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This article originally appeared in Brand Packaging

Remembering Margo Chase

Margo Chase got her start creating iconic graphics for some of the world’s most celebrated musicians, including Bonnie Raitt, Madonna, Cher and Prince. Just like the legends she collaborated with, Chase mastered her craft, challenged convention and learned how to work with any client without sacrificing vision or quality. A year after her untimely death, those who knew her best reflect on Chase’s approach to creating one-of-a-kind designs that continues to inspire.

Master your craft

In 1991, Capitol Records approached Chase to design the album art for Bonnie Raitt’s classic record, “Luck of the Draw.” The songwriting legend spent years honing her distinctive guitar style. Like Raitt, Chase spent tireless hours mastering her craft. In the age of Adobe Illustrator, it is easy to overlook the intricacy involved in creating the handdrawn typography Chase made for “Luck of the Draw.”

She applied the same skills years later to ensure the women’s footwear brand Chinese Laundry stood out with consumers and at retail. Chase took a muralist approach, handcrafting a collage of intricate illustrations and typography that ultimately helped the brand achieve its goal.

Break the rules

In true Rock ‘n’ Roll fashion, Chase broke rules in design. In 1992, she was approached by Victory Records to design the album art for Ten Inch Men’s “Pretty Vultures.” Prior to digital photography, designs involving photography started with a series of Polaroids that were used to refine the art direction for the project. Once the composition was chosen, a pristine photograph was taken and the negatives would be scanned for the final printed piece. But for this project, Chase felt the lo-fi aesthetic of the Polaroid added an edge that a cleaner image simply could not create. She scanned it into Photoshop where it was symmetrically duplicated and colourised—creating the shadowy, distorted image we recognise today.

While working with Califia years later, Chase convinced the brand to step away from conventional cues in the non-dairy milk category to stand out at shelf. At the time, almost all brands used the same gable-top structure, the colour blue, splashing milk and scattered almonds. Similar to how the anarchy of punk rock shifted the culture away from mainstream rock aesthetics in the mid-70s, Chase’s persistent exploration of the unconventional paved new roads in design. Califia’s adoption of an iconic new structure and a design without traditional flavour visualisation marked a significant departure from convention and positioned the brand for success in a market of larger established brands.

Sing in harmony

The idiosyncratic tendencies of Prince, Madonna and Cher are, by now, legendary. Chase’s experience working around the nuanced and changing demands of her celebrity clients aptly prepared her to navigate the complexities of working with larger brands. Working on Gain detergent, Chase had to collaborate with an extensive P&G team, and her skill at keeping true to the brand’s vision and goals ultimately helped everyone sing in harmony.

There is no doubt that Chase’s beginnings in music informed her approach to later work in packaging. By mastering her craft, breaking the rules and learning to sing in harmony, Chase was able to create packaging that really rocked!

Clark Goolsby, Chief Creative Officer, Chase Design Group

Good SEO is critical for any commercial website and the business which owns it. All site owners can understand the benefit of improving a site’s SERP ranking. As well as the knock-on effect of boosting its traffic. Getting more traffic to a site is obviously something to shoot for. Those site owner’s, then, can appreciate the worth of SEO.

That worth, however, has traditionally proved tough to quantify. On this very blog, we’ve talked at length about the cost of SEO. SEO services are provided according to different types of payment structure. There’s always an ultimate figure, though, to put on how much a business spends on the services.

What there often hasn’t been is a monetary figure to explain the value delivered by improving a site’s SEO. That’s where this guide to the ROI of SEO comes in. We’re going to talk you through a way that you can assess the ROI you might expect from improvements made to your SEO

https://www.accelerate-agency.com/roi-of-seo/

The transatlantic partnership of Bray Leino Limited and The Mx Group (Mx + Bray Leino) beat competition from global B2B agency giants to win the pitch for Cummins’ global strategy and communications agency of record. Cummins, a Fortune 500 company, is a leading manufacturer and distributor of engines, filtration and power generation products, generating over $22 billion in revenue each year.

“Mx + Bray Leino has the capabilities, agility and experience necessary to help us drive sales, elevate our brand and expand our creativity,” said Carole Casto, Cummins, Vice President of Communications. “They have demonstrated they know how to work effectively with business-to-business clients and help companies like ours achieve their objectives. We are pleased to begin this partnership.”

