Todd Dominey - MailChimp

And this is what we call our signature wordmark. We use this quite a bit. The interesting thing about signatures is that there's a pretty famous other signature that you may think about. This one, of course, being the signature of Walt Disney, which became the wordmark of the brand. Now, the reason I bring Disney up is because I think if you were to ask people, you know, what do you see in your mind when you think of Disney, when you hear the name? Some people would probably think of this, but I would venture that probably more probably think something along these lines. It's not so much the signature, it's not so much the wordmark, it's the character. MailChimp actually shares something with Disney in this regard, which means we have to talk about Freddy. Or, as he was known on his birth certificate, Frederick Von Chimpenheimer the Fourth. And that is his true full name. So MailChimp actually, and Freddy, goes way back to the very beginnings of the company. These were actually some of the very first versions of Freddy that were created by our founder and CEO, Ben Chestnut. And it's kind of amazing because he was doing like flat vector art, you know, back before it became cool again. Um... You know, he actually, you know, he created this. And people always wonder, they're like, why monkeys? Like, where did this whole Chimp thing come from? Well, what, like, what is this, you know? And we still answer that question. And this is kind of still is true is that under just really monkeys. And when he was a kid in school, he used to draw monkeys all the time. And so when he, you know, became a certain age and he, you know, founded a company and created a product, and he's thinking of a name for it, and it's got to be mail something. You know, something about email. And he was like, well, let's just call it MailChimp. You know, monkeys are great. So he drew a monkey. Very innocent, you know, very just kind of off the cuff. And thus MailChimp was born. And this was probably almost 15 years ago. Over the years, Freddy has changed quite a lot. He became much more high fidelity. He got much longer, much larger. This was actually designed by the incredible, uh, illustrator Jonathan Hicks out of the UK who you may have heard of. He's the same person that created the Firefox logo. He also worked at Opera for a while, created a lot of their user interface elements. And the only problem with this Freddy is that he's great, but he's huge. And he's really difficult to downscale and use effectively, as any of you know, who've tried to reduce a logo down. So we ended up using something like this. And Freddy was reduced to this type of mark. And one thing that I, that is interesting, I don't think people really notice this about this particular version of Freddy. But his ear in this version is actually round, like a teddy bear. You know, it's actually not a monkey, which I think was an interesting style choice at the time. Internally, this is kind of sad to say because we've actually moved on from this logo. But the nickname for this Freddy, we sometimes call him Blank Stare Freddy, or Dead Eye Freddy, because he's got this wonderful, you know, toothy grin, but he's kind of got this crazy look on his face, you know, like, like, I'm smiling, I'm smiling, you know. Just something, I don't know, something about him always felt off to us. And we didn't feel like, the smile was good, but we wanted something a bit more. So just recently, we updated him and redesigned him in very small ways. The ear has now been replaced. He actually looks like a primate now. He's not quite so much like a teddy bear. And we actually changed his eye, too, in a very subtle way. But it's a very important way in that we added just this little wink to his face. And the reason we did that is because this really captures for us our sense of humor and the way that we project ourselves and the way that we tell jokes. You know, we try not to be too heavy-handed about it. It's very, very subtle. And so as design director in my role, when I'm working with younger designers, you know, especially new ones who come to the company and are trying to figure out, you know, okay, I'm supposed to be weird, I'm supposed to be fun, and, you know, how much is too much? This is the thing I always refer back to. I always say, just focus on the wink. Think about the wink. Like, that's the tone you're looking for. Don't go overboard. Just enough. So it's very subtle. So that's our new mark. Um... Freddie has actually evolved quite a bit. Freddie, in a way, has come to life, which is kind of terrifying. Our creative director, Ron Lewis, decided to start creating actual figures of Freddie. And the reason I'm including this is because these figures have become almost a logo within themselves. They are so incredibly popular. We didn't expect these things to be popular. Really at all. I mean, we made this first one. This was what we call Classic Freddie. Kind of like Classic Coke or something. Um... And Classic Freddie, we just made it. Gave out to employees, gave out to some friends. And these things became so crazy popular that we just kept going. And we just kept making more of them. And more of them. And we actually have six more that are coming out soon that I saw before I left. And... Why do we do this? I don't know. It's fun. And people really love these things. People actually love these things so much that they sell them on