Marty Neumeier Quotes

Designers don't actually solve problems. They work through them.

The most innovative designers consciously reject the standard option box and cultivate an appetite for thinking wrong.

The best design tool is a long eraser with a pencil at one end.

To achieve originality we need to abandon the comforts of habit, reason, and the approval of our peers, and strike out in new directions.

A brand is a person’s gut feeling about a product, service or organization

Branding is the process of connecting good strategy with good creativity.

The central problem of brand-building is getting a complex organization to execute a simple idea.

Brand is not what you say it is. It’s what they say it is.

A genius is someone who can tolerate the discomfort of uncertainty while generating as many ideas as possible.

The narrow gauge mindset of the past is insufficient for today’s wicked problems. We can no longer play the music as written. Instead, we have to invent a whole new scale.

When enough individuals arrive at the same gut feeling, a company can be said to have a brand.

Convincing isn't really possible in an age of customer control. Customers hold most of the cards today. They have good visibility into their choices, and they can easily share information with each other. Not only that, they don't like to be sold. But they do like to buy. Your job shouldn't be to convince customers to buy, but to help them buy what they want.

Without design thinking, the only sane response to a problem is to make a smaller, "safer" move. Smaller moves don't get you very far. They key is to let out the leash on imagination, but not take it off the leash. Imagination is the only path to innovation. It's a good example of something that humans do better than machines.

Design can also be used to invent strategic futures, make complex decisions, and craft a bold corporate vision. We need to move design up the ladder of influence.

Designful companies are those that weave design thinking into the fabric of the company. In a designful company, innovation is rewarded instead of punished. Risk taking is the norm instead of the exception. Some companies have already embraced this type of culture change with impressive results.

Design is the underlying skill that activates innovation. If you want to innovate, you've got to design.

A brand is a person's perception. Of course, it makes marketers nervous to think that marketing is out of their control, but that's why the discipline of branding has emerged.

Cultures are naturally resistant to change. The same shared mental models that allow large numbers of people to work together efficiently can also keep people from imagining new ways of working together. In many corporate cultures, new ideas are viewed as heresy. But it doesn't have to be that way.

You can't be a leader by following a leader.

I see "demand creation" as a 20th-century construct that's bound up with advertising. It's an outmoded view of marketing that says, "First, we build a product or service, then we advertise it into people's lives." Embedded this view is the belief that companies control brands. This is a myth. My message all along has been that brands are actually created by customers, not companies. Companies only provide the raw materials - the products, messaging, behaviors - that people use these to create brands.

In a sense, traditional business is design blind.