“DESIGN BECAME IDENTITY, IDENTITY BECAME BRANDING, BRANDING BECAME LIVING IT.”
PETER KNAPP,LANDOR
INTRODUCTION
FOR MOST OF THE LAST CENTURY, COMPANIES HAD A CORPORATE LOGO, AND DEPENDING ON THEIR
BUSINESS, THEY MIGHT ALSO HAVE HAD CONSUMER BRANDS. IN THOSE DAYS, BRAND GENERALLY REFERRED TO A PRODUCT RATHER THAN A SERVICE. THE LOGO AND THE BRANDS THAT SAT BENEATH IT WERE SEEN AS WAYS OF EXPRESSING WHAT THE COMPANY DID, WHICH NORMALLY MEANT
WHAT PRODUCT THE COMPANY SOLD.
In the 1980s and 1990s, more competitors entered the marketplace through market
forces and deregulation, which in turn triggered mergers and acquisitions. With
so many players after consumers’ money, companies increasingly needed to differentiate their offers.
But as products and services came to resemble each other more and more closely in terms of quality and cost, this became difficult. It was then that people began to realise that their brand and its values (that is, what it stood for) were one of the few noticeable differentiators.
Towards the end of the century, there was the realisation that a strong brand could stretch or even jump into other sectors – so supermarkets got into financial services, and the UK chemist Boots paired up with the UK TV producers Granada to launch a Wellbeing TV channel.
The continued commercialisation of so many elements of life means that in recent times, branding skills have been extended into hitherto untouched sectors.
The charity sector (Scope), pop music (Hear’Say), football clubs (Manchester United), and even countries (Spain and Estonia), see themselves as competing for audiences, and branding consultancies have leapt in. Hence whole sectors have been put through the positioning and branding mill in a way that would have been unthinkable ten or 20 years ago.
At the same time, there has been a blurring of the boundaries between product and service. There is hardly a product out there which does not have some service element, even if it is just a call centre to field complaints about faulty goods. This raises issues around the manifestation of the brand – where and how it is seen and by whom – and how the people who work with it behave.
Design Week magazine editor Lynda Relph-Knight describes this move as being “away from a manufacturing company to a service company, that is from product to branding and service, where you are selling a promise”.
This move was also away from a purely visual manifestation of a corporate or brand culture, which approach, she says, didn’t take into account a company’s “touchy-feely things”, except perhaps its office reception area.
The key is experience. “Design became identity, identity became branding, branding became living it,” says Peter Knapp at Landor in London. Audience expectations have changed so that products now need to create an experience around the transaction or interaction with them. From clothing accessories label Mandarina Duck opening individually designed ‘embassies’ to the deodorant Lynx’s (now defunct)
barbershop chain, the emphasis is on intensifying the customer experience to encourage them to stay loyal.
THERE IS AN EVERGROWING NUMBER OF PLATFORMS FOR BRANDS. THIS MEANS
IMBUING EACH OF THEM WITH THE RELEVANT BRAND VALUES.
In the 1990s these experiences were intended, in part at least, to counter the threat of e-commerce. That threat has largely abated for the moment, but the need to create meaningful experiences continues. FMCGs (fastmoving consumer goods) are unable
to control every retail environment – and what position they take on shelf – but they can control at least some if they create their own stores. Hence the Guinness Storehouse experience by Imagination, the Lucky Strike concept shop in Amsterdam by Fitch, and BDP’s NikeTown.
Staff are now seen as the most important ambassadors a product or service
can have. They provide the human interaction with that other core audience, the customer, as well as the investors, analysts and suppliers. If staff are not ‘on brand’, the reputation of that product or service will suffer. Hence the huge amount of work that is going on in internal communications, or what is now known in some quarters as internal branding. This includes schemes which reward staff whose behaviour reflects specific brand values. BP has worked on this with Landor and Enterprise IG, and Fitch is helping the Belgian post office De Post do this. Global communications network WPP is so keen on the sector that it bought in one of the UK’s internal marketing specialists, MCA Group.
There is an ever-growing number of platforms for brands. Intranet sites, merchandise, office interiors, showrooms,exhibitions, live events, sponsorship,
internal communications, and even the very sound a product or service makes are all seen as needing to be ‘on message’. This means imbuing them each with the relevant brand values.
For all these platforms have any number of treasured audiences. And some people fall into more than one audience category, so the message must be clear and consistent.
