be here. Great to see you again! And I'm very proud of your Seattle-based SUB POP t-shirt you’re wearing today. That's very cool.

The X-Mentor: I wear it with pride!

[Laughs]

Tim, just thinking about how you got started in the design field and how that led to building brands.

What exactly did those early days look like leading up to when you first started GIRVIN Design?

Journey to Brand

Tim: Well, in the beginning I studied marine biology and comparative physiology and invertebrate zoology and marine biology in college. I like to draw. So, I would put together my lab journals or the scientific studies that we were doing in class, and I would design the page with an illustration. Then I would combine that with the notes from the class and the character between the notes and the illustration was this idea of trying to bring it into one form. What happened was they became increasingly elaborate and complex. More like journals with illustrative matter and textual content interwoven. So, I was creating increasingly elaborate layouts and arrangements. Dynamic juxtapositions of drawings of insects and other creatures that we were studying and then combining that with text. My professor said, “you should go into that.” Which was funny because I drove 3000 miles to study marine biology.

Then I got involved with another professor who's talking about medieval history, and I started looking at manuscripts from that period and began to realize that there was this incredible history of the book going back thousands of years, or at least a couple of thousand years. The idea of textual content being organized into a form that could be reviewed and studied at length by others. Obviously, the book became the Western tradition, a vehicle of the distribution of religious content as well as scientific work.

Again, it was this idea of juxtaposing illustration and text, and then even getting into the decoration of the text. So, then I thought, what's that all about? And I started studying the history of letter forms, that is called paleography, and I began studying the history of calligraphy, type design, fine printing, papermaking and book design. I started to combine that by asking, “what is that type? How do you draw that type and integrate that with the illustrations?

That's the beginning. And then I started traveling to learn more. I started writing to experts, then connecting with them and going and spending time with them around the country to learn more about this idea of calligraphy, or beautiful writing. And that of course flows into type design—and the idea of the illustration of ideas and language.

The X-Mentor: I’ve always admired your deep exploration into the essence of a brand. So, learning about your journey through scientific discoveries in biology and how that led you to typography makes perfect sense – to me at least.

It also doesn’t surprise me to learn that we both have a passion for the letter X, which has a fascinating history. And you’ve written about THE SYMBOLISM OF THE X. Your exploration of “X” illustrates how you uncover allegory and other elements that symbolically communicate a far deeper meaning than can be seen on the surface.

Could you share your approach to uncovering some of the more magical or mystical elements while ‘digging in the dirt’ and exploring a brand’s essence?

Brand Essence & The Mystic

Tim: Early in my career, I came in contact with this very mystical character on the college campus who told me that he was a Talisman maker. I did not really know what that meant. So, I talked to him at length. He is a Native American, and he had this idea that you could make an object with the characters, writings, symbols, feathers, threads, all kinds of things. Obviously, the global tradition of Talisman making, or amulets and protective devices is incredibly ancient. So, I began to explore this idea that there was this symbolic intention or textual content that could be made into some kind of protective objects. I used to make these things for friends who were traveling. I would make these symbolic drawings and combine them with text. I still do that.

Then I just began to walk further and further into that exploration of the deeper history and meaning of texts and alphabets and symbols and what lies beneath that.

I think the same thing can be said of biology. Really what you're doing is you're trying to understand biological systems, or layers of activity within an Organism. And that ends up creating this sense of research, of searching and digging deeper to try and learn more. So, this idea of magic for me is about transformation. It's really about how you take content and understanding from one level and then move it into a deeper level of awareness.

Design is from the Latin word signum, which is to sign, basically—but it links to signet, signal and signature—so there’s more to making a “sign.”

For example, if you look at this piece of paper here, I'm in this library right now and there's a piece of paper here next to me and really, it's kind of an undefined entity.

Tim Girvin illustrates how brands “transform” the perception of ordinary objects. (2-minutes)

So that is really what magic is about. If you study that idea, it's really about transformation. It's about taking one set of perceptions or one character of an object and moving it into a completely different level of understanding.

