"The Web is so overloaded with clutter and information, brand becomes an important differentiator."

What is the role of brand on the Web?

It's huge. The wonderful thing about the Web is that anybody can create a website. The terrible thing about the Web is that anybody can have a website, and does. The Web is so overloaded with clutter and information, brand becomes an important differentiator. Who do you trust? Why go there? What do they deliver – not just the first time, but the second, third, fourth time? The Web has so much to choose from that in order to use it productively, you only want to visit the sites that keep their promises. That's what a brand is. A brand is a promise to the user that gets kept consistently. The companies that perform in ways that respect your time, intelligence and the limits of your technology are sites you're going to want to see again.

“History of ANIMOSITY…”

Business people probably don't appreciate being told that they should learn to think like designers.

Let's be honest, there's been a history of animosity. Business people look at a designer as somebody just interested in doing pretty things. And the designer looks at the businessperson as a barbarian willing to sacrifice quality to win at the bottom line. But in the New Economy, the capacity to talk to each other and see each other as necessary collaborators is more important than ever. What do successful entrepreneurs and business people in the New Economy do? They reconfigure reality. They reimagine the space in which their company is going to compete. They redesign their organizational operation. They reconceive a metaphor for their business. In fact, they operate in a land that's often pretty intangible. Venture capitalists and incubator companies are constantly trying to foresee what doesn't exist. They look for openings where there are opportunities.

Now how does a good designer work? A designer often starts with things that are very tangible. How do people work, talk to each other? How far do they move from their desks? How do they get information off the printed page? How much time do they spend making decisions at a newsstand? What typeface sends the right message? These are tangible propositions that they work from to create the organized principles that will solve those tangible problems.

“A great experience… a great design… ”

How would you define a great designer?

A great designer is someone who understands human beings and what they really want, need and will use. My wife, a trained architect, taught me everything I know about design – which is that design isn't about buildings that look like wedding cakes. It's about creating the experience for the person who works inside the building as well as for the person walking by outside. What do people experience when they walk in the front door? What do they experience after an eight-hour day? Are their eyes fried? Have they had good fresh air because the ventilation system works? In the same vein, someone working at a technology company should not be thinking about what color to make the case, but about the design of the experience that the user has.

“Customer in charge, Customer support! …The classic truth ”

What about redesigning the relationship with customers?

That's fundamental but it's old news. I once had the privilege to hear Stanley Marcus speak. After listening to people say that the great thing about the Web is that customers are in charge, Stanley got up, at the age of 90, and said, "I don't want to sound like a fuddy-duddy, but when I went to work at Neiman Marcus, my daddy's store, we always thought customers were in charge. What's the news here exactly?" It's a classic truth, but the connection now is more intense and urgent. There's more choice. What's next in the New Economy is refocusing on the things we've briefly forgotten about what really matters.

"A great designer is someone who understands human beings and what they really want, need and will use."

“Design ranges from the physical

layout of a room to the makeup

artists who present Larry

King to the public.” - Management Guru Tom Peters

"design is the soul of a manmade creation."

- Steve Jobs

Is design purely practical?

- Not really. I saw an article in Fortune recently where Steve Jobs is quoted saying "design is the soul of a manmade creation." There's a part of that I'm attracted to. I also loved Rose Tremain's passage on music in her novel "Music and Silence," which I think is just as true about design. [Reading from book] She writes, "…of course, we really do not know where music comes from, or why, or when the first note of it was heard, and we shall never know. It is the human soul speaking without words, but it seems to cure pain." For me, design is elusive, it's soul, it's abstract, and it's all of the opposites of those things.

“Tangible and intangible. ”

Is design more important for marketing products than services?

No. Paradoxically, I believe that design is more important for services. Harvard marketing expert Ted Levitt pointed out years ago that if your product is tangible (planes, boats, cars, pen knife), you need to distinguish yourself from the herd by emphasizing intangibles – i.e., service. If your product is intangible (banking, travel, etc.), distinguish yourself from the masses by emphasizing the tangible – to wit, design. FedEx, for example, stands out on the tangibles – strong branding, clean trucks, easy-to-use forms. To me a business system, like FedEx's, that works transparently on the surface and offers brilliant simplicity is as much about design as an iMac or a Beetle. If you're a service business, it's important to specifically work on the tangibles.

The dumbest mistake is viewing design as something you do at the end of the process to 'tidy up' the mess, as opposed to understanding it's a 'day one' issue and part of everything."

What mistakes have you seen managers make in terms of understanding and using design?

Mistake No.1 is treating design as a veneer issue rather than a soul issue. The dumbest mistake is viewing design as something you do at the end of the process to "tidy up" the mess, as opposed to understanding that it's a "day one" issue and part of everything.

"I have never seen an effective marketing decision made based on the data." – John Scully, Ex-Apple CEO

He wasn't making an anti-data comment. He meant that you should collect data by the ton, so that your subconscious is informed by the data. Then you do whatever you ought to do. Certainly design falls into that realm. You can't reduce design choices to a few general principles, but you can inform your intuition.

“E-commerce Period."

How important is design in e-commerce?

It is e-commerce. Period. All stop. Whether it is the look of the screen, the innards, the delivery mechanism that actually makes the stuff come to fruition after you punch your one-click button, or the look-feel-taste-touch of the site itself, the Internet is a pure, unadulterated design medium.

“Shell yellow, Coke Red."

Do you consider the physical manifestation of a brand important?

Infinitely. I read a comment in a book, can't remember which, that there's nothing distinctive about the Kodak identity except Kodak yellow. There's some truth to that. Kodak yellow. Shell yellow. Time red. Coke red. The physical manifestation of a brand is shockingly important, if it is consistent with what's going on inside.