We ask "What's the Point of Having a Brand?" to our guests Andreas Markdalen, Global Chief Creative Officer, and Todd Taylor, Marketing Director, frog.

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Design Mind frogcast Ep. 13 – Phone a frog

Successful businesses believe in their brands. But why? What’s the point of having a brand at all?
For the launch of our new ‘Phone a frog’ segment, we thought who better to talk to about what makes a brand valuable than two frogs who think an awful lot about this matter: Andreas Markdalen, frog’s new Global Chief Creative Officer and Todd Taylor, Marketing Director. Listen in to hear about the changing mandate of the marketing function, the relationship between brand and experience, and why designers and marketers need to work well together.
Listen to the podcast episode and find transcripts below. You can also find us on <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/design-mind-frogcast/id1541644073" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/5mxbuRY6KtBwIrNhWhu0sx" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Spotify</a> and anywhere you listen to podcasts.

Elizabeth Wood

Andreas Markdalen

Todd Taylor

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Elizabeth-Wood_Headshot-s2

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Andreas-Markdaleni

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Behind the Design: Designing the Brand Strategy for frog’s ‘Make Your Mark’

frog design and business leads talk frog’s brand relaunch, lessons learned in building a brand for the modern age, getting to the soul of an organization, telling truer stories—and what it means to ‘Make Your Mark.’
On this episode of the Design Mind frogcast, we’re talking about what it takes to design a brand for the modern age. Of course, when we talk about brand, we&#8217;re talking way bigger than any single logo or fancy color palette. We’re talking about designing a holistic, unifying brand strategy to be both an engine of change for an organization, as well as an expression of this change to the world-at-large. 
But first, let’s back up. There’s a reason why we’re talking brand strategy here today. At frog, we’re excited to be announcing the future of the frog brand. Marketing Director Todd Taylor, Executive Design Director Andreas Markdalen and frog President Andy Zimmerman sat down to tell the story of how they knew frog was ready for a new, powerful brand vision that can speak to where frog is now and where we’re going next.  
Listen to the episode and read the transcripts below to hear from three business and design leads at frog, each involved with leading the charge behind frog’s brand refresh and a new call to action for the organization as well as our partners that we like to call: ‘<a href="https://www.frog.co/make-your-mark" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Make Your Mark</a>’.

Author

When Mario was just a few days old, he was diagnosed with a perinatal stroke. Mario is now 5 years old and has greatly improved mobility with the help of mirror neuron rehabilitation.

BY STEFANIA MARCOLI, MATTIA PARIETTI & TODD TAYLOR — FROG

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Learning To Fight The Stroke

After his stroke, Mario’s parents founded FightTheStroke.org to connect families affected by infant and childhood strokes. The social movement advocates for technology and open medicine as enablers of a better future for young stroke survivors.
FightTheStroke.org is currently developing Mirrorable, a telemedicine solution that connects children over a video link to engage in playful rehabilitation exercises together. The approach relies on stimulating the ‘mirror neurons’ that fire while observing and imitating an action performed by someone else. In mid-2016 a small team of frogs joined the project to shape the best possible user experience for the affected children and their families. In July the team structured a lean approach, prototyping the minimum elements required to act out the experience, testing them and then rapidly iterating on the experience. The following video documents Mario, his parents and the frog team as they test a low fidelity prototype of the Mirrorable experience.
Since the user test, frog has supported the FightTheStroke.org team in designing the Mirrorable user experience, from the user interface to a family diary used to record progress and collect feedback. The FightTheStroke.org team is now working hard to develop Mirrorable for a research project with families in December 2016.

frog

Stefania Marcoli

frog is a global design and innovation firm. We transform businesses at scale by creating systems of brand, product and service that deliver a distinctly better experience. We strive to touch hearts and move markets. Our passion is to transform ideas into realities. We partner with clients to anticipate the future, evolve organizations and advance the human experience.

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IFA, Europe’s largest consumer electronics showcase, can be an overwhelming experience for novices. But for frog’s designers, it’s an opportunity to scout the latest trends and test the market’s hottest consumer products.

