eBay Relationship:
External
Consultant
Product Strategy,
Interface Design, Brand Strategy,
Behavior &
Visual System
2 x 4-week sprints.
Founder
Brand Innovation Lab
Define Innovation Process,
Manage Budget,
Select Partners,
Concept, Scale & launch,
succession management
1 year
Global Executive Creative Director
Align team,
Agency Selection,
Global Campaign Direction,
Manage Localization, Define and
Launch company-wide Playbook
1 year
Through my consulting practice, I’d already helped lay the foundation for a re-imagination of eBay. But getting a company to align around any new strategy is hugely complex – exponentially more complex as the size of the company increases. Being on the outside looking in created a level of objectivity but I began to see the limits of a consulting model in practice.
What quickly became clear was that acceptance and understanding of the new brand strategy differed from team to team. The vagueness of the term Brand, largely misunderstood in the product and engineering teams, was further exacerbated by the absence of a clear customer-facing expression of the strategy.
So when eBay asked me to come inside and form The Brand Innovation Lab (BIL), I realized that my first job would be to find a way to express the new strategy to help everyone bridge.
In its first year, the Brand Innovation Lab set the groundwork for a customer-facing expression of the new strategy. 'Fill Your Cart With Color’ became the first Global Brand Campaign in eBay's long history.
After six months of running the lab. I was also given creative oversight of Global Brand Creative, crafting the launch film for 'Fill Your Cart With Color' working with 72&Sunny. But, we didn’t just create marketing expressions, we also crafted product prototypes to identify new ways to interact, wrote patents to highlight new business models, and created experiences for partners within the company to show them how the new strategy could grow their business.
After a year I gained oversight of the Brand Expression System, and in collaboration with the UX and Brand team launched a playbook for visual and verbal communication for the entire company. For this launch, we concentrated on creating Brand ’Tools’ rather than ‘Rules’. Our prime objective was to help employees and partners save time as well as adhere to the new brand.
Two years into my role at eBay the CTO offered me a tandem position in the Product team to run end-to-end product experience and product design patterns. The knowledge I’ve gained from unifying products and brands in the setting of a complex international Fortune 500 company is invaluable, the vote of confidence from the CTO was incalculable.
My most profound insight from this is that any consultant who cares deeply about their client’s business would not only want to be able to access the objectivity of being on the outside looking in but also empathize with the practical problems discovered only by being on the inside looking out.
'Everyone has their own version of perfect' was the existing agreed Brand Value Proposition, but it didn't make sense to many beyond the Brand team. Woking with the SVP of North America I developed this value chart to show how the asymmetries of demand and value can maximize the potential in any product category. From this we went on to develop product and service ideas in the Brand Innovation Lab which helped develop the eBay Authenticate which is thriving today. The SVP Scott Cutler went on to become the CEO of Stock X.
The Brand team at eBay was mighty but small, managing the work from an international company through central policing was impossible. Building tools which helped our partners make work which fit the Brand, with less effort and more speed was a much better way to build alignment.