Steve Jobs was a college drop-out. He didn’t use a college grant. He didn’t need a tax break. He leveraged an environment that rewarded innovation. That environment is alive and well today.

If you look beyond the dour headlines; if you can see past the cornacopia of commercially viable crap filling our shopping carts, you’ll see ingenuity in action. You’ll see people creating at the highest-levels. Not just in America, but all over the world.

The best thing to happen to America is the economy taking a shit and scaring us all into inventiveness. Maslow’s pyramid is hitting each one of us square in the jaw and forcing dormant forces to come alive.

This is the Results-Economy. If you’re out there slinging the same tired solutions the other guy is, you’re done. But if you tap into imagination, you will discover that the there is absolutely nothing wrong with the economy.

Never in the history of the planet have more customers been walking the earth, all of whom share a desire to express themselves, stay warm, go faster, jump higher, eat better, communicate easier and/or satisfy whatever need–be it emotional or rational–as fast as possible.

Steve Jobs was a genius and a maverick. But like most mavericks his genius had nothing to do with his products. It had to do with his ideology. He was never afraid to exercise his fuckyouability, be it taking on IBM/Microsoft, his hand-picked CEO from PepsiCo or the mobile phone industry, he was never afraid to challenge convention at any cost.

We can all marvel at his creations. Most CEO’s would be lucky to have one game-changer, he authored at least four. But what I marvel at, as I watch the country struggling to escape the funk of the group-think fueled by the 24-hour news cycle, is that Steve Jobs never seemed to give market conditions a second thought. He wasn’t some Polyanna, glass half-full celebrity CEO, he simply understood the basic human desire to create, play and learn, and he built businesses around such desires because he knew he had an inexhaustable supply of customers. From a a fish named Nemo to a operating system that fostered creativity to a phone that doubled as a personal media center, the guy just understood our root need to think untethered.

I don’t agree that there will never be another Steve Jobs. I think there are thousands more like him walking amongst us (and more than likely they just so happen to be Apple customers).

I truly wish Steve Jobs didn’t have to go so soon. But I’m glad I was on the ride while he was here.

Invent or die, America. Onward

Connor will act as the primary brand ambassador for the brand and will handle personal appearances, autograph signings, exclusive videos and camp appearances for the Flow Society Tour of events throughout the lacrosse season. Additionally, the company will develop and market an exclusive collaboration line of signature apparel and gear that will be co-branded with Flow Society and the celebrity himself.

Connor Martin explained the partnership by saying, “From my head to my toes I can’t feel my legs! That is how excited I am to be a part of Flow Society. They are a brand that aligns very well with what I do as an athlete and with my Con Bro Chill nonsense. The way they love our game, have fun and deliver loud, bright colored gear makes my head spin with all of the possibilities and fun we are going to have. At the end of the day, they want to support me being me, and I’m ecstatic about that. This is going to be Boom Town.”

Having Connor join our Flow Society team adds to our authentic position in the lacrosse segment and provides us a presence in the fashion, music and video arenas. Connor will play a major role in keeping us in touch with the target consumer as well as communicating our brand personality to this audience. We are honored to bring Connor into our brand family”, stated Bob Stec, CEO of Passport Brands, the parent company for Flow Society.

The partnership kicked off at the Big City Classic at the Meadowlands on April 3 and will continue throughout the lacrosse season. The product line is in development and is expected to launch in key retailers for Spring 2012.

Flow Society brand is a division of Passport Brands, Inc. Passport Brands is a design, merchandising and marketing company that specializes in upper end niche branded apparel and accessories. The company operates a disciplined and focused marketing and sourcing platform for a diverse and growing portfolio of brands. Currently, the company operates the Marithe+Francois Girbaud jeans line for young men, Flow Society brand of authentic lacrosse gear and Brandina.

Starbucks co-founder talks about early days.

If there’s one thing I love about being a nonboxer, it’s our fundamental understanding that accelerating business outcomes is about connecting our client’s with a rolodex of individuals who just know how to get it done. Had a great lunch today with one such person. So inspired by his story. Totally humble with no reason to be. Love guys like this. Give it a read.

“With the addition of Jeff to NONBOX we will now be able to provide this marketing service to our clients,” said NONBOX partner, Steve Karakas. Guettler added, “Experiential marketing is the difference between telling people about features of a product or service and letting them experience the benefits for themselves. It’s very effective.”

Guettler has served as business development and marketing manager for a Global 50corporation, facilitating high-profile corporate investment, financing, growth and go tomarket strategies for branded consumer goods clients. Over the past 15 years, his work has included strategic behind-the-scenes negotiations with such notable companies asProcter & Gamble, Pepsico, NIKE, Columbia Sportswear and others.

