Let’s say you’ve built the next big thing. You’re ready to take on the world and make billions. Your product is amazing and you’re convinced you’ve bested the competition. As a point of fact, you know you offer the very best solution in your market. But here’s the rub. If your competition has established stronger customer habits than you have, you’re in trouble.

The cold truth is that the better product does not necessarily win. However, there’s hope. The right strategy can crowbar the competition’s users’ habits, giving you a chance to win them over.

To understand how to change customer habits, we first need to understand what habits are and how they take hold. Simply put, habits are behaviors done with little or no conscious thought. Research shows almost half of what we do, day in and day out, is driven by these impulsive behaviors.

Consider just about any product you find yourself using without thinking and you’ll find a hook. Do you sometimes check your phone without really knowing why? Hook. Ever opened Facebook or Twitter to do just one thing only to find yourself scrolling and tapping 30 minutes later? Hook. Have you ever found yourself unable to stop playing a game like Candy Crush Saga or Angry Birds? Hook, hook, and more hooks.

Hooks have four basic parts: a trigger, action, reward and investment. User habits are valuable precisely because they do such a good job of keeping competitors out, making it exceptionally difficult for a new company to shake users from their existing routines. Here are the four ways fledgling products can win over users from the competition and successfully migrate them from one product habit to another.

1. Faster Hooks

In his book Something Really New, author Denis J. Hauptly deconstructs the process of innovation into its most fundamental steps. First, Hauptly states, understand the reason people use a product or service. Next, lay out the steps the customer must take to get the job done. Finally, once the series of tasks from intention to outcome is understood, simply start removing steps until you reach the simplest possible process.

Though it’s excruciatingly simple, understanding Hauptly’s first principles yield big results. Removing steps between the user’s recognition of a need and the satiation of that desire is at the core of all innovation, from the cotton gin to the iPhone. Products that can shuttle customers through the four steps of the hook more quickly than competitors, stand a good chance of winning them over to new routines.

For example, take the corporate collapse of Blockbuster at the hands of Netflix. Customers could watch the same movies at relatively similar prices from either movie rental company. Yet, the ease of having a film always ready to watch, versus needing to drive to a store to pick up the flick, delivered the reward faster. The ease of satiating the need and passing through the hook more quickly made all the difference. Movie enthusiasts migrated their habits to Netflix and Blockbuster subsequently filed for bankruptcy.

2. Better Reward

Our brains crave stimulation. Whenever an experience is more satisfying, more interesting, or more rewarding, we want more of it. Sometimes products establish new habits just because using them feels better.

For example, take Snapchat, the massively popular messaging app, which 77 percent of American college students say they use every day. The company is rumored to have turned down a $3 billion acquisition offer by Facebook, conceivably prompted by Mark Zuckerberg’s fear of losing his grip on college kids’ habits.

But why do so many users impulsively open Snapchat instead of Facebook? For many people, Snapchat is more rewarding. Whereas using Facebook involves scrolling through a cluttered newsfeed of ads, posts from distant acquaintances, and messages from tragically uncool relatives, Snapchat delivers pure high-octane excitement.

A defining Snapchat feature is that messages sent through the app can self-destruct — the receiver has just a few seconds to view the image before it’s gone. Facebook posts stay on the Net forever, whereas Snapchat gives users more freedom to share with, shall we say, indiscretion.

In a recent survey, 14 percent of users admitted to sexting on Snapchat. Though the study found that sharing pics of naughty bits doesn’t occur often, it is one example of what makes the app more enticing.

The ability to share spontaneous (and often embarrassing) images without fear they’ll linger on the web generates more interesting messages for the receiver and therefore increases the likelihood of using the app. If a user was to receive two messages simultaneously, one a message on Facebook and the other on Snapchat, it’s the more rewarding app that gets clicked.

3. Higher Frequency

Studies show behaviors done more often have a higher habit-forming potential while those done less often do not usually become routines. When it comes to pulling users away from their existing habits, products that can engage users more frequently than their competitors, have a better shot at bringing users back.

Every few years, a new way of engaging customers becomes possible. What I call an “interface change,” reshuffles the deck of user behavior and creates new opportunities to form habits. For example, successive interface changes occurred with adoption of the personal computer, then widespread Internet connectivity, then mobile devices, and now the coming of wearables. Each created an opportunity to shift customer behavior out of existing routines and into new, more frequently used interfaces.