With brand work, it's the same thing. How do you take an understood or a recognized object or concept or technology or product or perfume or food or whatever it may be and change it from being seen as the core item that it is into something that is newly understood and newly recognized?

So just another etymology behind that is the very nature of the word brand. Brand is a 4000-year-old sound that comes from an ancient group of roots called the Proto Indo-European linguistic group and it means fire.

Fire and brand are connected to each other, and you could think about that as a passion of the people that make the brand. You can think about that as a transformative element.

So that is how I tend to think about these things.

The X-Mentor: In that blog post, THE SYMBOLISM OF THE X, you write about how “The truth is told” and that “if there is belief, conventional wisdom might be transformed.”

How does transforming a product, business, or brand into a symbolic entity create a sense of mystique or conventional wisdom around it?

Tim: There's another aspect of the “X” that's particularly interesting, and I'm sure many of our readers know, there's this song called Cross Road Blues, which was written originally by Robert Johnson, a Mississippi Blues guitarist and Blues musician and then later interpreted by the band Cream as Crossroads and it really refers to this this basic symbol, the “X” as a point of a crossroads, meaning that “as I come to the crossroads, I have to make a decision, I have to figure out where I'm going.”

Tim Girvin illustrates the “Magic of X” as the point where the BrandQuest® begins.

This center point of the axis of the crossroad. That is where the magic is. That's where the quest begins. That's where the question occurs. “Where do I go? What do I do?”

And if you think about it dimensionally, X becomes not only a flat object, but then it becomes a spherical index, with vertical indices of different dimensional ways of thinking about what that portal is.

So, it's an interesting character for you to choose as your X-Mentor allegory.

It’s magical.

The X-Mentor: Oh, the “X” is no mistake. My musical roots in the Delta Blues and the “X” crossroads goes all the way back to my days at Memphis College of Art, where I was working nights at Kiva Recording Studios. The main studio, Studio-A, was built to simulate a large circular underground kiva such as can be found in the Southwest United States. The owners of Kiva Recording Studios,  Gary Belz and Joe Walsh, had an affinity for Native American spiritualism. Thus, Kiva Studios was designed as an “X” crossroads between ancient and modern spirituality. I witnessed Stevie Ray Vaughan record his last album “In Step” there with Jim Gains producing, who also produced Santana, Journey, etc.

Rock, Blues, and Soul artists used to just stop by and hang out at Kiva, like the legendary Albert King and his “Flying V” guitar. I spent an evening watching the sun go down while sitting on a bench outside the studio with Mr. King, listening as he told me one story after the other. So, a lot of that crossroads “X” Mississippi Delta Blues mythology and ancient spiritualism came through that place and that magic has stayed with me ever since.

And that circle you’ve just drawn at the center of the “X” – that’s Kiva! Where the “magic” happens.

Tim: That is fantastic. What a great story. I had no idea about that.

The X-Mentor: Oh yeah, a long time ago, so many great stories!

Back to your X-Interview, Tim. So, let's talk a little bit more about one of your brand stories where you originally created a brand, and then later had the opportunity to mature the brand over time.

And I think you have a story for us, right?

Kettle Brand Chips

Tim: Yeah, I do have an interesting story on that. Through another designer friend of mine, I was introduced to this character, Cameron Healy, who was a Mystic unto himself, a Sikh practitioner, and he had this idea of creating a new form of potato chips – sliced potatoes that were cooked using a kettle methodology as opposed to the basic deep-frying approach that many of the chips are currently made. He was using this kettle cooking technology that he had created and then selling these chips out of the back of a truck. And so, he needed lettering for this new product. That was basically Kettle chips, the name of the original rendering. So, I drew this logo for him as a start to try to capture this idea of the craft, the handmade quality of it. I drew this with a broad edge pen in 1982. Healy began to set up a production facility in Salem OR and continue to grow and produce these chips, first in the Pacific Northwest, then the West Coast, then nationally, and then ultimately internationally until the brand was sold, I think in the latter part of the 2016 or something like that. It was sold for a billion dollars to Snyder's-Lance, another snack group down in Oregon.

