Name: Brainstorm Design 2023: Design Leadership
Uploaded: 2023-12-11
Duration: 17 min 57 s
Description: Teman Evans, Global Chief of Design, General Mills In conversation with: Clay Chandler, FORTUNE

Teman Evans, Global Chief of Design, General Mills In conversation with: Clay Chandler, FORTUNE

Brainstorm Design 2023: Design Leadership

Conferences

We are so delighted to have Taman Evans here at this session. He's one of the most extraordinarily talented, not only just designers, people that I've ever met, he has had an amazing creative professional journey. He's been an entrepreneur, an architect and interior designer. He's led global branding and marketing teams. You heard a little bit today about what he's with this global network of designers. He's a lecturer at Harvard University and a real passionate educator just on many fronts, extraordinary accomplishment and we're going to talk to him a little bit about, about his job and how he works today. So Taman, please come out and join us. Are you stay right? That's where you are. Thank you very much. Thank you. Look at the beginning of our program today, I mentioned that, you know, one of the things that we observed at fortune was that uh that design is more than just branding and marketing. But I didn't mean to short change, branding and marketing because branding and marketing is a very important part of design. So I want to talk a little bit about that just now with you uh because that's your role at at uh the Mills, as you say. And um maybe we can start by just having a look at the video. Have we got to the the to man's video? We can sort of see the work that you're engaged in recently. Have a look at this. Do you wanna, do you wanna give us a kind of play by play of these products? This is from our, our fruit snacks portfolio. We call it Diff Fruit and it's hard enough to evolve. One of these brands. Uh There, there's tons of loyalty. We did three at the same time. Uh So you can imagine the stakes were high and we're talking about design leadership. So I think one of the first uh elements of that is uh setting the stage for your team. So I would be remiss not to give a shout out to Tamara Furman on my team. She's the design manager who oversaw this work, a herculean task to take not one but three brands and introduce brand worlds that cover new packaging, new logos, motion based logos, responsive logos quite an effort. So give us a little context of of General Mills. I mean, this is an extraordinary fortune 500 company. Very big long history. We were chatting a little bit last night about the number of products in in the sort of General Mills portfolio. Help us understand the scale of what you oversee. It is a dizzying number of products that's probably why I had to give that shout out to Ta Tomorrow because uh it's one hun 100 plus products globally. And people know us, I, I think most easily, easily for things like cereal. So uh Wheaties and Lucky Charms and Cheerios. But we're also Old Paso and Yoplait and Haagen Dazs and Betty Crocker brands with storied histories uh that are really loved in, in households around the world. And so there is an incredible sense of responsibility in being stewards of those brands. So you've got this vast portfolio and tell us how big is your design team. It's a, we are a small but mighty uh group uh depending on what we're touching, we probably get up to maybe in the twenties uh which if you think about 100 brands and that you uh design hands, it means we have to be very well organized. So you work with a lot of agencies and outside vendors, but the kind of crucial key decisions are yours and you're in this kind of key role of, of them being the the interface with management and executive uh leadership. So when you've got that many products and you've got that li a team, you have to really make careful decisions about, OK, which brands do we refresh uh when and so I'm interested in the decision to, to take these uh uh out for a refresh because these are, tell us a little bit about these three products because they're kind of interesting. They're relatively new. I mean, I am, I actually a little bit too old for them. I was already kind of, uh, out of high school by the time these brands rolled out. Pardon? The pun? But, uh, um, tell us about how they originated. Well, it's funny because I grew up on these brands. So I used as a kid, I used fruit roll ups as currency, uh, to get favors friends. Uh But we, these brands have incredible staying power. Uh They have a lot of uh sort of influence with young adults. And typically when we bring a story around about evolution around like this, because the brands in trouble or the entire category shifted. That wasn't the case here at all. These are very strong. And if anything, they're what we call capacity constraints, which means there's more demand than supply often. So that means that if we were going to talk about the need to set these brands up for growth, uh and for the future that we had to make sure that we were making a very compelling case to leadership. And that's my job, not just to say we're going to pull the design level for designs sake, but to tie it to a very concrete explicit growth story. So give us a sense of who the sort of target market for these would be. Well, it's great because when you start to pull them apart, which is some of the first work we had to do. We work with a great agency called Olson Saltzman to start to pull these brands in the portfolio of heart. But we'll start uh with honestly with uh fruit roll ups. Like I said, the one that I use this currency, uh that brand is being targeted towards young adults, but it's really meant to be to live as this permission slip to play. We like them to treat that brand as if it is literally a blank canvas and we want them to put their on it as we moved to fruit by the foot. We found still going after young adults that I used to always think about fruit by the foot is it's really, really long. And so we talk about more and more, we call it extraordinary. Uh And what we realized was that what was really important to the uh the young adults who are consuming fruit by the foot is that it was their moment to take a break. They called it their chill time. And so design now telegraphed that. So for that brand, it's really about giving, extending that moment of pause and chill time. So that's that story. And then third last but not least is gushers and that's all about what's letting