When Amazon first began selling books online in the 1990s, it made shopping a more frequent behavior by putting the store inside the customer’s home via the Internet. Today, Amazon has become the world’s “everything store” and threatens all offline retailers with the ease and convenience of shopping for whatever whenever. In many households, dropping an item into their Amazon cart is something done nearly every day.

4. Easier In

A characteristic of many habit-forming products is that they are easy to start and hard to stop. By breaking down some barrier to begin using the product, companies have found success wooing users away from competitors.

For example, though Microsoft Office is still the world’s most popular productivity software, the suite has come under attack by rivals such as Google and Apple who each removed a major barrier to start using their software by making it free and easy to use. When Google Docs first launched, it provided a fraction of the functionality offered by Office. But at the time using Office required downloading and paying for the software while Google Docs provided immediate entry.

Over time, learning how to use Google Docs, creating new files and inviting others to share those documents online, all made leaving difficult. The more the product was used, the more the habit took hold.

The Monopoly In The Mind

Habit-forming products utilize four strategies to get inside users’ heads. By shuttling users through the four steps of the hook faster, better, more frequently, or by making it easier to start using the product in the first place, companies can wrestle user habits away from incumbent competitors.

Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by Nir Eyal. Excerpted from his book Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products

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Join celebrated Wall Street Journal Advertising Editor Suzanne Vranica as she leads a panel on media transparency — what Ad Age called one of the biggest stories of 2016.

Learn about a company that is “re-imagining the primary care experience from the ground up,” in this Brand Experience Brief.  Circle Medical Group, is a technology-enabled healthcare start-up whose doctors are available to make house calls 8:00am – 8:00pm seven days a week at no additional charge.  See how it is delivering convenience, transparency, thoroughness, and comfort in a brand experience that serves as an example for all businesses to learn from.

related Brand Experience Briefs:

• Amazon Books Store
• Sharp Healthcare All-Staff Assembly
• Walgreens Chicago flagship store

transcript:

Today you’re going to get a peek into what the future of healthcare looks like.  You’re going to learn about Circle Medical Group, a company that is, in the words of one of its founders, “reimagining the primary care experience from the ground up.”  I discovered the company first as a patient, but was so impressed with what I experienced that I wanted to share it with you as an example of an extraordinary brand experience.

Let me start with some background.  Circle Medical was founded in San Francisco by three tech entrepreneurs in the summer of 2015.  Having gone through Y Combinator’s accelerator program, it raised a 2.9 million dollar seed round, led by Collaborative Fund.   It’s one of several companies that are rethinking the patient experience and using technology to enable a better one.

CEO George Favvas and Chief Medical Officer David Kagan told me they started Circle Medical to change how healthcare works — to create a patient experience around what the patient needs instead of building a healthcare system and squeezing the patient in.  They focus on delivering three benefits.  First, convenience — making it easy to find a doctor, book an appointment, and deal with insurance.  And having doctors available where and when patients want to be seen.

So their app, available in iOS and Android, allows patients to scan your insurance card, find a doctor and make an appointment, chat with your doctor, receive appointment summaries, and check your insurance co-pays and deductibles.  There is no paperwork at all.  The app interface is pretty standard and it made everything simple and seamless, even taking care of insurance for me since Circle Medical is considered in-network for almost all insurance companies in California.

Circle Medical’s doctors are available 8am to 8pm 7 days a week and they make house calls for no extra charge.  In fact only about a third of its individual 3,000 patients go to their offices.  And speaking of their offices, the space functions as an office both for doctors and the start-up so the patient room is a small conference room equipped with a medical table and workstation for the doctor.  But the rest of the place definitely feels more like a tech start-up with its cool industrial feel, open workstations, and bar and game room in the basement.

The second benefit the founders designed the company to deliver is transparency.  David described his frustration with how healthcare is excessively complicated and said he wanted to help patients breakdown what you get and what it means.  The way my doctor explained everything to me and the summary of my appointment that was available afterwards through the app delivered that for me.

Finally, the Circle Medical experience is intended to be thorough.  David observed that both doctors and patients would agree that the typical 7 minutes that a doctor usually spends with a patient isn’t enough time to get and give information and for the patient to feel comfortable with the doctor, so Circle Medical appointments last a half hour.