eBay for like tons of money, which is kind of insane. Um... So, Freddie has lots of friends now. We have a lot of fun making these. These are actually hot collectibles inside the company too. Another thing that's very near and dear to my heart because I'm a parent and I have kids is the relationship that Freddie has just beyond adults. You know, with kids as well. For people who work at Mailchimp and have children. And even for people who live in the city of Atlanta because they see Freddie everywhere. You know, we have a lot of billboards. We sponsor a lot of local community events. Kids just have this weird fascination and love affair with Freddie. You know, kids come in and they draw him all the time. They send us pictures of him. Which I think in a way kind of reminds us, you know, how much fun and character there is in our brand. Because they're so enthusiastic about it. They're actually so enthusiastic about it and we love their work so much that we turned one of their drawings into an ad. This was actually a print ad campaign that we did where we put these in bus stops and on billboards all over the place. And somebody's kid drew this. I can't remember who, but I love this. This is probably one of my favorite print ads that we've ever done. Um... So, obviously we have these awesome hats. Kids really love the hats. This is my son Drake actually. He was about six years old at the time wearing a Freddie hat during a very rare snowstorm in Atlanta. It never snows in Atlanta, just so you know. And this was an amazing experience. Then we just have these weird versions of Freddie that have never really come out. We just do stuff like this. So we call this guy Sketchy Freddie. He's a really strange one. And then we have this one. Um... I don't know. This guy has been used quite a lot actually. I think we call him like Simpsons Freddie or he's got this crazy mustache. And he's quite amazing. And then we just keep going. And then we have, you know, just ones that are kind of made out of blocks of wood and fruit. If you ever come to Atlanta and you want to come see some Freddies and come to MailChimp, let me know. So, that brings me to the next part of the presentation. Where I would like to talk for a minute about empathy. So what is empathy? Empathy is basically the feeling that someone has when they feel like you are listening to them. And when they are being heard. It's a pretty powerful thing when you think about it. When you think about moments in your life when you've been sharing something with someone. And you have a particular emotion. And you're, you know, trying to communicate that emotion to someone. And that person really seems to be listening. And they seem to be empathizing with what you're saying. If you think about that moment and the moments in your life when that has happened. Those are the moments that we try to scale. And we try to replicate across our application and in everything that we do. One of the really tricky things about empathy is that unless you were born a very empathetic person. That just automatically cares about everyone. Which is an increasingly rare quality today, I think. Um. It's really something that you have to nurture. And it's something you have to try to grow amongst people that you work with. And why do you do that? You do that because when people who work on the product. Designers who work on the product. When they empathize with the struggles and with the pain points that our users are having. Their work is better. Designs are better. They pay more attention. The craft is better. So how do we do this? For many years we used to fly all around the world. We would go thousands of miles every year to visit customers. And to ask them what they liked and what they didn't like. And those types of things. And we would share that information with the company in like Google Docs or presentation of some type. But we learned over time that what people really needed was that one to one interaction. They needed to experience it and feel it and hear it first hand. So now once a month. We actually pick e-commerce users who use MailChimp and use it a lot. And we fly them into the company. And we put these unfortunate people in front of the entire company in our coffee hour space. And this is not an opportunity for them to tell us how much they love the product. I mean that's nice and everything. But what we really, really want to hear are the struggles that they have. You know what are the pain points that they experience. Not just with our product. But what is it like running a business? What is it like starting a business? It is a very difficult thing. And especially for people who have never really run a business before. Or tried to create their own product. They don't have the mental picture of what it is. So we like to ask them questions like what keeps you up at night? You know what sacrifices did you make in order to pursue your dream in creating this business? All of this is to help further and deepen our empathy for our users. Okay. We are actually so committed to this empathy thing that we kind of did this bizarre, kind of bizarre but it's actually kind of awesome I think. Project this year where we decided that hearing stories from our customers about starting stores and starting business was not enough. We had to do it ourselves. I mean we're already a business and we have our product. But what we really wanted to know was what it was like