True Stories: Trends in Story, Brand, and Experience Design

Date: Wednesday, January 16th

Time: 8am - 9.30am

Location:
Fleishman-Hillard,
220 East 42nd Street
(Between 2nd and 3rd Avenues), 11th Floor.

In the global sphere of business strategy and communications, there is an increasing need to explore and redefine the relevance and the resonance of how brands communicate to their audiences. The world is swiftly spinning, and there are trends beneath the sagacious growth of luxury brands that suggest that there is a need for a continual self-examination – a getting back to the roots of what drives the brand in the first place – is in order. It is crucial to understand the mechanisms of your audience connection – to reframe and refocus how your brand speaks to the market. And how, and in what story, your markets connect to you.

Based on Tim Girvin's 30 years of worldwide brand development, patterns are emerging in the international market that suggest consumers are increasingly asking for, and seeking out, the truth. The challenges of massive confusion of daily marketing messages and an overwhelming similarity in positioning of products – even luxury products – leads to increasingly lessened differentiation. Additionally, the plethora of pirated and counterfeited products only adds to the dispersal of relationships to brands.

Trends reveal that people are having a harder time focusing – a more difficult time framing in their minds any type of relational brand magnetism, "what is the brand that is mine, that is meaningful, that is part of my life?" Without a kind of spiritual connectivity to a brand link, there's nothing holding anyone to a brand's premise of offering.

If the most potent growing segment of luxury is in Asia, and the class stratified character of that diverse economic group speaks to owning luxury as class jumping – that strategic link is hardly sustainable. Big growth is accomplished – but who will care as increasing populations have their logoed bags, have been to the luxury shops that are proliferate everywhere, proverbially, a Starbucks on every corner? What holds them? What value is understood, what long-term relationships are maintained? Starbucks principle does not a Gucci make.

Girvin's premise is archetypal – that an important component of the management of the luxuriously made product or service connects with guest relationships by using the foundational tool of storytelling as part of the brand message sphere. That the maintenance of the spirit of craft and the hand-made, the premier sense of the beautiful is something to be cherished – not waylaid in the interests of commerce alone. Girvin's focus is holding purchaser relationships and continuously captivating the mind of the guest, the consumer, the holder of that dream.

The premise of the proposition is – that at the very heart of connecting with people – one to one, one to one billion – a narrative is more memorable and retained. And at the center of the refined potency of the luxuriously created, there is a true story that is, in many instances, almost completely forgotten. And if there is, or was, a story, how is it visualized?

Why? Who cares? The emerging transition is that truth is in the telling – how that story is interpreted is an equal component to the explication in media. In Tim's work on luxury brands, web communities, global beauty, motion pictures, increasingly he's seen that audiences don't want to be lied to, don't want to pay for false representations – and are looking for personal, even spiritually suggestive treasures. Things that are part of their personal experience – that are inherently part of their story, but part of the story of the brand. In a way becoming intertwined with the brand's experience.

Girvin will explore the nature of luxurious appointment, the concept of craft, legacy and family, transitioning designers, finding jewels in the heart of any story – and how to strategically and relevantly launch them to a captivated market, resiliently tuning them for new strategic shifts and conditioning. It's less about the concept of the old and it's more about renewing and vitalizing what content might already be there, under the folios and blueprints that lie at the very heart of a brand. Deepening the spiritual, even psychic connections of an audience is the path for long term relational connections – whether its one person, or one billion.

Starting out in college as a biologist and a marine scientist, he disdained killing the finds of the class research. He quit. His professor, noting the elaborate nature of his illustrated and hand-drawn scientific journals suggested that he move his focus to art history. From there, Tim changed colleges, traveled the country, working with fine printers, luxurious binders, hand-made papermakers, custom book producers, architects, master calligraphers and designers to advance his sense of the rarefied, the hand-produced and the compelling, in design.

He traveled to England on a National Endowment for the Arts grant, studying there – moving on to France, Austria, Germany, Switzerland and finally Russia, exploring design, craft and intention, visualization and production, art and presentation. Returning to the states, his opening practice was almost entirely about retail strategy, design and merchandising – and partnering with architects, retail groups and store planners in the US as well as internationally, he learned about the concept of presentation from two sides of the counter. He worked with Nordstrom, Bloomingdale's, Bullocks, Neiman Marcus, Macy's and others.

These retail foundations created an extremely broad strategic and creative practice, with Tim and his teams working internationally on projects such as designing wayfinding and brand patterning for luxury stores in Jakarta, branded storytelling explorations for the Gucci Group in the US and Paris, retail visualizations in Seoul, luxury shop fronts in Osaka and the visual identity and packaging for Nordstrom, one of the largest specialty retailers in the United States.

But the real work of Girvin is, and has always been, about finding the spiritual edge of a brand – looking into the heart of the story, the soul of the people that make the business – and finding there what needs to be vitalized and renewed.

Girvin's work (www.girvin.com) has ranged from strategic brand innovation work for Procter & Gamble, human interface and museum design for Microsoft, product merchandising for Apple, finding the new heart of Yves Saint Laurent, to creating the visual identity programs for more than 350 motion pictures, ranging from Braveheart to Beowulf, and Unforgiven to The Last Samurai. His firm's diverse clients include: Estée Lauder Companies, GS | Retail: Seoul, Gucci Group, Johnson & Johnson, Kerzner Resorts, MGM MIRAGE, Microsoft, Paramount Pictures, Procter & Gamble, Seibu: Tokyo, Tableau, Vulcan, Warner Brothers, Wynn Resorts, Yum!.

He's a member of AIA, AIGA, Dai Nippon Design Alliance, Dentsu Corporate Communications Design Group | Tokyo, Design Management Institute, Industrial Design Society of America, Fashion Group International, Japan Graphic Designers Association, the Luxury Institute, The Luxury Marketing Council, and the TED community.

His firm's work, articles, drawings and photography have been published in Art Direction, Brutus | Japan, Calligraphy Idea Exchange, Communication Arts, Create Numerique, Creation, Daily Journal of Commerce, Design Management Journal, Film Journal International, Fitting Image, GD | USA, Graphis, HOW, ID, Idea | Japan, Interiors, IDENTITY, Nikkei Design, Northwest Magazine, Novum Gebrauchsgraphik, Pacific Northwest Magazine, People, Portfolio, PRINT, Puget Sound Business Journal, Seattle Homes & Lifestyle, Seattle Times, SEGD | Journal, Senden Kaigi | Japan, Stratégies | France, The Hokkai Graphic | Japan, The Spokesman Review, The Weekly | Seattle, Typographic, Typography Today, USA Today, VM&SD, Wall Street Journal, and Washington CEO.

Tim has a BA from the Evergreen State College, but either snuck into or worked his way into classes with legends at The Cooper Union, Harvard University, The Imperial College London, Reed College, and Stanford. He has offices in NYC and Seattle, as well as a liaison partnership in Tokyo.