I personally experienced a fourth important benefit — comfort.  There are four doctors on staff and you can learn about them in videos on the Circle Medical website, so you can relate to them as real people and pick the one who resonates with you.  Also the doctors dress casually so the appointment feels less clinical.  I spent most of my appointment fully-clothed sitting at a small table across from my doctor just talking about my health.  Overall he related to me as a person not a patient.

So from my experience as well as the reviews I found online, I can say Circle Medical delivers on its goal of transforming the primary care experience — and delivering a consumer experience for all businesses to learn from.  There’s a lot more it can do to deliver on its benefits, including integrating with other services, devices, and providers, but as a start-up, it’s definitely on the right track.  Thanks to Circle Medical Group and other companies like it, healthcare is catching up and perhaps maybe will even exceed other industries in delivering extraordinary experiences.

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John Lewis launches L.A. crafted denim for the British high street: AND/OR, its first in-house denim lifestyle brand. Authentically L.A. crafted denim sits at the heart of the brand and is complimented by an impressive range of versatile womenswear, shoes, accessories and lingerie. Playful and youthful, the label channels ease and effortlessness throughout, comprising pieces that seamlessly slot into any wardrobe.

CREATIVE CREDITS:
Agency: adam&eveDDB
Chief Creative Officer: Richard Brim
Written & Art Directed by Creative Team: Selma Ahmed & Genevieve De Rohan Wilner
Chief Executive Officer: Tammy Einav
Business Director: Caroline Grayson
Account Managers: Nina Godinho & Tom Peters
Producers: Matt Craigie Atherton & Amy Coomber
Assistant Producer: Hayley Carter
Strategy: Martin Beverley
Production company: Stink
Director: Samy Mosher
Executive Producer: Tor Fitzwilliams
Producer: Josh Barwick
Cinematographer: Jackson Hunt
Editing Company: Final Cut
Editor: Daniel Sherwen
Post Production: The Mill
Colourist: James Bamford
Producer: Alex Fitzgerald
Audio Post Production: Factory Studios
Audio Engineer: Jack Hallett
Music Supervision: SIREN
Music Supervisor: Sian Rogers
Music Track: Makeba by Jain

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Marketers are under huge pressure to succeed. But how should we judge a successful brand? And what should brands do to stay successful?

Mark Ritson once observed that: “Throughout history, one challenge has done more damage to leading brands than any other: success.” Absolutely. In the wrong hands, brand success quickly breeds complacency. Instead of continuing to accelerate away, some brands call time on pressing home the advantage, and pay a heavy price. Here are six ways that brands count themselves as successful, together with some thoughts on what they should do if they want to stay that way.

1. Everybody Knows Your Name – for some brands, top of mind = top of market. These brands look at the headlines they’re gathering and the social followings they’ve accumulated and judge themselves to be on the road to riches. In fact, the world seems to once again have fallen in love with brands that everyone knows (but that don’t have a business model). Platform is a much-used word today, and on the face of it, seems like the perfect springboard. But influence and authority are useless if they do not convert to cashflow. And that won’t happen ultimately if the business model is unsure, the audience fickle, and the product can be quickly emulated by others.

2. Your Asking Price Is Not Even Being Questioned – the sign of a powerful brand in my view is one that consistently commands a margin beyond what the market naturally assigns. If your brand is highly profitable, that’s one of the most reliable signs of success going. The key thing to watch here is what’s fueling that margin surplus. Brands that are tapping market supply shortfalls or monopolies to drive up profitability should have a “plan B” based on the time-proven assumption that a rival will arrive to spoil the party and take a share of the bonanza. Brands with strong profit-taking driven by customer loyalty need to make sure they have the imagination and the resources to stay surprising. Because brands that lose interest quickly lose advantage.

3. Your Product Is Flying Out The Door – in this age of demand-gen, the focus can quickly shift to revenue at the expense of profitability. Top-line is beguiling because it always seems to reflect the sentiment of the market and the propensity of consumers for more. But ultimately if your cost-per-sale and cost-per-serve are crippling, no amount of backslapping over conversion rates is going to save your brand. As consumer expectations continue to climb, it’s tempting for CMOs under strong demand pressure to succumb to short term tactics to get them through the quarters. But pay a lot of attention to your end return. Sometimes it’s better to throttle supply or find new, more effective ways to sell or serve, in order to re-set what’s coming back by way of returns. As a brand, you always want to be wanted more – but not too much more (because then that’s frustrating).