Bray Leino will manage the work across the U.K., Europe and Asia — all of which represent significant growth markets for Cummins; The Mx Group will be responsible for all North America work, with Bray Leino’s media department covering all markets.

“Cummins has an incredible history, whilst being at the forefront of engineering, leading the charge in power solutions and breaking new ground in technical innovation. We’re incredibly excited to work for such a respected and forward-thinking client, at a time of huge industry change, said Kate Cox,” CEO of Bray Leino.

“We knew we shared Cummins’ passion and industry expertise, but what’s really made this appointment is the way Cummins and Mx + Bray Leino ‘just clicked!’ There are very exciting times ahead,” said Peter Wroblewski, Principal & Co-Founder of The Mx Group.

The Cummins appointment is the latest in a series of high-profile, global wins for the super-agency collaboration of Mx + Bray Leino.

Both top-5-ranking B2B agencies within their territories, the Mx + Bray Leino transatlantic partnership was formed to provide B2B marketers with a world-class global agency option outside of the holding company model. The two partner agencies select clients they view as a great fit and form custom teams that are bound by their mutual desire to work for a common client. “Our agency teams aren’t made to work together; we want to. We share ideals, great chemistry and a passion for marketing,” said Cox.

The powerful partnership of Mx + Bray Leino provides clients with a combined offering of over 450 full-time employees, 75 years of B2B experience, and capabilities ranging from strategy and creative to demand generation and digital development.

“From a pure B2B marketing expertise standpoint, the strength of our two agencies combined is unmatched. Our custom client teams pull from a deep set of resources to meet a client’s specific challenges. And we’re seeing how much our clients prosper from our shared interest in their success,” said Wroblewski.

For more information on this partnership and the Cummins appointment, please contact Adam Holder, Managing Partner, Bray Leino: [email protected]
DDI +44 (0)7974 668929

‘You’re selling the vision and delivering the minimum feature set to visionaries, not everyone.’ 

— Steve Blank

MVP definition

Sports fans reading this might hear ‘MVP’ and think Steph Curry or Tom Brady, but this isn’t an article about superstar American athletes. In this case, we’re talking about Minimum Viable Product.

In a nutshell, the MVP is a product with just enough features to satisfy early customers, and provide adequate feedback for future product development. 

Coined by Frank Robinson in 2001 — and popularised by Eric Ries and Steve Blank — the SyncDev co-founder described it as such:

‘The MVP is the right-sized product for your company and your customer. It is big enough to cause adoption, satisfaction and sales, but not so big as to be bloated and risky. Technically, it is the product with maximum ROI divided by risk. The MVP is determined by revenue-weighting major features across your most relevant customers, not aggregating all requests for all features from all customers.’

MVP example

Some of the biggest success stories in digital business start out with an MVP of sorts. Take, for example, Instagram. The photo and video-sharing social media platform currently boasts a staggering 1 billion monthly active users — but this has been 10 years in the making.

Conceived in 2009 by Kevin Systrom, Instagram was originally called Burbn, an HTML5 mobile web app which primarily featured location check-in and friendship reward points, as well as photo sharing. The vision was an open network of photo sharing and discovery, an antidote to the typical closed friend models prevalent at the time.

After a successful seeding round 6 months later, Instagram — as we know it — launched in October 2010, with the hope of facilitating communication through images. What’s important to consider is that this early product was a fraction of the app it is today. Hashtags weren’t added until 2011, photo tagging and video-sharing until 2013, global advertising until 2015 — the list goes on. The vision was there, and the MVP which nabbed 100K users in its first week paved the way for that vision to be truly realised.

MVP benefits

So you know what the MVP is, but what are the benefits? There are plenty…

Read the full version 

An emerging global movement. We make work better, one place at a time.

Reinventing Work: Bristol turns one in a few weeks time. We’ve grown and evolved considerably since our first meetup in July 2018. So almost a year into our journey I thought I’d introduce what we’ve evolved into as of July 2019. Also to share how you can get involved and contribute to our growing movement as we continue to take shape and adapt.