uniquely you on the inside out. So you tell folks to be bold and, and, and, and very proud about who they are and the brand gives them permission to do that. So the gushers I, I like actually, and they're, but they, they come in a variety of different flavors and they, they really are, can be very sour and t to sort of wake you up. Um, so that's an, that's an interesting one how, um, I guess I have a couple of questions about this because these brands are now, you know, they originated long before social media was a thing And now they're uh they're being consumed by a generation for whom social media is second nature. And III I don't know if you want to talk about this or not, but I was quite amused by this thing that uh II I write about that, that uh roll ups have recently gone very viral because a couple of people on tiktok figured out this hack where you can take ice cream. I think it was Mango Ice cream and strawberry roll ups was the most popular one. And if you put the ice cream, well, maybe you can talk about like what? No, that's what I think you've done. The perfect job. They realized that there is this fantastic combination of fruit roll ups and ice cream where it becomes this chilled snack. And our R and D team was all over it as that virality started to happen. So what happens apparently is that uh the, the uh roll ups are kind of rubbery and um when you wrap them around the ice cream the cold temperature then instantly sort of freezes it and it gives us this crunchy uh crispiness. And so there's all this commentary on tiktok and it, it went viral and as soon as it started to go viral, I think I saw at least a half a dozen versions of people trying to knock this off and do their own version. I got some late night calls about it. My mom tried and I said, ok, we ticked the right boxes now as fast as the parent test. Well, that's also an interesting point because um many of these kids, their parents will remember this product in a, in an older context which we have to be sensitive to. Uh so we even if we were evolving these brands, we started by talking to consumers and they gave us permission to do certain things and permission not to do other things. But if we do the before and after for gushers used to be called fruit gushers, at least that's what we called it. Uh Fruit gushers, fruit by the foot, fruit roll up, we talk to our consumers are like we don't call their gushers, that's what we had on them. And so we, that gave us the permission to evolve that um on pack too. And so is there a kind of a in addition to the the sort of younger generation, there's still this kind of nostalgia factor to these brands? How do you reflect that in the, in the branding campaign. Well, if you were talking to uh my boss, our chief marketing officer, he would say he wants us to be stable on strategy fresh on execution. So there are certain tenets of these brands that we hold near and dear. We don't want them evolving all over the place, but then we know where there's room to play. Uh and it's different for each of these brands because we're positioning them for different things. And so that's what I keep in mind as I'm thinking about what will allow to go forward and what not. Uh in some cases, we're setting up some of these brands to compete in candy, totally different category, even though we're in fruit snacks. So they've got to be armed a little bit differently. But others, we just wanted to make sure we were bringing along those loyalists who have been with us for for years. But also making sure that if we're serious about a growth story that we've got to bring others under that tent as well and give them something that gives them that invitation to come into our world. And how do you judge whether this is working? I think what I love about being in a business like mine is that the business tells you, you can say the design is as great as you want it to be. But if you aren't moving that needle in terms of that top and bottom line then that is just art for your wall in your office. And that does not do much to make the, you know, the holders of the stock very happy. So that's a great segue for me to just talk a little bit about how you got to General Mills and, you know, we don't have a ton of time, but I would urge people to kind of look online to some of the other things that Tamon has led at, at General Mills. The, the Cheerios uh campaign is just fantastic, really brilliant uh marketing. Um So there, there are some good examples out there. Um really whimsical, fun, imaginative video campaigns uh that are terrific. But you started out not as a, as a commercial designer, you know, aspiring to work for a big company, you started out passionate about architecture, University of Florida, tell us what happened next. You know, I think it's strange whether or not it's kind of predictable that so many of the speakers on stage today were either architects or they started as architects. I think that's because architecture is really in education in three dimensional, sometimes four dimensional problem solving. And what's great about that is it means as an architect which I still consider myself to be, but I simply attacking problems at a different scale. I can walk around a problem in a way that allows me to appreciate that 300 m view up high. But then I've developed this telescopic ability to zoom into very minute details. Architecture teaches you that as a process and a way of working, I'm just a p using it to apply the problems that fit in the palm of your hand uh from day to day. Uh But I started out as an architect, I ended up working with Room Kha and he's the one that planted the seed while I was at the Office of Metropolitan Architecture, the I could stretch and do more. He was working with Prada at the same time that he was building the Seattle Public Library and I thought that planted the seed in me to be an entrepreneur. So I went and I built my own company and I'm happy I did because it's one of the reasons that I'm so protective of our brands. I know how hard it is to build one. And I know that even though they seem very robust, they can actually be broken very easily and take years to repair. Uh And then from there, I uh ended up building that company at to a certain point of success in selling that company. And then I went and actually started um consulting uh did some time with the Rockwell Group. I had all of my faiths come together today. Uh my entire world collided today. So