Trendsetter - Barry Shepard

Shepard's next step was to throw himself into an equally competitive field: the design business. He and Rodgers started out primarily doing brochures for hotels and resorts. That work eventually led to bigger accounts, including SHR's first automotive client, Audi, in 1983. What clinched the deal was SHR's arresting action photos of cars, which came at a time when airbrushed studio portraits were the norm.

Shepard didn't start using the term visual positioning until the late 1980s, but he had long been interested in effective design. As a student at ASU, he submitted his own rendition of a bolder Sun Devil mascot, because he thought that the existing one didn't do the job. (Unfortunately for Shepard, his devil never got its due. Prior to its scheduled debut, the university's alumni voted to cast out the image.)

Years later, Shepard continued to be struck by companies that said one thing with words and communicated something very different with images. "I remember designing annual reports that talked about being innovative, yet which showed an aerial view of a factory, which wasn't innovative at all," he says. "Our whole focus became about visually reinforcing what the company was saying."

Sending the Right Signals

Before SHR can develop a visual strategy, a client's executives, marketers, and product developers all have to agree on the brand message. At the beginning of a project, SHR's brand-strategy team leads a workshop to identify the three or four core brand dimensions. Painful as it may be, narrowing them down is a necessary process for companies that want to communicate several ideas, because "consumers can't hold more than four thoughts in their minds about a brand," says Shepard. Ideally, the dimensions differentiate the brand from the competition. Participants pore over pictures of seemingly unrelated objects, such as watches, buildings, shoes, and people, culled from SHR's archive of more than 8,000 images. The objective is to select images that best represent the current brand, the competition, and the "aspirational brand" -- what the client hopes to be.

"If we're working with a car company, we don't use cars," explains Laurie Penn, brand-strategy manager at SHR and a member of the firm's brand-strategy team. "We want them to think differently about their brand than they normally do. The visuals help us to arrive at better verbal descriptions, and those descriptions help us to develop the visual language of what the brand looks like."

To find the visual signals that suggest these characteristics, SHR's visual-positioning team conducts a series of consumer visual-research groups. At one end of the table is a card that names a certain brand dimension; at the other end, a card that bears an opposite or less desirable trait. Consumers arrange a group of images according to which ones best represent each extreme, and then they explain their selections. The exercise translates words into pictures, says Shepard. Using this visual spectrum, SHR detects specific elements such as photo angles, compositions, and layouts. Those findings serve as a guide for designers in the creation of a product or an advertisement.

In the early stages of the VW Beetle's development, when the car was nothing more than an idea, SHR helped designers J Mays, Freeman Thomas, and the rest of their VW/Audi team define the four primary characteristics of the brand that they were hoping to create: "simple," "honest," "reliable," and "original." After conducting consumer visual-research groups, SHR collaborated with the car designers to create a design palette that was based on those dimensions. For instance, because consumers thought of circles as being simple and honest, designers incorporated a variety of circles and arcs in the car's interior and exterior, like a motif. The concept car eventually became the new Beetle, which became the hottest car on the road a couple of years ago.

The visual-positioning research eliminates the subjectivity inherent in most design, says SHR's senior designer, Miles Abernethy. Instead of guessing what will appeal to consumers, designers understand how people interpret visual information, how they intuitively react. The visual signals aren't always what SHR or its clients expect.

In one case, says Abernethy, a toy company that was creating makeup for young girls defined one of the brand dimensions as "confident." As part of its research, the company asked focus groups of girls to choose which bikes represented confidence and which ones didn't. The adults expected them to choose the photo of a modern, futuristic bike. Instead, the girls chose a no-frills Schwinn. "To 8- to 10-year-old girls, confidence means not standing out from the crowd and not falling off your bike and having kids make fun of you," says Abernethy. "They chose the bike they could ride."