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Lights, Cameras, and Lots of Action: The IFA Consumer Electronics Experience

<h2>New market realities</h2>
For the first time at IFA, virtual and augmented reality (VR/AR) felt ready to move from the lab to the living room. Millions of gamers spent this past summer navigating the real world in pursuit of imaginary monsters with Pokémon Go. Its success provides us with some convincing evidence that, with the right content, AR can find a mass audience. This makes the release of Lenovo’s Phab 2 Pro smartphone a timely one.
Lenovo’s Phab 2 Pro is the first handset enabled with Tango, Google’s augmented reality application platform. The new capabilities represent a next step for true smartphone based AR. And if the consumer trend spills over, Tango-enabled smartphones with industry-specific applications could also help workers collect and access information in exciting new ways.
Additionally, the imminent release of Sony’s PlayStation VR is poised to bring virtual reality to a mass audience through their proven content platform, at a price (€399) that will make VR widely accessible. Sony’s competitors may silently hope for a successful PlayStation VR launch: a hit may signal a tipping point in the VR market, opening up opportunities for a world of virtual products, content and experiences, both in the gaming space and numerous other domains.
<blockquote>
“The PS VR is very comfortable, easy-to-use, high-end VR headset ready to hit the market. You don’t need an expensive computer, just plug it into your PS4. It will ship with quite a few games and I’m convinced the content will keep coming. This is a consumer-ready VR headset.”
— Peter Dijkgraaf, Interaction Designer, frog Munich
IFA-2016-15</blockquote>

<h2>Will “Smart” Find A Home?</h2>
Despite being one of the most hyped IFA trends for several years running, the smart home category continues to show modest rates of adoption. Even Nest, bought two years ago by Google for a hefty $3.2 billion, is widely reported to be underperforming expectations. Although the category is yet to really catch fire, an enormous range of smart home offerings competed for attention at IFA.
The smart refrigerator is one of the latest appliances to go online. Most of the offerings resemble an enormous mobile phone embedded in a fridge door. Internal cameras are also popular, allowing the user to check out the action from inside their fridge directly from their smartphone. LG’s offering even runs Windows 10, including Cortina – and it is translucent so that you can see through the screen into the refrigerator.
If smart fridges gain acceptance, we may discover a world of exciting things happening in and on our refrigerators. However, it’s likely that the smart fridge will need some more time to find its way into homes, where every member of the family already carries the internet directly in their pocket.
<blockquote>
“A small niche of people are tripping out about how awesome smart home tech is. Everyone else is still wondering what the fuss is about. The tipping point will only arrive once smart home technology becomes both easier and more useful for ordinary people.”
— Thomas Sutton, Executive Creative Director, frog Milan
IFA-2016-53 samsung family hub</blockquote>

<h2>Watch this space</h2>
There were more wearable devices on display at IFA than one could really expect to be able to explore. The diversity of the offerings demonstrates the wide range of use cases and design intents that are behind new product introductions.
Samsung launched the Gear 3 and it’s jammed with as many features as they could fit into its very robust frame, including fitness, notifications, payment, calls and GPS. Nokia’s Withings Steel HR also launched at IFA, but emphasizes minimalistic style with a few smart features. Health tracking is reported on your smartphone and alerts are displayed on a small screen embedded within an otherwise analog watch. Fitbit’s Flex 2 activity tracker embeds a small removable sensor inside a thin, flexible band. Five LED lights are the only on-device display and accessories such as gold and silver bangles and necklaces target a use case at the opposite ends of the spectrum relative to the Gear 3.
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“Telling time is a killer use case. Whether mobile payment or fitness tracking can achieve that status is yet to be seen. This is a fun time to observe how users react to the balance of form, function and emotion.”
— David Cleaves, Executive Creative Director, frog Munich
IFA-2016-82 withings Steel HR</blockquote>

<h2>Designer’s designers?</h2>
Unless you are a journalist or an avid brand fan, you probably missed the press announcements from the first days at IFA. If you did watch, you may have noticed a familiar theme shaping the on-stage narrative for all the major brands: the claim to design as a core value. David Lowes, CMO of Samsung Europe, opened their press event by emphasizing that Samsung is not just a technology company, but a “technology and design company” while standing against a backdrop reading “improving lives with technology.”
The tone set by Samsung and others signal a broader understanding of the importance of good design and a desire to project design as a core value. What was formerly seen by many as a shiny wrapper placed over a new technology is now understood to be a driver of innovation, a competitive differentiator and ultimately a stimulator of business performance. How deeply enormous organizations like Samsung can truly integrate a value for design and all that it implies is still to be seen. However, it is clear that there is a very high awareness of design’s transformational influence among those leading the conversation within the customer electronics industry.

Mathias Mouchard

Peter Dijkgraaf

Todd is responsible for marketing in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. He hails from a foggy island in the North Atlantic, but has called Munich home for more than a decade.

Graduated with two Master&#8217;s degree in Interaction Design and VR/AR, Mathias firstly focused on web and mobile interfaces. He then specialized in emergent technologies to create unique experiences.

Peter is a digital problem solver from the Netherlands. He approaches design with feasibility in mind due to his tech-native development background. It’s important for him to keep learning by staying curious and out of his comfort zone.

Todd Taylor

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