4. You Are Where Everyone Wants To Be Seen – every brand wants to be available. But you can be too available, too easy to find. And that will drive down interest (by lowering intrigue) and drive up your inventory costs as sales stall. Every brand also wants to be seen in the right places, and for some, particularly start-ups, the prospect of being stocked by a big name retailer can be a real head turner. Almost inevitably though, you’re paying for that privilege on a number of fronts. Truly successful brands look to retain as much control over where they are seen and how they are traded. If presence threatens to cost you control and/or viable margin, you should tread very carefully. You can get plenty of love from being seen in the right places – but that love can also smother you in supply agreement demands that eat your brand from the inside out.

5. Your Customers Queue For Hours – you have customers who are loyal to you, and who buy up whatever you release. You can barely keep up with demand. What could possibly be wrong? Well, it all comes down to who decides these people are loyal. It’s easy for marketers to assign loyalty to a range of seemingly consistent behaviors. But those signals in themselves can be deceptive. Banking on customer loyalty is highly tempting but equally dangerous, because it comes with a bunch of assumptions that foster complacency on the one hand and expectation on the other. The other thing about loyalty is that it can fade or be distracted quicker than ever today. Unlike some, I do believe it exists – to a point – but to nothing like the rates, or anything like the timeframes, that many cite. To get a sense of how vulnerable you are, and therefore how much loyalty leeway you have, look around at companion sectors and ask yourself how contagious their volatility is.

6. Everyone Wants To Know What You Think – once again, influence like awareness is much talked-about today. But you don’t have to look far to see brands and brand owners that captured the ear of the press and were lauded for their business acumen, only to have their businesses disintegrate. When everyone’s asking you questions, are you still prepared to ask yourself the hard questions as a leader? Because without them, your brand can fall away as you become distracted by the attention and the praise. The smartest entrepreneurs treat the media well, and above all treat them with respect, but they also understand that their business is theirs, and that when it impinges on the brand’s business in terms of time and attention, it has the potential to be distracting. If you have influence, leverage it morally and well, but don’t allow the knowledge of it to overly-influence your brand. Compete the way you did to become successful. Leaders that compete as though they deserve leadership, and the respect that comes with it, seldom stay leaders.

Ultimately, success is a state of mind. It’s determined by those in charge of the business, and it influences not just their confidence levels but also their appetites for investment and risk. The way to stay competitive is to be competitive. The brands that stop to admire how well they are doing, that believe they no longer need to compete because they have made it, or that fail to push forward for fear of losing what they have, are the ones that most risk losing what they have fought so hard to gain.

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Most organizations neglect the importance of developing a strong brand culture before communicating their value to the outside world. Management from these companies haven’t thought about how they can expect their employees to deliver a consistent brand experience to their customers when they are not offered a culture of brand consistency themselves.

Humans are reflective beings and we are likely to transmit our experiences with a brand to anyone who approaches us from colleagues to customers, from distributors to suppliers.

Putting brand culture first and making it matter are the main challenges when aiming for a successful brand building strategy from within. There are two approaches to be taken towards building a strong brand culture:

1. Brand Toolbox: Ensure Alignment

There are a few must-haves to facilitate the implementation of a brand toolbox and ensure a better brand culture alignment in an organization:

• Explanation of the brand strategy together with its reasoning and background to help employees understand why your brand does what it does the way it does. A common understanding is important so defining key terms will be of help;
• Detailed principles and guidelines of how your brand should resonate with the outside world and how the company expects its employees to engage as touchpoints;
• Real life examples of how the brand is supposed to be delivered and expressed;
• Map of the decision-making process to assist on the efficacy of your employees’ in taking the lead when necessary.

The brand toolbox is obviously not a brand-style or standards guide. The toolbox is about substance and how you bring your brand to life.

2. Brand Culture Initiatives: Increase Brand Understanding

Rolling out brand culture initiatives or programs is an important part of creating the right alignment within an organization. Participation should not be a privilege or limited to just a few of the company’s departments but an overarching process that includes the entire organization. This will help ensure alignment and communicate the company’s commitment towards creating a sense of ownership of its brand among all stakeholders.

