BIG QUESTIONS
Has your company taken any fun risks lately?
Companies often sink into a rut where they’re just twisting knobs and moving levers. Everything is incremental, progress is slow, and everyone is nervous. Then someone comes along with a new idea that’s so audacious, so transformative that it explodes the entire paradigm. That new innovator shows up to market with the “red lemon” of their industry and we ask ourselves, “How did they think of that?” We’ll tell ya: 1) They started with big beautiful ambitions and 2) they were unafraid. To go from small tweaks to big leaps, design research suggests reframing the problem such that you’ve abstracted it to a higher level (bigger ambition). This is called abstraction laddering, and it’s so simple a 5-year-old can (and often does) do it. Ask why, then ask how. Over and over. “Why” zooms you out, while “how” zooms you in. Use those two questions to move up and down the abstraction ladder until you find your moonshot. Then muster up some guts to take it (a subject for another newsletter).
TOOL JOY
The Twos app: When your brain is bursting with… things!
The Twos app is a fast, simple place to write down anything and in any order. Notes. Ideas. Tasks. Your Pop-Pop’s heart replacement surgery, Mom’s birthday (you should have this memorized)… your entire brain can be dumped right into Twos using a stream-of-consciousness style. The app automatically organizes your notes and turns them into an entirely different species of thing: actionable tasks in a to-do list. Now what are you going to do with all the energy that used to go into worrying about things?
DESIGN WE ❤️
Unusual wins
The creative industry finds itself at an historic crossroads — the safe path of well-understood methodologies, and a focus on increased optimizations of tried-and-true best practices. This is the straight, well-paved path of least resistance. But there’s another path — it veers sharply off the road and disappears into a dark forest of uncertainty. It’s full of risk, but also of potential reward. To choose this path requires a sense of adventure and a creative spirit.
Raw Materials, a new agency based out of Austin, TX, is on this path. John Roescher, CEO, says “We’re at the end of a long era of extraction and people can feel it — even if they don’t yet have the language for it.” Raw Materials’ battle cry is centered on the idea that while most companies are busy focusing on squeezing the last ounce of juice out of existing models, why not use our human birthright — creativity — to seek out and develop entirely new models that solve new problems to move the needle forward? We couldn’t agree more — Robert Frost said it best in his poem “The Road Not Taken”:
“I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.”
BEEP BOOP
Your little slice of heaven: A church pastor in Mexico is selling property in heaven. Notable is just how many different forms of payments they accept (Visa, Mastercard, Maestro, RuPay, Google Pay, Apple Pay). Someone’s read the checkout best practices we created for Stripe.
People watching: Take a journey through the inner space of YouTube as you watch clips of videos uploaded last week. The common thread between them? They are all unnamed, unedited, and unseen by anyone but you. Go.
The inevitability of ads: Newsletter platform Beehiiv is brokering connections between advertisers and newsletter creators. Substack is reluctant to follow. But, let’s face it, it’s a-gonna happen.
Pod love: Among Gen Z’ers, 56% prefer Spotify to YouTube (21%) and Apple (10%) for their podcast-listening pleasure. Gen Z is wild about Night Vale, a podcast about a fictional town where every conspiracy theory is true. Strange times.
Community Chest: The original Monopoly game actually had two sets of rules to choose from. Version 1: Everyone works together (players build up the economy and share gains), and the game ends when the person with the least money doubles their original wealth. Version 2: The ruthless capitalist rules we know today prevail, where one person’s success is everyone else’s financial ruin (and yes, we are living in Version 2).
Move over Google, Poogle is on the scene.
WORD TO THE WISE
“Love your experiments (as you would an ugly child).”
Bruce Mau, legendary design thinker
WHAT CLIENTS WANT
Branding is fuel
- It takes people 10 seconds to form a first impression of your logo.
- A signature color increases brand recognition by 80%.
- 37% of consumers become loyal to a brand after five purchases.
- 35% of companies report that increased consistency added 10% to 20% to their revenues.
- 68% of US adults choose brands that reflect their personal values.
- +46% in brand favorability when music is used.
- 46% of consumers pay more for brands they trust.
Source: DesignRush
ICEBREAKER
What’s a big risk that you’ve seen a company take recently?
Melissa: Not that it is a good risk… but Target walking away from DEI was a huge risk – that has backfired. This reel captures it perfectly for me.
Kim: Costco took the opposite approach, leaning into its DEI program and refusing a proposal to change its pro-diversity practices. It’s a risk that’s reportedly paying off – and making me extra-happy to be a member!
Laura: Two “big law” firms — Jenner & Block and WilmerHale — asked a judge to block executive orders that punish them because of their clients and the lawyers that serve them. Huge risk… and gosh what courage. ?
Sarah: In more retail news, Walmart recently ditched Affirm, making Klarna its exclusive Buy Now, Pay Later partner. This is a pretty bold shake up, especially with Klarna about to go public.
John: I’m phoning it in with a GPT-generated critique of Jaguar’s recent melodramatic brand overhaul, in the voice of one of my favorite iconoclastic writers, Edward Abbey: “So Jaguar’s gone and polished its claws till they gleam like a yuppie’s espresso machine. In their quest for sterile “modernity,” they’ve sandblasted the soul right off the beast — trading growl for whisper, presence for pretense. It’s the marketing boys doing donuts in the desert of meaning again, mistaking slick minimalism for depth. The wild cat has been caged in a museum of brand strategy, and brother, that ain’t no place for a predator.”
SPECIAL FEATURE
AI proofreading prompt
Pinwheel has an awesome human proofreader named Irene, but if you’re in a pinch and need something proofed instantly, try this AI prompt:
Note any typos in this doc. Deliver suggested edits in a 4 column table.
- Original text
- Suggested edit
- Reason for edit
- Emoji indicating the severity and importance of the edit
FALLACIES, PARADOXES & THEORIES…OH MY
“The framing effect” is why “80% fat-free” sells better than “20% fat”
Coined by renowned psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky in the 1970s, the framing effect is a cognitive bias whereby people react differently to the same information depending on how it’s presented, whether positively or negatively, even if the underlying information is identical (one could reasonably just call that “marketing”). Consider: “4 out of 5 dentists recommend” versus “1 out of 5 dentists do not recommend.” Same data, but most would choose the first product. Fear is a different, and more powerful motivator than optimism. Yet it’s one that marketers often avoid because they don’t want their brands to be seen as “negative.”
