What’s your company’s stylescape?
A quick trip to young you
You were young and you were told having something put down into written word is better than keeping it in your mind. Like a strategy or a 6-month plan for something. You said “bah, these old schools, what do they know? I’m young and I know what I have to do. I have it in my mind.”
Years went by and you learned that they were right. If your ego was big enough (which statistically is, if you’re a CEO), it took you through some sharp rememberable failing situations until you learned it. And eventually you became the old-school to someone else, as you’ve learned it.
You’ve put it down. And a lot of days went by and then you started putting plans down for the company. A 2 year plan. A sales and marketing strategy. A communications plan. Etc etc etc.
Here’s one that you might have forgotten along the files and folders full of writing. The plan for another human sense. For most of the cases it would be a visual plan, for very rare cases it’d be audio or even olfactory.
Your company is an entity. You can easily imagine Apple as a big tall megastructure that’s white and shiny (just like their products) and such and such. Take another huge corporation and you can imagine the way they look.
It’s easier to imagine it for huge corporations. What about your company?
How does it look, feel and sound? The more we go into voice assistants, the more “how does it sound” will become more important. Give it 10-20 years and just like every company has a logo, all of them will also have a voice.
But until then…
What’s the visual moodboard of your company?
Here’s two that we’ve made for some of our collaborations:
Indeed, what I’ve shown is only a tiny aspect of it. They’re both regarding the visual direction of the software we were building for them. But we’ve done a lot of stylescapes in regards to the branding of a company, their visual identity or even for a logo.
It’s a moodboard that’s not so random. A moodboard is a soup of pictures that you like. A stylescape is a soup of pictures that dictate an atmosphere and the way the identity is formed.
Why would I care as a CEO?
If you’re at least a bit sensitive, it helps you imagine. It’s a catalyst for decisions. Not every decision: clearly not helping you when a mass lay-off decision is taken.
But it does help you in every micro-decision taken around how the company presents itself. The way it speaks, the way its public announcements are made or the way you want consumers to look at it.
It could even influence the way the office is being arranged — something that can facilitate the topmost decisions around you. If you don’t agree with that, let me know why you’re meeting the key people in your company in a meeting room and not in the lobby — a decision can be taken there as well, right?
If anything like this doesn’t exist, please get your designers working on this one until you feel it. If you don’t like taking “feeling” decisions, have someone else do it. But please have them. Whenever in doubt, have a look at them. Their scope is wider than what I’ve displayed above.
In a sense, your outfit is a
About Ch Daniel
I run chagency, an experiences design agency that specialises on helping tech CEOs reduce user churn. We believe experiences are not only the reason why users choose not to leave but also what generates word of mouth. We’re building a credo around this belief.
If I’ve brought you any kind of value, follow me and get in touch here: LinkedIn | Twitter | Email
I’ve also created an infinitely-valuable app for sneaker/fashion enthusiasts called Legit Check that impacted hundreds of thousands over millions of times – check it out at chdaniel.com/app
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The idea of stylescapes has been inspired from a very important company called TheFutur.