Here are a few ideas on how you can design and execute brand culture initiatives as well as some real life examples from companies who excel at it:

• Deliver dynamic presentations followed by facilitated discussions, games, and interactive exercises (i.e. Starbucks has created a walk-through exercise for its senior level management in which everyone can experience the entire process of making a cup of its coffee from the planting of the coffee seeds to the in-store technology and front-staff service training to creating a common understanding of the brand’s promise);
• Create high-energy creative sessions such as a photo scavenger hunt in which groups photograph examples of brand touchpoints as well as themselves demonstrating the brand’s attributes and values. Engage these groups in assembling a collage of the pictures taken, adding captions and headlines to them, and then explaining the brand’s attributes and values to the other groups;
• A more content-driven session was held by Sony who organized customer listening booths where end users’ experiences were recorded and employees were asked to analyze, evaluate, and give ideas on how the brand experience could be improved based on the feedback they have received;
• A simpler but also effective approach is to conduct a quiz about the brand platform, target customers, and company priorities to ensure understanding and effectiveness of the previously adapted brand toolbox.

Extend Your Brand Culture Externally

IKEA has successfully extended its brand standards, values, and principles throughout its entire network of partners. Everyone connected with IKEA understands the brand’s cultural practices of protecting the environment and its emphasis on creating favorable employee working conditions, to name two.

Adapting a brand toolbox as well as launching brand culture initiatives that include different external stakeholders requires a broad understanding of their needs and perspectives of your brand. It is important that managers understand how to spot brand culture gaps in external partners such as third-party staffing service providers, advertising and marketing agencies, suppliers, channel partners, and others.

Extending your brand culture externally is an important consideration as it provides the opportunity for greater outcomes for all.

Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by Thiago Lucenti, The Concept X

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Today I break with my usual Brand Book Bites format of author interview and book overview to share about the book Shoe Dog:  A Memoir by the Creator of Nike by Phil Knight.  This wonderful book combines corporate memoir (Knight recounts some of the most significant moments in the early years of Nike’s founding) with personal confessional (Knight reveals with surprising candor his fears, vulnerabilities, and mistakes).  I suggest you read Bill Gates’ write-up about the book which perfectly captures its essence.  And while I agree with Gates’ assessment that it doesn’t seem Knight set out to teach the reader anything, I do think it conveys some important lessons and observations about starting a business and building a brand — and that is what I want to share here.  So here a just a few of the gems of wisdom that I gleaned from Shoe Dog:

Running a business is — or should be — like running itself.  I’ve found that too many people operate their businesses as if it were only a means to an end — making lots of money, selling lots of stuff, being “successful.”  All of that can be true, but it also seems that running a business can be an end unto itself.  The motivation can, or as Knight seems to suggest, must come from within yourself.

In writing about his idea to start a running shoe company, Knight observed, “Few ideas are as crazy as my favorite thing, running. It’s hard. It’s painful. It’s risky. The rewards are few and far from guaranteed. When you run around an oval track, or down an empty road, you have no real destination. At least, none that can fully justify the effort. The act itself becomes the destination. It’s not just that there’s no finish line; it’s that you define the finish line. Whatever pleasures or gains you derive from the act of running, you must find them within. It’s all in how you frame it, how you sell it to yourself.”

Believe in what you’re doing — or no one else will.  As an entrepreneur, you must be utterly convinced that what you’re doing is worth doing if you expect anyone else to do so also.  As Knight reflected on why he was so much better at selling shoes than mutual funds, he asked himself, “So why was selling shoes so different? Because, I realized, it wasn’t selling. I believed in running. I believed that if people got out and ran a few miles every day, the world would be a better place, and I believed these shoes were better to run in. People, sensing my belief, wanted some of that belief for themselves. Belief, I decided. Belief is irresistible.”

Managing inventory, not marketing, is the key to your viability.  A wise colleague of mine Jeff Harbaugh often writes in his MarketWatch column for the action sports industry about how managing inventory is more important than marketing these days.  It’s a concept that many brand-builders bristle at, but even Knight, perhaps one of the greatest brand-builders of our time, believes it.  He wrote, “Supply and demand is always the root problem in business. It’s been true since Phoenician traders raced to bring Rome the coveted purple dye that colored the clothing of royals and rich people; there was never enough purple to go around. It’s hard enough to invent and manufacture and market a product, but then the logistics, the mechanics, the hydraulics of getting it to the people who want it, when they want it—this is how companies die, how ulcers are born.”

Your brand should characterize your culture, and vice versa.  In my book, What Great Brands Do, I explain that Great Brands Start Inside — meaning, great brands start brand-building by cultivating a strong brand-led culture inside their organizations.  Nike’s story supports and explains this notion that brand and culture are inextricably linked.