However, the pool of adjectives from which companies take their values is not so big, and there is the risk of repetition and missing that Holy Grail – differentiation. That’s where the expression of those values by the consultancy comes into play. ‘Innovative and caring’ can mean different things to different companies, depending on the way it’s expressed through their literature, office interiors, staff behaviour, internet site, sound, sponsorship programmes and such like.
Wetwipe
The humble wetwipe is proof that branding need not be about logos. This is not just any wetwipe, but that of Scandinavian airline SAS. Stockholm Design Lab worked on brand development and implementation for the airline’s revamp following initial work by FutureBrand in the UK.
SAS’s wetwipe is the most popular in the airline industry. They know this from surveying what’s left on passengers’ meal trays, and it is the most stolen item off any tray.
The reason for this, according to SDL’s Göran Lagerström, is that this item is totally unbranded. “It’s the most stolen item because it’s fairly goodlooking
and you need a wetwipe, but you don’t want to walk around with advertising. It becomes yours because it’s unnamed.” And at the same time, he claims, it becomes SAS’s identity.
This understated approach to branding – Wolff Olins showed it off to great effect with Orange – is more in keeping with today’s consumer, says Largerström.
“This process works because people have been violated by overexposure.”
The average airline has more
THERE IS A FEELING AMONG SOME CLIENT BRAND MANAGERS AND MARKETERS THAT RASH IDENTITY OVERHAULS OR UNNECESSARY NAME CHANGES CAN THROW THE BABY OUT WITH THE
BATH WATER.
The season for name changes and identity overhauls has been and gone – for the time being. Only a company that has to, changes its name; whether that’s for legal reasons, like Andersen Consulting becoming Accenture (courtesy of Landor), or to improve perception (like Interbrand’s renaming of the Spastics Society to Scope), or for expansion reasons, like Wolff Olins’ name, Orange, becoming the brand for all Hutchinson Telecom’s businesses.
And anyway, there is a feeling among some client brand managers and marketers that rash identity overhauls or unnecessary name changes can throw the baby out with the bath water. The UK Post Office holding group’s unpopular transformation into Consignia (by Dragon) could fall into this category. Staff, the press and the public alike were baffled at the reasons behind the change, the meaning of the new name,
and the sentiments supposedly incorporated in the logo.
BRANDING IS A RELATIVELY MODERN PHENOMENON, THE INDUSTRY THAT
SERVES IT IS STILL YOUNG, AND OWNERSHIP OF THE WORD “BRAND” HAS YET TO SETTLE WITH
ONE PARTICULAR TYPE OF BUSINESS.
And as clients are now tightening their marketing budgets, major overhauls are seen as an indulgence. Much better, they seem to be thinking, to work with what we’ve got and improve the expression of our existing marque. This is what Interbrand is doing with Orange, what SiegelGale did with Motorola and Dow in the US, and what Enterprise IG did with BT. Some consultancies even advise against making massive changes if they think a refreshment of the ‘look and feel’ of a brand is all that’s needed. This is exactly what Fitch did with Hush Puppies.
This means that brand consultancies’ relationships with some clients have changed from being on a (usually very costly) project basis, to a brand guardian role. It may not sound as sexy, but it’s steady work and keeps the consultancy near the top of the food chain – since it is the CEO who is likely to make any decision regarding his company’s brand.
However, all this manifestation work should not mean bland uniformity. In fact predictable consistency has been replaced by variety.
Either the logo itself is adaptable, as in the case of GBH’s Teleconnect, and Allevio’s identity for eLearning in Austria, or the execution is varied. Audiences
are now sophisticated enough to be able to recognise a product or service without being swamped with actual logo applications. Good branding means the values are expressed beyond the logo.
Take Wolff Olins’ Orange and The Economist magazine (which was worked on by FutureBrand through MetaDesign), both of which are easily identifiable by their literature or advertising without the logo on view. This is what Landor has tried to achieve with its branding of BMI British Midlands.
Fitch is having a similar experience:
“We’ve found that we are taking brands beyond where they have traditionally been,” says John Mathers at Fitch in London. For example, the consultancy is advising Premier Automotive Group merchandise strategy for Ford and Jaguar.
Brands therefore need to cross an increasing variety of platforms, reaching specific or sometimes multiple audiences. They need to be able to carry a new business offer, and to tie up with an unlikely partner. This means the branding has to be strong and flexible.
Writen by : CLARE DOWDY
