Cristina Fletes-Boutte--The Tangents Interview

This summer, Cristina Fletes-Boutte brought her considerable talents in video production and photography to the service of Trig Innovation and its clients.  After completing her undergraduate degree in photography at Louisiana State University, Cristina moved to the Triangle area to take on a master’s degree in journalism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. 

With successful stints at The Washington Post and NPR under her belt, Cristina arrived at Trig, eager to bring her perspectives from the worlds of art and journalism to what she sees as a collective of creatives searching for better solutions to express product attributes and brand connections.

We sat down with Cristina to capture her sense and sensibility for her work at Trig, and how her background, education, experience, and self-motivation inform her central role in the firm’s emerging service areas that shape products and markets for clients.

Tangents:  What drew you to photography/video production?

Cristina Fletes-Boutte:  As a child, I loved poring through my father’s huge collection of National Geographic magazines—he had whole bookshelves full of them. I’d spend many rainy afternoons in Memphis pulling them all down onto the floor, making a huge mess, enthralled by all of the photographs from around the world.

While I loved photography from a very young age, I didn’t pick up a camera with any level of seriousness until my college days at LSU.  My parents gave me a point-and-shoot digital camera for Christmas, and I loved experimenting with all of the settings—black-and-white, different tones, and even video.

At the time, I was pursuing a major in English. That following semester, one of our assignments was the Depression-era documentary, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.  Like many English majors, I struggled to keep up with all of the different written works we were assigned, however, I found myself especially frustrated with the wordiness of this particular book and instead flipped to the photo essays by Walker Evans embedded in the middle.  The first image I came across was of a woman with gaunt features and piercing eyes. There, in one instant, I immediately understood the immense poverty and suffering of the Great Depression. What the author had been trying to communicate with thousands upon thousands of words, Evans did in one image. That shook me to my core, and I knew immediately that I wanted to make photography my life’s work.

The switch from English to Photography may have required me to up the ante on my technical prowess, but my introspective nature was always a key asset. Photography is more of a mindset than an occupation or activity. It’s about possessing an innate curiosity about everything, yet having the ability to take a step back and observe situations and environments. Most of all, it’s about finding the beauty in everything.

One of my favorite subjects to photograph is my family. For one of my projects I asked several members of my family to sit in the yard on a plastic chair—the men would hold pictures of their fathers, while the women held pictures of their mothers. The resulting photos spoke volumes about how images are made up of so much more than lines and tones—they serve as placeholders for a particular time and place in our lives and often become priceless artifacts as our memories begin to betray us.

After finishing my degrees at LSU and UNC, I had the wonderful opportunities to work at the Post and NPR—exposing me to two vastly different, yet equally effective approaches to journalism.  The Post taught me that once you’re “in the field,” you won’t always have total control over your work.  A national newspaper like that is obviously deadline-driven to the hilt, so it challenged me to bring my best to the table with each assignment, within a really tight framework.

NPR, on the other hand, was very open-ended, with lots of creative freedom, working on longer-term projects.  There, I learned how to wisely steward high levels of artistic freedom.  It’s easy when you’re having fun, doing what you want to do, to take your eye off the ball. But the people there are so committed to bringing their best work and meeting their deadlines, never sacrificing the fun or the deliverables.

Tangents:  What attracted you to working at Trig?

Cristina Fletes-Boutte:  From the time Ty Hagler approached me about working for Trig, I could appreciate this company and how it’s structured for success. I see it as a group of creative professionals who try to find different ways of presenting information on products, as well as connecting customers to brands.  What drew me in was the room for my growth, aligned with Trig’s growth and that of its customers, by establishing a service that’s a real void right now for many companies.

I had no preconceived notions about doing more commercial work—I entered this project with a completely open mind.  While I always want to push myself to become better with each and every client engagement, I always need to step back and make sure that our client is absolutely thrilled with what we deliver.  

Tangents:  What do you enjoy most about your work at Trig?

Cristina Fletes-Boutte:  There’s no “prescribed formula” here, something I think is quite rare. It speaks to the trust that Ty has in each of us within our respective specialty areas. So in the area of camera work, I have a voice—a real say—and get to articulate my vision for the work first. This strikes me as very unusual—Ty is an open book. He tells me about the products and the person involved, and then cuts me loose to put together a vision for the photo or video work.

This is the foundation for what I love most about my work at Trig—the creative freedom I have to use my own vision and judgment to make decisions based on my abilities and my limitations.  I also love working as a team with the Trig team and our clients, plugging in with people in our group for animation, website, and social media projects.

Tangents:  What do you think is the Trig team’s greatest collective strength, now that you’re a part of it?

