Whatever

Branding. What is a brand? And what isn’t it? A brand is not a logo, nor a trademark. A brand is a character, and people instantly recognise what it is; it is a person’s gut feel about what the product or service or company is about. It’s everything about a company. Yes, the logo is important. But so is the way you answer the phone, or how you dress when you go to a meeting – every point of customer contact. There’s no point in having a smart, professional visual identity and then turning up at an important meeting wearing torn jeans and trainers. Having a funky, modern, young visual identity and turning up in a suit and tie is equally self-defeating.

Fairly obvious stuff, but so many people fail to look beyond the logo. In order to create a successful brand identity, the designer needs to really understand the company. But first, the company really needs to understand itself. To really analyse what it stands for, what its personality is. And if the company hasn’t done that, it’s up to the designer to ask the right questions.

Once everyone’s agreed on what the real ethos of the company is, hopefully distilled down into a pithy sentence or two, then the brand can be built. The misconception is that a brand is built from scratch. It isn’t. The designer or marketing expert should merely be taking what’s already there and enhancing and amplifying it.

So why is it important? Well, there used to be a thing called a ‘USP’, or ‘Unique selling proposition’. It was the essence of a company, the thing that made them different to their competitors, and it was this that the advertising gurus of the day would try to sell. The problem is, there are now so many companies in every area, it’s very hard to find a really unique thing about what they actually do. One beer is pretty much like another, even cars are all fairly similar nowadays. The brand is what differentiates them, gives them a personality, makes them appeal to a particular target market more than the next identikit euro-mobile or tasteless lager. Sometimes, the brand personality is completely spurious, based on nothing more than a random thought plucked from the air by a marketing executive. Those brands don’t tend to last long. The ones that succeed are the ones that are based on something more tangible, a real personality or company ethos. Virgin is an obvious example, being based on the actual personality of Richard Branson, but there are plenty of others. Nike – another fairly obvious example – have built a really strong brand based on serious sportswear for serious athletes – the trainers live up to the hype, otherwise those famous sportspeople wouldn’t be wearing them, right?

The internet has also changed things when it comes to branding, particularly social media. Twitter, Facebook etc can be great for enhancing  your brand positioning, but they can also spread negative stories incredibly quickly. Apparently, the average consumer mentions specific brands over 90 times per week during conversations with friends, family and co-workers.

Sounds fantastic for marketers. But here’s the problem: not all of these messages are positive. What’s more, dissatisfied consumers are typically more vocal, taking to platforms like Twitter and Facebook to complain. Companies that aren’t quick to respond to these messages can find themselves overwhelmed with negative mentions, rapidly losing control of the situation… and their reputation. Brands that don’t live up to their promises are found out quickly, making it even more important that the branding is right, that is doesn’t overpromise and underdeliver, and that it’s saying the right things to the right people.

A good brand will deliver whatever message you’re trying to put across more clearly. It should make a company appear credible – assuming it’s an appropriate brand for that particular marketplace (back to the suit and trainers again). It should connect in some way with the target audience, and providing the reality lives up to the brand, it should bring them back again.  It’s a promise to the customer. A brand isn’t just something cooked up on a computer by those guys in skinny jeans and rimless glasses. It’s the essence of a company. The branding should simply reflect what the company already is. So what’s your brand?

Spec work, crowdsourcing, free pitching, whatever you call it, it’s big news at the moment. In one particularly ironic example, the UK government have just launched a site called Startup Britain. I’m not going to give it any traffic by linking to it here – it’s basically a load of big companies offering 10% off if you use them to startup your business. The idea has it’s heart in the right place I guess, but it’s turned out to be a massive own goal for the Government, who evidently didn’t count on the power of bad internet PR. I’ll give it a month till it’s taken down or at least radically altered. Anyway, part of it that’s got the design company fuming is the bit where it says you should get  a logo designed for your business (true) and  - here’s where it gets good – that you should go to the short list of crowdsourcing sites they’ve decided to include, at least one of which is based in America to get it done. I’m so appalled by that I can’t even begin to put it into words of more than four letters. The reasons crowdsourcing is bad news for both designers and clients are myriad, and if you don’t know what they are, you bloody should. Nospec.com is probably the best site for bringing all the information together about why crowdsourcing your design is a Bad Thing.

So if you’re a client, or a designer, please don’t. Thankyou.

Some more links on the subject…

Leighton Hubbell Logos

Graphic Design Forums

Logodesign Love

12ft Interactive – Why spec work is bad for the client

Monkeyshine media – it’s bad for business

And many many more…

Innocent drinks is a great brand. No two ways about it. Great design, lovely copy, good ethos and above all, good products.

So it’s not surprising that everyone seems to want to copy them. “I want to be like Innocent Drinks.” Why? do you make smoothies? No. And do you run your business, in a quirky, unconventional way? No. So why do you want that kind of image? A company should want the image that fits them. And it’s up to the branding expert to find out what that image is. How do they work? What kind of ethos do they have? And most importantly, what do they do? Those kind of questions should be at the heart of every branding and marketing project, rather than that off-the shelf type solutions that seem to be getting more and more prevalent.

It used to be that everyone wanted to be like Audi. Now it’s Innocent. Maybe Twitter next…

As I drive around the countryside, I sometimes come across this sign. ‘Farmer’s Own seed.’ It never fails to make me smile. (Maybe I’ve just got a very immature sense of humour.) The point is this: Every farmer who sells seeds seems to use the same wording. Wording which is obviously open to amusing misinterpretation by childish people like me. So why do they all use it? Why not put ‘Seeds direct from the farm,’ for example? Are they even aware of the connotations?

To be fair, that’s quite a flippant example. There are others:

Firstly, the infamous recent Ilfracombe rebranding.

Now, it’s not a horrible looking logo (although you can really tell the client wanted to ‘Do an Innocent.’
The designer, Tessa Martin, said: “The new Ilfracombe logo, with its idiosyncratic ‘swirl’ above the ‘i’ indicates intrigue, mystery and drama expressed with a spot of humour and fun too .It also reflects the twists and turns of the landscape and can conjure up thoughts of the seaside, sea, an ice cream, the harbour and fish.”

No Tessa, IT LOOKS LIKE A SPERM. No amount of post rationalisation design marketing speak will stop people seeing that. So, how can this happen? How can a logo go through all the meetings, consultations and amendments this one has undoubtedly gone through without someone going “Ummm, but doesn’t it look like one of my little soldiers?” And this to brand a town with the second highest teenage pregnancy rate in Devon.

1. Well, maybe the designer was having a laugh and seeing how far it would go. It does happen, trust me.

2. Or maybe people really didn’t see it until it was too late.

3. Maybe the designer didn’t see it and bamboozled the client with words like ‘Ideosyncratic swirl’ in order to sell it to them.

4. Or, and this I think is closer to what actually happens in these cases, people saw it but chose not to say anything. Creatives can be intimidating people, standing up persuasively, and often rightly, for their work. And feedback meetings can be intimidating places, nobody wanting to say the wrong thing in case they sound stupid. So perhaps someone did see the sperm, but nobody liked to say. It’s called groupthink, and it happens all the time in meetings. You could also call it ‘Emperor’s new clothes syndrome.’

Here’s another one:

Now, I’m not sure why he’s got all those tissues, but it doesn’t look like he’s gonna blow his nose…

The Favourite Website Awards people’s choice award for 2009 is a beautiful website from a band called Labuat. Don’t know much more than that because it’s all in Spanish. But that doesn’t matter… http://soytuaire.labuat.com/