About NONBOX. NONBOX is a marketing and communications firm founded in1999 in Portland. It provides a full spectrum of communications services including brand development, strategy development, interactive, creative development,media buying, video and motion graphics. The firm focuses on companies in the consumer footwear and apparel, technology and sports marketing fields.

The best part; “Being part of a talented creative team and solving a complex communications problem. Chris Roth, webmaster at Cascade Mircotech, was an amazing technical partner and we worked great together” said Andrew Schlabach, our designer and programmer.

Want to know what your company has in common with cultural powerhouses with iconic products  like Nike, Apple, Virgin Atlantic, Legos and Porsche?

As it turns out, not much.

That was our key takeaway from the latest book trumpeting design and deep customer analysis as the way to the promise land of sustained revenue and consistently unleashing products that people crave.

Former Business Week Seattle bureau chief Jay Greene uses Design is How it Works, as a platform for showing the uninspired that creating a product or a company that taps into the Id of people is as simple as embracing failure and financial losses, changing organizational processes to bring Design Thinking into every discipline in a company from the C-suite through R&D and on down through the ranks, and doing deep ethnographic and psychographic research on probable users of your product before embarking on your next build.

Sound a bit daunting?

It is. Which is why IDEO’s Tim Brown notes in the book, that when people tell him of their aspirations to be like Nike or Apple, he counters “You don’t have the nerve.” That is the greatest part of Greene’s book for me — that the corporate moguls and design luminaries he  interviews call a spade a spade. You can’t be Nike. You aren’t Steve Jobs or Jonathan Ive. You haven’t got the discipline, the reputation or, frankly, the cojones.

The headline for this post is inspired by every client or boss who has uttered such phrases and those like “We want to be known as the iPod of the (insert industry segment here).” Or…”Our products are best-of-breed innovations and we need to create the same experience and culture Nike does to drive demand and loyalty to their products”

Never mind that the industry segment might be sewage treatment technology or the product is road salt. We live in times where many executives are reluctant to accept that they can’t all be Richard Branson’s, no matter how bad they want to be.

How many of you design professionals can relate to John Barratt, president and CEO of Teague in Seattle:

“I can’t tell you how many product briefs we get saying we want a product that’s as good or better than the iPhone,” he says. “That’s a five-alarm brief for me..those folks just don’t get it. An iPhone is not a product. It’s a manifestation of a culture.”

It’s that kind of no-bullshit take on the power of design to transform a company and an economy that makes Greene’s book so refreshing and such a swift read.

For those of you who still think you’ve got what it takes to check your egos at the door, throw caution to the wind in the face of financial pressure, and actually find out what you customers want instead of what you can give them, here’s something you should know. Good design isn’t what you think it is.

• It’s not an emotive image with pithy text and a dope beat from a band named Mooseknuckle.
• It’s not a box made of hemp fiber in the shape of condor’s nest that was — be honest – an afterthought to hold your clever “Must-have” product.
• It’s not even the promise of a new piece of software that says it will solve world hunger with a user interface you’re sure is so easy even a chimp can use it.

It’s how a product works in the hands of your customers. It may be easy to use or pleasing to look at, but if it doesn’t solve a pain it’s a waste of time and money. “If there’s no pet peeve, there’s no product,” says Alex Lee, president of OXO. Thus, the title of the book absconds with the Steve Jobs quote: “It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”

Whether that’s the tried-and-true of form following function, an evolution of tired phrases like “out of the box thinking”or new fangled concepts like Design Thinking permeating all disciplines to foster organizational creativity — the bottom line is you need to know your customers better than they know themselves. The only way to do that is to get your hands dirty and actually engage with them where they will put your product to use. The book gives some great examples of how and where to do that in the profiles on OXO, REI, Nike and Lego.

So, for me the book is a call to get your head out of the freaking clouds or at least out of your own building.  It’s time to stop aspiring and start perspiring. There’s plenty of work to be done learning about what your customers need to cure their pet peeves. Build those products and they will come.

We looked at a sports marketing case study and then the students applied what they learned towards developing brand positions for Shaun White, Under Armour, the UFC and the Oakland Raiders.  They then had to use this brand positions and identify logical sponsors for the properties.  It was amazing how quickly they were able to grasp the concept and develop some very solid brand positions.

The Warsaw Sports Marketing program is preparing these students for big opportunities in sports marketing and management.  Many of the graduates find jobs at places like Nike, adidas, major sports leagues and franchises.  There is good chance these students will somehow be connected to marketing at a Super Bowl in the future.