So, I had actually started with Cameron Healy in the very beginning. I produced this initial design along with this other design person who had recommended me for this project. And then that was it. I basically was drawing that art and then it was being put on these paper bags and they were being sold out of the back of a truck.

And then ultimately Kettle became a major production facility down next to the Salem Correctional Center, the prison down there in Salem OR. Then it grew from there into this major production facility that's still there to this day. Then I came back in the 2014 timeframe when I had a friend of mine who had been introduced as the CMO of this enterprise called Diamond Foods that owns Kettle and they basically said, “I need you to come down and talk to me.” And I said, oh my God, I did that brand in 1982. So, then I continued to work with him on developing a brand system and a program for Kettle.

Discovering the “Soul of a Brand”

The X-Mentor: So, when you first started working on the Kettle brand back in 1982, did you have any kind of formalized branding process at that point?

Tim: No. The key for me combines two elements.

1. Listening – Curiosity: listening, talking and hearing a point of view from the person who is the founder of the brand, trying to understand what their vision is.

2. Illustrating the idea - Interpreting or representing as a cluster of graphics and color. An illustration and design strategy as an expression of the brand.

Listening is probably the most important. When I listen, I tend to move into somebody's mind space and understand them to the degree that there's an intuitive or instinctual aspect of what that interpretation could be. And I can envision in my mind where things could go and how they could be managed—how they could be expressed over a period of time. So, that listening or that questioning, that opening ‘quest’ is still part of the work that I do to this day.

I ask the questions to get the insights that will allow me to make that illustration, or to lustrate (i.e., to make something shine), that's really what that comes out to be—captivation, magnetism, unforgettability.

The X-Mentor: When we first met in 1996, you were codifying a strategic branding process called BrandQuest®. Today, I can only imagine that that process has matured even more. So, by the time that you came back around with Diamond Foods to reboot the Kettle brand, that QUEST process was likely applied, right?

Tim: Yes. Yeah, it's a fairly simple acronym:

• Question

• Understand

• Explore

• Strategize

• Tactics

It really comes down to this very logical system that many, many people engage in, in any level of scientific or creative activity. For me, it really comes down to the questions. To ask the questions you really must spend the time in advance to understand how you could articulate that idea, and understanding what their point of view is, and understanding what is relevant. What are the questions that actually relate to the person that's making the product? But also, the audience.

The X-Mentor: Can you describe your process for discovering the "soul of a brand” during a BrandQuest®, especially considering your work with various types of organizations, including film, television, and theatrical productions?

Tim: Well, I think that “soul” is another one of those ancient words. It's a Proto-Germanic linguistic root “seula,” which means sea, and implies a journey. If you think about the soul of something, it’s really about what is the journey. When I try to connect with modern businesses that are involved with high-level product output or smaller startup brands, I'm really trying to see into the leadership and their position as to what is the emotional core of the story and how does that relate to a journey? A business journey? A personal journey? Or the intertwinement of both?

So, if you think about yourself and your own background, your own experiences with music and the melodic character of how that relates to your life and the musical quality of your existence. That's kind of what I try to get to with the businesses that I listen to and try to interpret. What is that journey? What is the passion of the journey? What is the pain, the joy, the love? All those connections which become very psychic and emotional characteristics. And so, some of those again like the early allegory, the biology research, they're trying to get deeper and deeper and deeper into discovery.

For motion picture work, I try to connect with the director and the producer and the script writer and the actor, as many people as I can. I try to read the script, understand the story, so that I can understand and then to try to bring that out in a way that is the right sort of character and captivation of it.

A Quiet Place

So, for example with John Krasinski and A Quiet Place, I first went to Paramount Studios and was locked in a room to read the script and then I came out to talk to the executives at Paramount on the project. The script was top secret so I could not get out (with a script). And that's often the case. There's a lot of secrecy around motion picture production. And so, then I met with the team, and I started looking at production drawings and production art direction to try to understand what the nature of this “quiet place” was and the metaphor of the sand, the silence, the fear and all these different kinds of narrative characteristics. Then consider how do you encapsulate that in an object that is combined with imagery to convey that character?

