Peter White, Designer, White Design Studio, Dale Tesmond, The Brand Experience and Matt Heller, Cultural Anthropologist, Aegis Group teamed together to conduct a workshop for the ABPM Fall Conference in Dallas, Texas on October 21st, 2009. The topic was “Manipulation” – in other words, how to best prepare your audience to accept and retain the message you want them to take-away from their visit to your briefing center. Knowing you audience, crafting your message, climbing the emotional tree, the magic of three’s, orchestrating your experience, understanding and using peak end and zero sum principals were all examined as tools for creating a memorable experience.

From August 2009 through May 2010 I had the pleasure of working closely with Peter White in the design/development and manufacture of organizational equity concepts for Proctor & Gamble’s Product Supply Organization (PSO).  PSO is a complex interconnected set of disciplines/functions which owns the core aspects of P&G’s supply chain operations and execution.   White Design Studio’s was enlisted to create an over arching set of design elements which wove together these functions under the tag line of “Winning as 1”.    Peter demonstrated great patience and insight as he developed an understanding of each function, their key work as well as expectations relative to “branding” the organization (several already had some level of work completed in this area).  He provided a strong set of initial designs, collected feedback and quickly turned around revisions in order to meet the established deadline.  The finished concepts (defined within P&G as Personality Expressions(PE)) met both the objective of “knitting the organizations together” as well as becoming quickly integrated into the ongoing identity of the functions and appear in much of their ongoing literature and presentation.  Peter surrounded these PE with floor graphics and artwork which helped to further solidify the organizations under a common over arching set of design concepts.  He also helped resolve a key issue within the organization by introducing new technology within the work areas to electronically capture team identify without re-creating the previous paper centric and cluttered surroundings which lacked the professional atmosphere needed.

On the whole White Design Studio exceeded our design expectations while demonstrating an ongoing propensity to meet aggressive deadlines.  We will continue to use Peter and his team as opportunities arise and would gladly refer them to others doing like work.

Mark T. Martens
Project Manager, P&G