When Knight was trying to convince an attorney, Rob Strasser, to join the company after having represented it in a lawsuit, Knight said to him, “You’re one of us.”  “One of us,” Knight wrote, “[Strasser] knew what those words meant. We were the kind of people who simply couldn’t put up with corporate nonsense. We were the kind of people who wanted our work to be play. But meaningful play. We were trying to slay Goliath, and though Strasser was bigger than two Goliaths, at heart he was an utter David. We were trying to create a brand, I said, but also a culture. We were fighting against conformity, against boringness, against drudgery. More than a product, we were trying to sell an idea—a spirit.”

Be clear on the #1 thing you must do.  “Pay Nissho first.”  Knight wrote that this mantra was “my morning chant, my nightly prayer, my number one priority.”  Knight explained that he had concluded that paying his secondary bank, Nissho, was the #1 thing he and his company had to do every month in order to keep their line of credit at their primary bank secure — and they had to do that in order to have the cash to run the business.  Having that clarity kept the company alive.  Every leader needs to have such clarity.

Business is a noble cause.  Knight said it all:  “It seems wrong to call it ‘business.’ It seems wrong to throw all those hectic days and sleepless nights, all those magnificent triumphs and desperate struggles, under that bland, generic banner: business. What we were doing felt like so much more…We wanted, as all great businesses do, to create, to contribute, and we dared to say so aloud. When you make something, when you improve something, when you deliver something, when you add some new thing or service to the lives of strangers, making them happier, or healthier, or safer, or better, and when you do it all crisply and efficiently, smartly, the way everything should be done but so seldom is—you’re participating more fully in the whole grand human drama. More than simply alive, you’re helping others to live more fully, and if that’s business, all right, call me a businessman. Maybe it will grow on me.”

related:

brand book bites from Onward by Starbucks CEO Schultz

In CSR, Nike Just Does It

brand book bites from Birth of a Brand by UGG Founder Brian Smith

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This session will examine the enforcement landscape and consider best practices for navigating the world of disclosures.

TED Residents Steve Rosenbaum and Nikki Allen Webber break the ice (that’s Alison Cornyn in the background). [Photo: Dian Lofton / TED]

On March 6, TED welcomed its latest class to the TED Residency program. As an in-house incubator for breakthrough ideas, Residents spend four months in the TED office with other exceptional people from all over the map. Each has a project that promises to make a significant contribution to the world, across several different fields.

The new Residents include:

• A technologist working on app to promote world peace
• An entrepreneur whose packaging business wants to break America’s addiction to plastic
• A documentarian profiling young people of color grappling with mental-health challenges
• A journalist telling the stories of families and friends affected by deportation
• A programmer who wants to teach kids how to code … without computers
• A writer-photographer chronicling the lives of Chinese takeout workers in New York City
• A scientist studying an easier path to deeper sleep

TED Resident alumnus Cavaughn Noel and new TED Resident Evita Turquoise Robinson come together for the TEDStart event. [Photo: Dian Lofton / TED]

At the end of the program, Residents have the opportunity to give a TED Talk about their work and ideas in the theater at TED HQ. Read more about each Resident below:

The daughter of Syrian immigrants , Maytha Alhassen just received her Ph.D. in American Studies & Ethnicity from USC. She was co-editor of Demanding Dignity: Young Voices From the Front Lines of the Arab Revolutions, and her current work focuses on dignity’s central role in liberation movements.

Farhad Attaie wants to sound an alarm: child health is on the decline for the first time in generations. He is a co-founder of hellosmile, a community-focused healthcare startup that promotes preventative care for children.

Carlos Augusto Bautista Isaza is a Colombian creative technologist and interactive engineer whose work focuses on improving information access. He is currently developing MineSafe, a crowdsourced repository of safe walking paths for areas affected by landmines.

Jackson Bird is a video creator and activist. Since publicly coming out as transgender on YouTube, he has been using digital media to amplify transgender voices and promote accurate, respectful representation of transgender people.

New York–based designer Wendy Brawer is the creator of the Green Map, a tool that uses distinctive iconography to denote green-living, natural, social, and cultural resources. Locally led in 65 countries, GreenMap.org will soon relaunch with a new, open approach to inspire greater action on climate health and environmental justice among residents and travelers alike.

Formerly director of the MediaLab at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Marco Antonio Castro Cosío is a designer and technologist. His current project is Bus Roots, a program that puts gardens on the roofs of city buses—to capture rainwater and add green space while also providing a virtual-reality learning experience inside.

