How Chris Do of The Futur Disrupted Design Education The Moment He Stopped Selling And Started Giving
A Founder’s Journey to Brand Clarity is a series of swift interviews with some of today’s most intriguing founders on how they gained brand focus and clarity along their successful entrepreneurial journeys.
Chris Do, the Emmy award-winning designer, director, strategist, lecturer, consultant, and serial entrepreneur is disrupting design education through his widely popular online content and education platform, The Futur.
You and I go back quite a bit and we actually have a ton in common as well. We both studied at the ArtCenter, we both taught there. We’re both branding practitioners. We’re mentors. Some might even go as far as calling us thought leaders in our space. We run our own consultancies, yet we’re also very different and we like to meet every now and then for dinner to compare a few points on the state of design, branding, technology, business. But I think most importantly, for this conversation, on design education, which is very dear to your heart. Tell us about your fascination with education and why you started The Futur?
C Do: I’ve always been very passionate about teaching. I think it’s one of the noblest things that you can do. But the sad truth is teachers, who should be the most priced people in our society aren’t compensated in a way that makes sense to me. In our society, we seem to reward hedge fund managers, financial traders, people who move equities around and they’re not really creating anything but they’re all very powerful and wealthy in this world. So here I am teaching and I’ve been teaching at ArtCenter for quite some time and upon one of these moments when I’m driving home with my wife whom I invited to sit in the class, and I asked her, “How was class today?” I’m just looking for a little positive affirmation, some feedback so I can improve, and she said, “You know, it was really good, but I don’t think you’re living up to your potential.” I’m like, “What do you mean?” She said, “There were seven or eight students and how many times have you given this lecture? How many more times do you want to give the same lecture? And what about all the students that are outside of this classroom?” She basically threw a big challenge and a problem in front of me without a solution. Now, the answer didn’t appear immediately. It wasn’t obvious. It wasn’t until later that I’d met Jose Caballer who was also another ArtCenter alum that he said, “Chris, let’s get on YouTube. I want you to get on camera and let’s make content together.” Now, that’s an idea that was shocking to me because, mind you, I’m an introverted person. I’m used to being behind the camera making commercials and directing talent and not being in front of camera talent. So I resisted and I got on the show and I was super tense, but you know, some things started to happen. I think that the whole fear, that ice started to melt a little bit, and the more we created, the more feedback we got. It’s like you go from a vicious cycle to a virtuous cycle. So you got to get over the fear, you make content and then all of a sudden, I can see that it’s actually helping people and that feeling that you get, you can’t measure in a bank account and I wanted more of it.
Looking back, during that journey, starting it with Jose and then moving into The Futur, what was that one big breakthrough moment that propelled the startup, really the passion project, into a brand, into the small phenomenon in this niche space of design which you, at this point, really start to own? What was the moment?
C Do: Usually, that’s a difficult question to answer but I know that moment. In the beginning, when we made content, we were trying to make promotional videos to sell products and courses that we created and so there was always this ulterior motive and we created content to tiptoe and segue into hey, by the way, you should consider buying this product. And our audience and the value that we were creating was stunted because of that desire to market to people. The breakthrough moment came when I said to Jose at that point in time, “Look, I don’t want to sell anymore. I’m going to go away, I’m going to write a deck and I just want to help people learn.” That’s all it was. So that night, the night before, I probably spent about four hours writing a deck on branding and sharing my thoughts on this because so many people think a logo is a brand and they screw that up. It’s so much more than that. That’s just one small part of the puzzle. So when I wrote that, what happened was when we created that episode, people started to watch. We’re used to getting 30 to 50 views. Now, we’re getting hundreds of views a day and I knew then something had happened. When you do something right and you’re rewarded with this instant feedback, and that’s one of the great things about social media, you can try many experiments that are very ephemeral, sit back and watch, make a hypothesis about what works and what doesn’t and double-down on the things that do, and if you can repeat your success multiple times, you’re on to something and we definitely were on to something at that point in time.
It seems to me it was to move from marketing to empathy. Suddenly, you switched to saying, “Why am I really doing this? What is at the core of this brand?” To me, the core of the brand is always you coming from a similar design background as your audience, yet you made it. You had a great early career. It’s like the Gary Vaynerchuk idea where you can actually base your entire story on your success and then share how you got there with your audience and then you start “selling” because you actually proved to them who you are and that they actually should listen to you.
C Do: When you stop selling and you start thinking of your customers as somebody that you can create value for, then the whole game changes. I know a lot of people in the marketing space think about, “How do we get more people to look at our stuff and buy our products?” So they think about paid media and the transition has to happen into getting earned media. Earned media is something that you don’t have to pay people to watch. What you’re asking for from your audience in your community is for their most valuable things — their time and attention — and then you exchange that with marketing. That doesn’t make sense. Don’t pitch me. Give me something valuable. Tell me something that I didn’t know. If you do that, you will not have to pay people to watch your content and you build a relationship, affinity from your customer to your brand and that’s the key. If you can jump that divide, if you can transition from that gap and build that bridge, your game will change. Put all the money that you’re going to spend in media buy and build content. Hire researchers, authors, writers, videographers, motion graphics people. Hire a consultant to help you craft a content strategy that creates value for your clients.
How would you describe The Futur in a simple word? I call it your brand DNA. Is it empathy?
C Do: I think it’s empowerment. What we do better than most people is we give people knowledge and tools to empower them to achieve their dreams.
What does branding mean to you, Chris?
C Do: I think branding is the sum total of the user experience for a customer and this is Marty Neumeier’s thing. It’s not what you say, it’s what they say it is. So it’s a gut feeling and the gut feeling can be influenced, it can’t be controlled, and it’s one of these things, especially in this day and age, where social media and authenticity is so important that the days are long gone now where a brand can say we’re about customer service, we’re about the best-built quality and the most interesting design when you can easily cross-reference that on a number of channels.
A final piece of brand advice?
C Do: I think if you have a brand and you want to do marketing, it comes down to creating value for other people. So I try to live by this mantra: give as much away as possible for as little as possible without hurting yourself and if you do so, the law of reciprocity, karmic, equity will be built, and I think this is a term that Gary Vaynerchuk uses which is ‘you can exist in the thank you economy.’ I think we’re entering this whole new place where people more so than ever don’t want to be sold to but are so ready to buy. Give them a reason to.
To catch my full interview with Chris, stream this episode of Hitting The Mark
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Condensed and edited. The original interview was conducted in November 2018.