–Steve Karakas

The pillars of Bro-cial Media are simple:

• Don’t just know your audience. Be your audience.
• Feed your audience with content that makes them hungry for more.
• Deliver content in a medium your audience likes to consume.

Where, oh where, might you ask did this insight come from? New nonbox client, Connor Martin a.k.a ConBroChill and/or Flowseidon.

This pro lacrosse star, born and raised in the Northwest, is more than a flowing mane with a penchant for the bombastic and a persona that’s part MTV’s Puck Rainey and part Jason Mewes of Jay and Silent Bob fame. This wholesome kid next door is a bonafide digital media sensation.
With YouTube creations constructed using his dad’s video camera, ConBroChill brings as many as 500,000 like-minded sports enthusiasts to him with every  three- to five-minute dispatch. This popularity has created a product-pitching hotbed for CBro and his sponsors, as well as opened the door to him as an arena anthem creator and a current spate of possible television projects that nonbox is working on to cement Connor’s place in popular culture.
But let’s make something clear, we’re learning from Connor as much as he’s learning from us, and we’re not afraid to say it. We don’t profess to know all the answers. What Connor has accomplished on his own is amazing, authentic and something we can all learn from as we try to harness the tools available to marketers in the ever-changing media landscape.

So what’s the moral of  this local-Bro-makes-good story?

It’s time to quit looking for ways to make a Facebook profile relevant for your company or clients. It’s time to quit pushing Twitter messages out that trumpet how cool you are. Retire big idea thinking for a moment and go Bro-cial.
Here are five tips for integrating Bro-cial Media into your marketing mix as a company or for your clients:

1. Develop a persona for your brand. You may not be ConBroChill, but you are somebody. If you don’t know who you are — Ask your coveted audience.
2. Live where your prospects, fans, and competitors live. Is it YouTube? Is it LinkedIn? Is it in technology or industry forums or trade pubs? Don’t waste time building communities from scratch. Find out where your Bros are already hanging out.
3. Don’t be a witness. Be an activist! Participate. Engage with your bros and give them reasons to want to hang with you.
4. Be fresh – in attitude and in your content. Have an edge that reflects your persona  in everything you deliver and bring things to your bros that elicit action. Don’t just create for the sake of freshness.
5. Encourage frequent  interaction with your bros to stay current. Don’t pontificate in a vacuum. Unvalidated clever ideas from you or your marketing cohorts may make you laugh or feel empowered, but if they miss the mark you could end up with something like this flop:

Motrin Moms Mishap from Johnson & Johnson.

Turn your own Flowseidon loose. Let the audience have some say in your brand story. And make some friggin’ noise. Otherwise, no one really gives a shit about what your slinging*

*(unless you’re Steve Jobs. To be like him, you simply need to ignore focus groups, eliminate do nothing committees, develop customer empathy, invest in beautiful marketing, develop a meaningful ad budget and execute flawless product launches).

After years of ridicule for the slip up, comedy central’s sarcastic comedian, Daniel Tosh, who hosts his own show Tosh.0, contacted Natalie and asked her if she would like to do a web redemption of the 2003 incident. She reluctantly accepted and on February 1st 2011, the episode aired. Natalie showed the world not only did she remember the words to the National Anthem, with no help from Tosh, she absolutely nailed the performance and will now continue on her road to stardom. Here is my best friend, Natalie Gilbert’s web redemption:

A screenshot of the advertisement website. Click to view it for yourself.

While I’ll admit to being new to the industry, I’d like to think I know good marketing when I see it.  Lately advertisements have been especially effective at drawing me in because they are starting to branch out from the norm.  They seem to be tailored to me and what makes me laugh/cry/intrigued/want to take action, etc.

Your Mom Hates This.com is an online advertisement for Dead Space 2, a sequel to the popular video game from EA.  The image to the left and the website title basically say it all: “your mom hates this”, and therefore, you should love it.  What makes this campaign so great, in my eyes, is that they found out exactly who their target was and went straight for the jugular.

This game isn’t for moms.  It is for 18 – 20-somethings who love this stuff, and in turn, love watching their moms hate it.  Being part of that target audience, and admittedly enjoying watching my mom cringe once and a while, I will say that this campaign did exactly what it was supposed to: make me more interested in this game!

I laughed, marveled at how cool the game looked, and then laughed some more knowing just how awful these mothers thought it was.

So bravo EA, as off-putting as this campaign may be to some, I feel that it’s a direct hit to the hearts of potential consumers!

Check out the link above and tell me what you think of their site in the comments.