work with David Rockwell, you should also say Pepsi, you were Pepsico as well. That was a little later. But before that I was the VP um on the ad side VP of brand strategy at FCB Foot Cone and Building. And then Mauro poached me for, for Pepsi. And then from there, I moved on to General Mills. So that's an amazing experience. I mean, we should say that prior to going to Onao Ma and working with, with Ram Coolhaus. Uh I mean, you were a seriously uh trained designer, attended the Gun School of Design uh at Harvard. Um I wonder if maybe just in a minute and 30 seconds, you may say something about your graduate dissertation, your, your thesis, your dissertation, which was oh brilliant. Uh but also very provocative. Well, it was a joint thesis I did with my identical twin brother. Uh so that'll set the stage, but it actually was an interrogation of gated communities and we approached them from a branding perspective where we said let's actually engineer a better gate. It turned the problem on its ear. It was meant to provoke. Uh and it was called architectures of camouflage and subterfuge. So I'll leave that there. The rest is online. Yeah, it's really incredible. And so originally there was a debate about whether because this didn't really conform to the very strict and narrow rules for dissertations at, at Gunn. There were even people suggesting that this need to be thrown out, maybe you even needed to be expelled. Yep, it was, it caused quite a stir. Uh One of my uh huge mentors uh decided that he was going to uh to speak up for the work and say that this is provoking us in a way that isn't in the traditional sort of uh canon. And because of that ended up being nominated for the thesis prize. So just that you stick to it. Here you go. That's, that's fantastic. So tell us why you decided after graduating with such distinction. Uh you know, I mean, that was really a uh something that everybody at the school debated that that thesis, I think it was covered in the crimson of it was really AAA kind of a major thing. So after, you know, being on this trajectory to really be a kind of celebrated architect, having a stint with Ram and seeing what that looks like, you decide to go and kind of launch your own company with no prior experience running a business at all. What compelled you to make that switch in? In course, I think once I saw the power of my skill set to be unleashed into so many different spaces other than buildings, I had to try it for myself, but it could have failed spectacularly. And if it did, I would have maybe had to go back to O MA and knock on the door and beg them to let me back in. But it was an experiment that I had to undergo. And that was where I learned in the school of hard knocks, how to build a business, how to build a brand. And I take everything that I've learned from that and everything I do every day. So this was a company called uh Theo. They tell us quickly what, what it, what it meant. So, um we made, uh we ended up in a sustainable jewelry space. Uh and we discovered by Oprah Winfrey, she put us on her old list of favorite things which helps uh you know, in terms of, of growth. Uh But she tells the story of, oh, there were these two twins who uh started out as architects but discovered this world of sleek polished jewelry instead, it was made from mango wood. Uh So we were actually recycling that and they gave us a very particular niche and I understood the need to be unique and honestly super differentiated in a very proud do that to this day. They are beautiful pieces of jewelry, you know, absolutely fabulous. If you sort of again, look them up on the internet. So we've just got a little bit of time left. I want to mention that one of the things that you're very passionate about is educating young designers and that you are still teaching at Harvard and at other locations and tell us quickly about the course that you teach and and why it is that you are teaching that I teach a course called paper plastic. That is all about the uh supermarket landscape. And so I have, I have bring in designers, I bring in people from the business school, the Kennedy school MIT and I put them in teams and we tackle brand problems. We reposition brands and then build them from the ground up and introduce packaging innovations to them as well. And this is a course that's open to students from a variety of different disciplines, not just trained designers, people from the business school, you told me you were even accepting a couple of people from mit that are some engineering backgrounds. I mean, I think that's a fantastic model for exactly the kind of ideas. That's what we've been trying to talk about collaboration at the end of the day and getting people from other disciplines to kind of look at the world through that uh through that design lens. Uh Well, Taman, you know, I feel like we saved the best for last. I wish we had more time, but thank you so much for joining us and we wish you continued great success with your endeavors both at the mills and at the gun uh school and we hope you'll come back. It's a pleasure. Thanks everyone. Thank you, Jo. So we've reached the end of the day that concludes brainstorm design 2023. I want to thank all of today's speakers, our brainstorm design co chairs, and you our delegates here in the audience. You've been a terrific audience and we really appreciate that we want to extend. Extend a special thanks to our host partner, Mgm Kai and to Pansy Ho in particular, it has been a great joy to convene brainstorm design in this beautiful hotel. Uh We would also like to thank our strategic partner W Wang Yu Wu Lang Ye and our partner JIA Ling, our media partner Apco worldwide. Please now join us upstairs at the vista for cocktails, entertainment and dinner. So our hot new band, you'll love the name for them. We're calling them The Fortunes and it features, it features Tom Dixon brainstorm design co chair, Tony Chambers and our programming director carry Goldstein on drums. So would be a lot of fun. They've had about an hour and a half to practice and rehearse. So we'll see how that goes. And on your way out, please make sure that you grab a set of the D school's design library from the registration desk. Those are free. Those are there to be yours. And I think you'll learn a lot from them in addition to what we've covered here today. So with that, I'll conclude the day. Enjoy your evening. Have a lot of fun and thank you so much for coming.