Cristina Fletes-Boutte:  We take a product out of the dry realm of deliverables and shape it into something much more—real brand-building. Sometimes our work is tutorial in nature, such as instructional videos, and that’s fine—people have to know how they’ll actually use products. But what I really love is grabbing people emotionally on how they connect with the product on multiple levels.

I’m reminded of the recent Tide commercials during the Olympics, and the way they connected athletes and their mothers—the same women who washed years and years of sweaty, dirty laundry, who now had the privilege of watching their kids triumph at the Games.  I want to keep pushing boundaries for Trig and its clients in much the same way, garnering those really deep connections that people have with products they use every day. That’s been the real thrill I’ve found in commercial work. Ultimately, people are interested in other people and connecting with them.  There’s so much of this work for us to do and do well. 

Tangents:  Tell us something else, outside of work, which fuels your passion.

Cristina Fletes-Boutte:  I’m a runner and have been since joining the cross-country team in high school.  What I love about it, and I can’t help but relate this to my professional mentality, is that you don’t have to compete with others to succeed. You can simply go out and run, challenging yourself to do better each time.  I run almost every day, and I learn something about myself each time. 

Like work, some days are better than others, but there’s always a learning opportunity, an opportunity to improve.  While my professional schedule is fairly prohibitive to doing scheduled road races, I tend to do well when I do stop to measure myself against others.  It’s funny that you can achieve so much, whether it’s in running or in professional pursuits, by simply measuring against your own performance each time.  If you try to get a leg up on what you did yesterday, you can often exceed your own expectations. And in business, this mentality has meant that exceeding my own expectations makes a “wow factor” for a client that much more likely.

Brand Identity Case Study: Parklife Communications

Client Company—Parklife Communications, Hillsborough, NC

Vital Signs:  The company is two years old, led by a husband-and-wife team of veteran corporate marketers.  Parklife provides marketing consultation and content for both digital and collateral materials.  Clients include companies in business-to-business consulting and services, legal, green building, entertainment, and fine arts.  Parklife has a heavy emphasis on the cutting-edge tactics and tools in blogs and social media.

Needs—In a classic “cobbler’s children with no shoes” scenario, Parklife has built its business over the last two years without taking time to brand itself. The company needed a representative logo and brand mark, along with color and font schemes suitable for everything from business cards to social media avatars.

Trig’s Branding Approach—First step, 3C analysis, taking a holistic look at the company, its representative clients, and its competitors.  After capturing the essence of Parklife and its people, seeing the types of clients it targets, and positioning the company within its competitive landscape, Trig facilitated several ideation sessions with the principals, leading to multiple concept iterations.

During the first ideation session, Trig assembled a list of adjectives to describe the Parklife brand: progressive, kinetic, modern, playful, fun, shrewd, business-savvy, anti-corporate, innovative, and collaborative.  Our consulting team then matched up these adjectives with fonts that reflected the attributes described, giving the Parklife team multiple options.

During the second ideation session, the Trig team probed Parklife’s penchant for color. We received some great guidance here, as the Parklife team had some well-defined opinions. We were told to avoid anything too primary and corporate, but to avoid being too trendy. The color scheme needed to be modern, but with a classic feel.

After refining Parklife’s color preferences, our design team set to work on a brand mark that would serve as an iconic representation of the company in both digital and collateral-based marketing.  An early idea that clearly resonated with the Trig team and the Parklife team was the idea of turning certain letters in the name of the company into punctuation mark-like images. After multiple iterations, we settled on the truly iconic rendering of Parklife with the A and E reflective of quotation marks.  We selected the A mark for the stand alone brand mark for use in applications such as social media avatars.

Results—The results of this exercise were inspiring for the Trig team, since we enjoyed a rare opportunity to do brand work for a service company outside of our normal industry space in hardware, tools, and medical devices.  You can see the multiple renderings and iterations that got us to the final products on our case study page.



Inspiration at Work—A Trig Innovation Core Value

Please don’t hate us because we love our work. 

It’s okay; we’ve paid our dues and worked in some pretty gut wrenching jobs where our efforts were disconnected with our interests, wishing we were doing . . . well, what we do today! The specific tasks of today’s work, as great as they are, could quickly become routine, boring, and even disconnected if we did not practice a simple value. So, what is that secret value that keeps us mentally and emotionally engaged? 

At our company, we talk with each other quite a bit about our core values, because we want them to be a living, breathing DNA, woven into everything we do. These conversations keep us mindful of our values as we place them into action. In trying to achieve this authenticity in our work, we must actually live those values in the service of our clients.