So, a lot of that really becomes very soulful interpretation of the deeper intention of the film and the story and the team that's involved in producing it.

Then how does that get translated into value? Oftentimes, with a movie you've got this power shot in the beginning that you're really trying to get this story into play. But then that story can last for a period of time, so you have to develop a design strategy that has longevity and can survive.

The Matrix

The X-Mentor: I can remember when The Wachowski’s project came to GIRVIN. Our interactive design team had these three-ring binders that contained the end-to-end storyboards of a hero’s journey that would become the characters in The Matrix.

To this day, I can recall elements of that and see literally, almost in a comic book fashion, how that story was unfolding. And of course, the BrandQuest® around that was trying to understand that hero’s journey. And then trying to find ways to encapsulate it. I.e., visualizing The Matrix. Right?

Tim: Yeah, exactly. Well, in that instance, I went down and met with the Wachowski siblings, as they're now known. I spent probably a day with them at Joel Silver’s office on the Warner Brothers lot, going through the entire movie, looking at all the storyboards, all the production drawings, all the content to try to get to this point of view. They were incredibly passionate about the look of things. I mean, they developed technologies to shoot this film that were unique to that production. So, they had a very distinct point of view about what they wanted to see accomplished and what they wanted to represent.

It was a big assignment for GIRVIN, because we were not in the Hollywood milieu. As a brand design ronin in Hollywood, we get called in to work on these fairly unusual problems. And it was Joel Silver who called me up and said, can you come down here tomorrow and help us with this project? So that's what I did. I flew down the next morning. And then I spent most of the day with him and with the Wachowski siblings, and then started working. They were sending me dailies and sending images and things kind of showing me what was happening with the evolution of the film. And then they moved to Sydney, (Australia) and they said, “Hey, Tim, you should come to Sydney and see what we're doing down here, man. It's amazing.” So, I did not go to Sydney, Australia, much as I wanted to. But it was an evolution trying to get there—finalizing the theatrical branding, an innovation, for the film’s promotional look. And they were constantly sending new ideas like, “Well, we really like what Bjork’s doing with her music, and we like this graffiti, and we like this font, and we really want to figure out how do we get something that's more completely unique to the film in terms of the style.” So, it was quite a creative collaboration and a lot of fun to work on.

The X-Mentor: I can only imagine what it would have been like to go to Australia to hang out with the Wachowski siblings on the making of that film.

Tim: Yeah. That's where a lot of it was shot.

Crafting CX & UX Journeys

The X-Mentor: Can you explain how you incorporate the concept of customer journeys and touchpoints into developing the soul of a brand? How do you consider these interactions at different stages, from initial research to adoption and scaling, in creating a cohesive brand experience?

Tim: Absolutely. I began talking about this some number of years ago and thinking about it in terms of the retail related work that I did. In the beginning when I first started, I was really looking at the experience of a store. For example, as I’m walking on the street, I see the sign, I approach the area, I get closer to the store. I approach the doorway. I touched the doorway. I open the door. I come in and then what happens to me in all these sequences? How does that all work?

Because when I was working with Nordstrom on a lot of the early campaigns that I did as a focus on broadly integrated deployment, I would go and participate in the opening night of the campaigns, and it was very interesting to see how people reacted to things.

What I noticed was that people— sure they get the big spectacle, but they're also down to the smaller moments, tiny tiers of experience that they have.

You know, something, in the momentary, something very close at hand, a moment that is touchable; it’s intimate. So, we realized that we need to think about the big store experience, the entry, the shopping bags, the packaging. But we also need to be thinking about merchandising and all of these other ways in which customers come in and experience those detailed nuances. So that was extremely valuable for me.

And that is UX!

And as you work your way into the digital environment, it's the same. What are the ways in which I come in contact with this digital world —How am I led in? What is the navigation— the journey of the customer? What is the journey that I’m taking? What decisions must the UX journeyer make to get someplace?

That is an important aspect of it.