In a nutshell

Reinventing Work is a global grassroots movement of ‘reinventers’ who want to learn and practice new, more human-centred ways of working. There are a number of monthly meetups around the world where we get together to share practical advice, explore ideas, and look at the patterns found in existing self-organising teams / self-managing workplaces.

Why? Because, globally, 85% of us are disengaged at work.

With your help, we want to help put this stat right. Reinventers participation is valued and you don’t need anyone’s permission to get involved with or to start working on whatever you are interested in. If it floats your boat and meets our purpose—making work better, one place at a time – then go for it!

Global movement?

That’s right, Reinventing Work has spread from Bristol to Melbourne, Adelaide, London, Bath and Lisbon. More and more people are reaching out and we’re chatting with and supporting others who are interested to start chapters in their cities. If you would reinventers who might like to start your own please get in touch—we would love to help them. Here’s a Trello board with some ideas on how to start your own chapter.

New to new ways of working?

If you are new to this world but have a sense that work just isn’t working then watch this excellent 45 minute Google Talk by Aaron Dignan, Author of Brave New Work. It’s the perfect place to start—I can’t recommend both the talk and the book highly enough.

A few excellent next stops include:

1. Leadermorphosis: a podcast exploring the emerging world of self-management and progressive organisations, hosted by Lisa Gill. Each episode features a guest thought leader or practitioner offering their perspective on new ways of working.
2. Corporate Rebels: a fantastic blog offering a wealth of knowledge, thought, practical advice, and real world examples of organisations working in new, better, ways. I’ve linked to an excellent article written by Lisa Gill. Also head over to their archive, it’s a goldmine.
3. Liberating Structures: if you’re convinced (or curious) about new ways of working and want to practice some, I know no better place to direct you than the Liberating Structures app. Experiment with as many as you can!
4. Reinventing Organisations: a seminal book on new ways of working. I prefer the illustrated version as it’s better organised and neatly summarises the full text. You can download it and pay as you feel.

Reinventing Work: where to start?

A great first action in your workplace would be to:

1. Gather a group of colleagues for a lunch and learn to watch the talk above.
2. Then spend time discussing new practices you would like to try, and old practices you would like to stop. Why not try a circle discussion for this.
3. Seek to agree on a time bound, safe to fail experiment—try a new process to see if it’s more efficient, or remove a process that slows things down.
4. Get a date in the diary to evaluate the experiment and to discuss new ones.
5. Share the resources listed above and arrange a regular lunch and learn to explore them.

Reinventing Work: Discussion

Discussion between reinventers tends to take place over on Slack. You can join in here: http://bit.ly/ReinventingWorkJoinSlack. Hit ‘Channels’ on the left and join the discussions that sound interesting to you. If you have any questions or would like to seek advice on any aspect of new ways of working then ask away—we’re a friendly and supportive bunch.

Reinventing Work: Meetups

Come along to Reinventing Work: Bristol to hang out with and learn from others who are passionate about new ways of working. We tend to do a lot of meetup organising on Slack and Zoom (or similar). If you would like to get involved then head over to Slack and hit ‘Channels’ to find #admin-bristol. In the spirit of transparency we encourage working out loud in these channels, rather than sending direct messages between co-organisers.

Reinventing Work: Decisions

In between meetups, proposals can be made and decisions taken on Loomio http://bit.ly/ReinventingWorkLoomio. Everyone has permission to be involved in decision-making, to start a proposal and to ask reinventers to make a decision.

Reinventing Work: Blog

You can read articles from fellow reinventers about new ways of working and you can write them too! Let me know if you’d like to write and I’ll add you as an editor of https://medium.com/reinventing-work.

Reinventing Work: The Future

We know better than to try to predict and control this. We hope that there will be more meetups in more cities helping more people to reinvent work. But we don’t want to grow for growths sake, rather to make a meaningful impact in our workplaces—to make work better, one place at a time. It’s been a fun ride so far and it feels like we just got going!

Last year we bought reinventing.work and this year we want to make good use of it. I wonder what it will look like in July 2020? Your suggestions are very welcome, and you are very welcome to get involved and shape our future. We hope to see you soon at a Reinventing Work: Bristol!