At Trig, we have found that seeking inspiration is so central to our work that we express it as one of these core values. It feels natural that a business, a profession—a pursuit—rooted in creativity should find its touchstone in inspiration. And our life pursuit—innovation—has so many creative entry points:  invention, design, and branding all emerge from a creative fountain.

Inspiration is what fuels those of us who spent our school days drawing on textbook covers and scribbling our manifestos in tattered notebooks. It comes from an appreciation for both our natural surroundings and humankind’s works in the worlds of art and architecture. While the muses of our youth were comic book characters and fast cars, the wisdom of experience tells us that inspiration comes from many other sources we may never have imagined.

Most importantly, we draw our inspiration in our current work in design, development, and branding from our clients themselves. We seek clients who are like-minded people—people who are open to devising new and better processes for bringing great things to life (to borrow an old line from our friends at General Electric).  We can’t navigate possibilities without first having clients who are open to them.

Next, we draw inspiration from the character of our clients, who are operating in what can feel like a cold business world at times. Recently, we intersected with a very special group of people, whose leader exemplifies integrity at every turn. While very straightforward and pragmatic, this gentleman’s commitment to honesty and fairness with his own team and his competitors—a deep respect for what’s going on in his industry outside of his own company—is nothing if not inspiring.  

And we can’t forget to have fun. This is perhaps the greatest gift that inspiration has to give to all involved in a creative process.  Our core design team gathered yesterday to discuss a current project, and I can’t help but think about how much we all laughed as we gave feedback to each other’s work in driving a better solution for the client. Laughter is a great medicine, but it’s also a driver for great collaboration with great purpose—it’s so much easier to take criticism and improve when it’s served in a kind-hearted spirit.

We should never forget to pinch ourselves, knowing how lucky we are to use the skills we first honed on our textbook covers earn a living.

Branding to Reach New Heights: Thought Leader Select Engages Trig Innovation to Kick-start a New Generation of Innovation--Part One

As part of a corporate re-branding initiative that included a revamp of its corporate website, Thought Leader Select engaged Trig Innovation to revisit their corporate logo.  Through Trig’s consultative process, the two parties spoke in great depth about what Thought Leader Select stands for as a research and consulting partner to the biopharmaceutical industry, how they are different from their competitors, and the customers they serve.

Thought Leader Select understood that brand elements such as logos create unique icons that become shorthand for all the positive and negative associations experienced by the customer with that company.  Logos become meaningful as file folders of the minds of customers—they store their brand experiences mentally, using the logo as an instantaneous trigger to recall memories, both good and bad. Thus, icons are a powerful shortcut past language to a deeper emotional connection.  Properly designed logos pack a lot of meaning into a visual shortcut

The first stage was to discuss the brand strategy in terms of a 3C (company, customers, competitors) analysis and determine how that strategy would be expressed in the visual assets.  Thought Leader Select’s marketing team had already done a great job understanding their customers and competitors, through its recent completion of a client feedback survey and exhaustive competitive landscape research, and has developed a strong awareness and appreciation for the people in its own workforce and their respective skills and experiences (the company has doubled its number of employees in the last two years).

Comments from one of Thought Leader Select’s employees, a research manager named Rhonda Napier, stood out in particular during discussions.  The fierce pride within the company came out with comments like “Doctors aren’t a search term. They deserve to be honored and not reduced to a number or data set.”  Thought Leader Select’s employees exemplified the company’s commitment to its core service—identifying and profiling medical experts for collaborative work on new medications—and the industries it serves (healthcare and biopharmaceuticals).  “We respectfully connect companies with the doctors they need to advise them on medical and clinical issues as they bring new medicines to market—the right people for the right reasons,” stated Kristen Smithwick, a vice president at the firm. “We believe that our objective, validated methodology opens up opportunities for more physicians and health care providers to provide their expertise pharma and medical device companies in the ultimate service of public health. “

When asked what brands would inspire the new direction of the company brand, principals at Thought Leader Select loved the modern, clean look of pharmaceutical companies such as Pfizer and Eli Lilly, consulting companies such as McKinsey, Bain, and even some art museums such as the Guggenheim and the Museum of Modern Art.  Trig Innovation had to strike a balance in the visual assets’ appeal to both pharma and the medical community.  Previous brand iterations utilized color references for scrubs, white spaces, and a general sense of antiseptic sterility.  After some thoughtful discussion, the antiseptic scrub colors were less emphasized, though the palette couldn’t stray too far away. Trig drew from the bold, dynamic presence of advertising agencies while establishing the brand as a trusted resource that can overcome skepticism.  And, just as importantly, Trig team had to accomplish these goals in a way that amplified the humanity of the highly trained people that assess the research data with a very hands-on process.