to actually start a new business. Create a product and sell that product online like all the thousands of people who use MailChimp do. So this year we started this thing called Freddie & Co. And this is Meg in marketing. We actually picked out an employee, a full-time employee in the company and said this is your new job. You're no longer working for MailChimp. You are starting your own business and you have to sell your own product. You're going to document everything. You're going to create a real company. You're going to create a real website and you're going to report on what you find and what you learn. And so Meg did it. So the first thing we did was we started making these really awesome socks. Love these socks. People love socks, right? So we started making these beautiful socks and selling them online through an actual store. All of the money that she made from the store we gave away to local charities in Atlanta. And we were so committed to this idea that, you know, not only did we get the money. We were so committed to this idea that, you know, not only did Meg, you know, create a business. She actually had to go down to the city to file all the paperwork. And we really got deep into this thing. This is Meg actually hand-wrapping and mailing out thousands of socks in a mail room just like someone who would start a business would do. Because we really wanted to experience what that was like and not take any shortcuts. So the first thing I want to talk about is the role of emotion. Emotion is the state of feeling, instinctive or intuitive, which is totally separate from your reasoning or from your knowledge. In other words, it is the emotional part of your brain. It is not your logical part of your brain. And the fact of the matter is that a lot of people who use MailChimp on a daily basis, they're perhaps not always thinking so logically. They're experiencing a lot of emotion in that moment. This is a great example. I quote from a book that I highly recommend that I love called Small Data from Martin Lindstrom where he argues that every successful brand stands for something more than itself. And that thing is emotional. So as you've seen these before, I know. What I would like to talk about though is, you know, why we do this and where these came to be. For one thing, in case you didn't know, like sending an email campaign is actually a lot of work. I mean, it's kind of like designing a 600-pixel wide website. And you're making one website at a time. And sometimes it can take days to do. Sometimes it takes people weeks to create these email campaigns. There's lots of content. There's images. There's all these factors. It's a very stressful thing because also unlike social media where if you post something to social media, you can just go back afterwards and edit it or delete it or do whatever you want. Email is not that way at all. When an email goes out and it goes out instantly and lands in people's inboxes, it is gone. I mean, you are not getting that thing back. So if there is a typo or some kind of problem, it's all on you and you can't do anything about it. So we recognize this and we know how stressful this can be. And so we want to make sure that people know what this moment is and how serious it is. So we do this, what we call sweaty hand Freddy down here where he's like, I'm going to do this. Where he's like getting ready to push the button. And we're not trying to freak people out, but we're just kind of trying to say, okay, like, you know, are you really ready to be doing this? Because this is the moment when you click that button. And then when you kind of like ride this emotion up of stress, then you kind of have this nice kind of like curve around the top and back down where we give you the high five at the end. And the high five is incredibly intentional because it is such a moment of success. And we know for sure. We know from research and we know from speaking to people what that emotion is like and they love it. I mean, we could have very easily have put like, you know, a little circle and a checkmark and some text next to it that said, you know, great. Your campaign was sent. Yay. You know, but that's, that just doesn't capture it at all for us. That would have been the easy way to do it. But we really wanted to recognize the emotion and the feeling that people have and to increase their engagement with the application in doing so. So we created the high five. And the crazy thing about the high five is that we know it's working because we see stuff like this all the time where people actually high five their screens and take pictures of it. And they post them to social media. They send them to us by email. We see this stuff all the time. This is one that I happen to particularly like. This guy was like really enthusiastic about sending his campaign. And I agree. It does. It gets old. So a little bit, again, about emotion. This gets back to my point earlier about tone. This is a site that we have that anyone can pull up that we actually use internally when we are trying to communicate to people in support and to people on the design team and any place else. This is at voiceandtone.com where we try to identify and come up with ideas for how to communicate with people based on their own experience. So like for example, this is an example of what a failure message is like. And this first one up here with the user, this could be a support ticket that they