Award-winning artist Alison Cornyn is using photography and historical documents to create “Incorrigibles,” an installation and web platform that investigates the incarceration of young women in the US. She also teaches at the School of Visual Arts Design for Social Innovation MA program.

Daniel Gartenberg is a sleep scientist who is testing a new way to detect and improve sleep quality using wearable devices. He is validating his invention in collaboration with Penn State, the National Science Foundation and the National Institute of Aging.

Journalist Duarte Geraldino is documenting the stories of US citizens who’ve lost friends and family to deportation. In the process, he is creating a national archive and shared resource to gauge the impact of the evolving US immigration policy.

TED Resident Bayete Ross Smith, a multimedia artist, meets fellow Resident Fred Kahl, also known at the Coney Island sideshow as sword swallower the Great Fredini. [Dian Lofton / TED]

Anurag Gupta is the founder and CEO of Be More, a social enterprise that employs proven training programs to eradicate unconscious bias. He is also an attorney and a mindfulness expert.

In her two decades of interviewing women and girls, filmmaker and journalist Sue Jaye Johnson documented dozens of stories about the isolation of shame. Now she is focusing on healthy, real-life sex stories from across generations, cultures and orientations—to expand the idea of what’s normal, what’s possible, and who we are as sexual beings.

Fred Kahl, a.k.a. the Great Fredini, is an artist, designer, magician, sword swallower and inventor who uses technology, imagination and play to create surreal, magical experiences. His project is a virtual reality recreation of Coney Island’s famous Luna Park—a turn-of-the-20th-century attraction that showcased fantasy architecture and technological futurism.

Anindya Kundu is a sociologist who studies the qualities that enable disadvantaged students to succeed, despite personal, social and institutional challenges. His book, Achieving Agency, is forthcoming.

A native of Finland, Linda Liukas is the creator of Hello Ruby, a children’s book that teaches programming skills without a computer. A programmer herself, Linda wants to make computers big again—so big that a child can crawl inside and learn how it works from the inside out.

TED Resident Paul Tasner, a first-time entrepreneur at 71, gets to know creative technologist Carlos Bautista, also a new Resident. [Photo: Dian Lofton / TED]

Beth Malone is an artist, curator and social entrepreneur who’s exploring ways art can reimagine (and improve) environment and circumstance. In her case, that includes coping with her father’s dementia, and helping others understand what it may mean if they are confronted with the disease.

Leslie Martinez is a designer and researcher who works at the intersection of immigration and design. She recently organized Hack the Ban, a hackathon that matched creatives and technologists with organizations supporting the Muslim and immigrant communities of New York City.

Matthew Nolan is a social entrepreneur and technologist who founded and developed Verona, an app that promotes world peace by introducing users to others with opposing views.

Evita Turquoise Robinson is the creator of the Nomadness Travel Tribe—a celebration of cultural harmony and curiosity spread by some 15,000 likeminded travelers of color. She is now considering what might happen if black communities use their buying power to invest in international property, while retaining a sense of social and economic consciousness.

Steven Rosenbaum is a digital entrepreneur, filmmaker, author and journalist (7 Days In September, MTV Unfiltered, Curation Nation). He sees the “fake news” crisis as an invitation to rethink the presentation of news, and help consumers tell the difference between fact and opinion.

Bayeté Ross Smith is a multimedia artist who is on the faculty at NYU and the International Center of Photography. His new project examines the mindset and traditions of people of color who serve in combat for the US military, despite knowing that they will continue to face oppression when they return home.

Writer-photographer Katie Salisbury is working on a multimedia project that will tell the stories of Chinese takeout workers in New York City and also examine the significance of Chinese food in American culture.

Disinterested in retirement, Paul Tasner instead launched PulpWorks, Inc., a packaging company that uses only waste paper, agricultural byproducts and textiles as raw materials. His goal is to reduce the billions of pounds of plastic packaging that enter our oceans, waterways and landfills each year.

After losing her nephew to suicide, Emmy-winning TV producer Nikki Webber Allen made it her mission to spark awareness of mental health issues in the African-American community. She believes that the cultural stigma of mental illness in communities of color keeps many people from seeking help, and she is working on a documentary to tell the candid stories of young people dealing with these disorders.

Applications for the Fall 2017 class (which runs September 11 to December 15) open on April 15 at ted.com/residency

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