Why Branding needs to Evolve
Ask a regular person about branding, and they'll tell you about logos and colors and packaging. But visit any branding agency website, and there'll be paragraphs of text on how they've changed the fortune of companies before any actual showcase of work.
Worse still, the customer experience for a lot of brands is completely disparate. Obviously gone are the days when you can visit a store and get advice from the owner, or peek around the back and look at the craftsmen hard at work. But with the increase in the number of platforms and touchpoints just seems to come an increase in inconsistency.
Once you've bought the product, the flashy store will quickly be replaced by a dingy service center or frustratingly under-trained call center. They've already got your money so why do they care? A strong serious corporate website might lead to a twitter or instagram page that's re -sharing memes or jokes. Social media is supposed to attract "the youth" right?
Today, the brand is again handled by a large number of different agencies, each with their own take on what the right direction for the brand is. Apart from the internal branding or marketing team, and the leadership of the company, the brand consultancies, business consultancies, traditional advertising agencies, digital marketing agencies, even E-commerce platforms and IT agencies, all present their own take on an overarching brand plan.
And then each touchpoint has its own set of specialists with their opinions on what works best. The retail designer will talk about the stories the space should tell. The packaging designer will tell you about how they can't print the color you want, so they've switched to the next closest shade. The paper supplier will tell you about his new metallic papers. The printer will tell you about he can also design and make your POS solutions.
This leads to a completely incoherent customer experience, as the website, social media, and packaging are all speaking a different language, none of which are the language of the brand. They're all supposedly optimised for their specific medium. But they're all based around standard templates. After all, you can't fundamentally change the format of a YouTube ad or an Instagram post. And Google and Facebook have their own guidelines for how to optimise branding for a Youtube ad or Instagram post.
It's easy to look at this whole mess and say, "that's just the way things are". Or "each medium has its limitations". But the customer doesn't care. They just see an inconsistent brand. And until you can have a sales rep standing at each touchpoint explaining in great detail why the illustration on instagram doesn't look like the illustration on the pack, the company isn't going to be able to make its case.
All the consultants in all the agencies that claim to be "Brand Custodians" don't really care either. Their big strategies tend to push their own offerings. They might even use a standardised template for all their clients. Or even worse, a standardised thought process. If they truly cared about the brand they would invest in it. They would track the success in a way that could be directly attributed to the change in branding. They would work on every single touchpoint. But it's much easier to just give a guideline PDF and collect a cheque. And the sales and marketing teams will be left to make head or tails of it.
I'm not saying branding isn't important to business. You can build a successful company without the most stellar branding, but it's a much harder journey. I feel that good branding doesn't have to fundamentally alter the nature of the business to be successful. It's one thing to have a view on how budgets should be divided. It's another to try and change the business model. It's one thing to claim that customers were impressed with the new branding. It's another thing entirely to claim that the success of the company was due to the branding. Correlation doesn't equal causation. And there are a myriad of contextual factors which can lead to the success or failure of a brand, which are almost never tracked. Most importantly it downplays the efforts of leadership. After all, they decided to bring in an agency and invest in branding in the first place.
Branding agencies need to evolve. But not in the direction of changing business (because at that point, might as well become an investor or an incubator. There's certainly a lot more money to be made there). No, branding agencies need to evolve to cover a larger portion of the customer experience. And to cover a wider range of senses and experiences.
For as long as we've had radio ads, we've had jingle writers and composers. We've had musical logos and motifs (Coca Cola's "Pop and Fizz" came not from a Coke bottle, but from Suzanne Ciani's Buchla synth). We've also had sonic interfaces, from the beeping of a microwave, to Brian Eno and Robert Fripp's Windows startup themes.
For as long as we've had mass production, we've had industrial designers sculpt and shape products into iconic forms. Raymond Loewy shaped Coca-Cola bottles and more importantly Coke's fountains and fridges. Bernbach's famous Volkswagen ads were based around the peculiarities of Ferdinand Porsche's design. And his other iconic design, the 911, is more important to Porsche than their logo. Hell, Walter Landor was an Industrial Designer.
Look around and you'll see plenty of other examples of "branding" that extend far beyond visual identity. Apple's minimalist stores and their "aluminium everything" aesthetic. Ikea's stores and their flatpack, DIY process. "Hello Moto", the PlayStation Icons, the Canon DSLR shape. And these are all old, existing examples.
Today there's more scope to experiment than ever before. Chatbot tone of voice. VR stores. AR Shopping. Voice Assistants. But these are still existing technologies. The fun part comes in the things I haven't yet thought about.
And how about behavioural economics? Cognitive Biases? Dark Patterns? How often are we getting into Gestalt Psychology when talking about logo design? Or into morpheme relevance when talking about naming? There's a whole world of research techniques that are just starting to be used in branding.
So why are branding agencies still stuck with their convoluted decks and guidelines? Even in the limited scope of just making a logo, there's a lot of fun to be had; if it’s based around user experiences. Just take a look at Bruce Mau's work for Sonos. Standards Manual, a company built on glorifying brand manuals from the past, is creating a tool to make guideline books actually useful to clients. Even they understand the how useless that guideline PDF actually is. Even within the realm of "visual identity" there's so much scope to grow.
It certainly isn't a capability issue. You no longer need specialists to create this stuff. Any hack with access to the Internet can learn how to do this. The device you're reading this on can probably teach you all you need to know, and even help create a lot of these experiences.
No, the issue goes deeper than that. Branding has become a sort of template. Most agencies no longer question the scope of branding, nor the importance. They deliver a standardised template, and pat themselves on the back for changing the world. But just as companies realised that they could save money on a TV ad and run a purely digital campaign, they'll soon start to realise that an online logo creator and a couple of web fonts can replace a branding agency. Especially if all you're going to get after months of work and rounds of "strategy" is a lower case Sans Serif logo. And as Muji has shown, you can build a successful brand by emphasising thoughtful design over flashy branding.
It's time for branding agencies to evolve. They need to look at different senses and different experiences. Move beyond delivering a logo. Some agencies have started this journey decades in the past. Some have already put in the steps and invested in expanding their capabilities. But the vast majority of small shops need to start and grow and become relevant for a larger portion of the customer experience.
Instead of just talking about revolutionising businesses, they need to focus on creating actual revolutionary branded elements and experiences.