HyperBranding™

The X-Mentor: Of course, you’ll recall that we created HyperBranding™ at GIRVIN.

That was the world’s first Interactive Branding Trademark, a pioneering accomplishment.

Tim: Yeah, I sure do.

The X-Mentor: HyperBranding™ was all about emphasizing the design of behavioral aspects of user experiences, transitioning from “broadcast” branding for the masses to personalized, one-to-one brand interactions inside of a web browser over the Internet.

Tim: Yes!

The X-Mentor: So, it's not surprising to hear you discuss moving through a “digital environment” and identifying key touchpoints, or "Moments of Truth" as it’s more commonly known in today’s interactive design. Today, we can even perform statistical analysis on these Moments of Truth (aka MoTs).

Tim: Yes.

The X-Mentor: Absolutely, it’s now possible to pin-point the exact MoT and related CX Drivers that determine business impact (e.g., Revenue, Costs, Retention, Profitability, Risks, etc.) And this way of thinking and seeing a problem all started when we were launching HyperBranding™ back in the 1990s. Of course, “Digital” as it’s now called, has matured significantly as a practice over the last decade or so. Still, the thinking started when we were working together on HyperBranding™.

We now understand that entering a store, whether physical or digital, requires attention to the overall tone set by the brand. It's crucial to identify and prioritize each touchpoint, as they do not all carry the same weight in influencing the customer experience and resulting customer behaviors.

Today, it’s increasingly important to track these leading “Experiential Metrics” because Emotions are the #1 Driver of Business Outcomes. In fact, all economic behavior depends on What Happens in the Heads of Customers. Simply put, Experiences prepares customers for action. E.g., Buy now. Cancel my subscription. Switch service providers. Invest in this business. Try this new product.

Tim: Yes, that's fantastic! It's interesting because this translation of idea really ranges into conventional shelf comprehension and what we call Moments of Epiphany, where there is a person that knew a product, or understands now that product changed and it's better, or a product is brand new. And then how do you make that happen? So, it's interesting to have that kind of conversation.

I was talking with a client that I've been working with on a package, an external package, and a new product development. And I said, we really need to be thinking about if we could make a store for this, what elements are we going to be using from the packaging to create our store? How do we do that? We should be thinking about this as a multi-dimensional environmental expression which is a digital expression. Same thing looking at how does that translate to the website and to other digital movement or promotions? How do you integrate that language?

Thoughtfully.

The X-Mentor: Through my work with various enterprises, I've discovered that many businesses believe superior technology drives sales, especially in high tech. However, we've learned that customers decide to buy (technology, and everything else) emotionally, and then later justify their purchases logically. While technology has utilitarian (i.e., functional) value, it's the products that are designed with intent to create a delightful experience that attract and retain customers. These buyers are motivated by “Experiential Value” which not only drives higher revenue but also yields more profitability and CLV (Customer Lifetime Value). So, all this to say that we now know, in no uncertain terms, that Customers Buy Emotionally.

Tim: Yes.

The X-Mentor: So, profit margins are significantly higher for brands that create an emotional connection and convey true value. The same can be said for the performance of such brands in the stock market, they out-perform the CX laggards.

Tim: Yes. Emotion! Well, and I think the other aspect that you're touching on is memorability.

When I talk to people about branding experience. When I get into customer interceptions or focus group sessions or meetings. It's interesting to ask people about what brands they really remember and what experiences they really remember. And going to a website or using their phone to make decisions.

What is the glue there, the adhesion to memorability, the unforgettable string of events that will continue to bring someone into a positive space in their recollection or cognizance of a brand experience?

The X-Mentor: Yeah, Maya Angelou. To paraphrase, people will forget everything else. What you said, what you did, but they'll never forget how you made them feel. Right?

Tim: Yeah, exactly. Yes. Fantastic. That's a great quote.

Bad Ass Coffee of Hawaii

The X-Mentor: One last story here. Maybe you can help us understand how a brand actually lends itself to having business impact. You've done so much work over the course of your career, there's probably immeasurable amounts of brand value and business impact that you've created.