sent in. This could be somebody on social media doing some rage tweeting. This is someone, maybe they're just thinking this in their head. And so we identify at the right what they're feeling at that time. So they're trying to get this campaign out and it's not going. And so how do we speak to them? Is that a moment to be friendly and cute and jokey and to be giving them high fives? Absolutely not. So we clarify our tone by saying this is a moment where you're supposed to be straightforward. You're supposed to be factual. You're supposed to be helping people. Just get to the point. Don't be cute about it. And then we have it on the other side. Which is someone who's like really stoked about how well their campaign is going. And in this moment they're feeling exhilarated and they're feeling confident and they're feeling empowered by the application. And so we respond by trying to encourage that. We respond by trying to deepen their engagement with the product and to encourage them to keep going and to send more campaigns because they're being successful and they're being awesome. So I'm coming to the end of this now. I also just want to talk about how we can help. I want to talk about how sometimes in addition to being fun and friendly and all those things, sometimes we just like to kind of play jokes and we like to have fun with people. And this was something we did a couple of months ago. I don't know how many of you noticed this. But we redesigned our login page. And the reason we redesigned it is because login pages are typically just boring. I mean they're really horrible pages to design. So we thought, well, why don't we just do something that's kind of like a big brand statement. You know? Why don't we do some original things here just to, you know, kind of brighten someone's day when they're logging in. So for whatever reason, the very first image we picked, because it was summer and it was hot, we shot a picture of a vinyl Freddy upside down in the sand. And we didn't really think much of it. But the response was kind of insane. We had all these people on Twitter asking us why was there a but on the login page. And we had people contacting support saying, I'm not sure if you're aware of this, but you have a but on your login page. And we're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, we know. And we kind of let this ride for a little while. And then we're like, okay, enough. And so we eventually replaced the image. But it was really interesting and we loved it because, I mean, it showed that people were paying attention. And even though they may have been slightly offended or maybe a little creeped out by it, it was still a lot of fun and it was unexpected. So the future. Where are we going from here? And this is something I spent a lot of time obviously thinking about. Something that we have been exploring a lot on our design team is getting back to the point about applying your brand and being consistent across your entire user experience. This is something that we're chasing all the time at Mailchimp. And one of the things that we are trying to find and one of the things that I'm trying as someone who's been doing this for a long time, one of the things that I'm trying especially to figure out is how do we almost turn up the volume and bring in more personality and more charm and more character into our application and into our mobile applications, which is a really difficult thing to do. There's a very tight balance on it. So we've actually been exploring a bunch of stuff. We actually surveyed everyone in the company and said, what is your impression of Mailchimp? What do you think about it? It's look and feel. It's typeface. It's color. All these things. We've had crazy responses and we've made posters out of them. We've been doing typeface explorations. And then down here, this was actually my favorite part. We got a bunch of pens and Velcroed them to this board and we said, don't be shy. Tell us your feelings. And we put these giant boards up in the hallways and people would come by and they would pick up the pens and they would write. This is an early version of this. It eventually got more scribbly. And people would write on it and they would write hilarious things about like what their impression of a typeface was. Like what it made them think about. Which for us, culturally was really fun because it brought more people into our process, into our design process. And it made people feel included. So that design is not so much created in a vacuum. So before I go, I just want to say thank you to some people that I work with at Mailchimp because their work truly makes us who we are. And a lot of the things that you see and a lot of the things I've been talking about today are not possible without them. This is actually the product design team at Mailchimp that I manage. It's not everyone but it's most of them. We went out go-kart racing this day which is kind of why we look hot and disheveled the way we do. These are some of our friends in marketing. This is apparently a thing. It's called Canadian Tuxedo Day. I don't know if you all have heard of this. But I don't know if that's offensive or what. I don't know. But they explained that to me. Apparently it's an all denim thing. So these are really people who are very much responsible for our photography and for our identity and for a lot of the fun things that you see in Mailchimp every day. So thank you.