Can you share a story from your recent work to illustrate how a brand can create measurable business impact?

Tim: Yes, absolutely. Well, I have done a lot of work for Procter & Gamble and I had a partner that I worked with, particularly on brand innovation and brand creation, we were working with the CEO, A. G. Lafley on creating new brands. And he and I maintained contact and he said, “hey, I've got a friend who's got a coffee company that he is now the CEO, and he needs help trying to boost the revenue in terms of a franchise model. So basically, a franchise model is, “I see a brand that I like, and I'd like to be participating in, I'd like to be involved in some way, I have to make an investment, could be $100,000, could be half a million dollars, could be a million dollars or more. I need to be attracted to that franchise to make a decision like that.” And he said that their new franchisees were not only diminishing, but the ones that were still there were abusing the core principle of the brand.

And so, he said, “can you come down and talk to me?” So, I went down to Salt Lake City and spent some time with him and his team. I saw the brand, which was kind of based on a sort of a touristic interpretation of Hawaiiana. It was the coffee company Royal Aloha, and the brand is Bad Ass Coffee of Hawaii. Bad Ass means they're referring to the asses, the donkeys, that brought the beans down from the Highlands of Maui and that you could hear the bells around their necks ringing as they brought the coffee down the mountain. And it was kind of this positive association with that. Then being a Bad Ass, of course, has got lots of positive connotation in terms of courage, resilience and driving character.

He showed me where they were. And the challenge that they had is that there was a very dated interpretation of Hawaii. Very retro and kind of funky. Maybe a little more hippie in terms of its orientation, like something you see on the side of a Volkswagen bus. So, he said, you know that the number of sales that they're making in terms of the product as well as their franchising was dropping, and it was undisciplined franchising. He needed to bring everything back into a stronger snap line towards the business strategy.

So, I worked with him to complete the opening BrandQuest® and exploration. Then I met with the team, and we started looking at store design. We started looking at packaging and identity and then we came up with a much cleaner but still illustrative personality and a much more disciplined system of design, what we call BrandCode®, where you have a very specific grouping of colors, complementary palettes, materials, brand patterning, store layout and arrangement, merchandising programs, back of bar menus, depiction of products, storytelling, and then art. So, we chose a completely different, more modernist approach to the installed art that we supplied to all the stores. We developed a new discipline about how the stores would be designed, the patterning that we used in the packaging was also on the walls.

So, it was all about this integration and going back to what we just discussed about the notion of memorability.

That's the key is that when a person comes in contact with a brand and there's one aspect of the brand that they've experienced, then they go to the place [retail store] and suddenly they see that what they had in that little shipped product is actually integrated into the environment.

It shows more care and more attention to the holistic experience of what's involved.

What has happened is we started out with a number of franchises that probably were somewhere under 10, and now it's well over 30 different locations. They've been able to attract new franchisees, new funding, and new marketing strategies. Everything is much more thematically aligned. So, the music that we play in the background is not old Hawaiiana. It's more modern slack key character with some classical Hawaiian singing. The interior design is much cleaner. The back bar, the presentation of product, the packaging, the environments are all much more carefully thought through.

Business Impact:

It really led to a dramatic uptick in terms of the number of sales, the number of people that wanted to buy into the brand and to create their own franchise location.

But it's been dramatic in terms of the change from where they were to the new attraction of new franchisees has been enormous.

And if you talked to the CEO, he'll say it's all about this program that we put together, all about improving the look of the brand, the packaging, the attitude, the personality, the experience design and everything.

The X-Mentor: The truth of the Bad Ass brand has been told; the conventional wisdom has been transformed.

Tim, this has been fantastic! Thank you so much for sharing your stories, insights and brand-building wisdom with us today on The X-Mentor!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)

Tim Girvin is Founder | Chief Creative Officer at GIRVIN Strategic Branding & Design. He also serves as Advisory Consulting Board Member at The Film School / Seattle, and Board Member at Pattern Computer.

Greg Parrott is The X-Mentor and publisher of The X-Interviews.