It is not enough for a brand to be desirable and nice-looking. To gain and maintain visibility in an information-rich world, brands have to be distinctive. Innovative brands manage even more: They engage and create pride in both the audience and the company’s employees.
But how do you create an innovative brand? First you have to give design rules a lower priority and rather concentrate on making the brand communicate well. A brand should feel emancipating and not restraining. It should inspire both the people working with it and the overall audience. Second, and perhaps even more important, you have to think flexibility. The brand has to be able to operate freely in various media channels.
Flexible brands
Technological progress and changing media habits have altered what we expect of brands. Visual appearance no longer means a fixed set of logo, typography (font), colour and other graphical elements. Innovative brands are changing to flexible multi channel tools for inspiration and engagement. The influential brand business Wolff Olins’ work for clients like London 2012 (the Olympic Games), New Museum (New York) and Beeline (a Russian mobile communication company) are good examples of how flexible solutions give brands new dimensions and possibilities, and how strong visual brands can be innovative and still easily recognizable and characteristic.
London 2012 is an emblem with a fixed outline and lettering and some primary colours, but everybody is free to fill it with images and other colours. The emblem has been received with mixed feelings, but the brands success will not be determined until after the Olympic Games. New Museum’s logo is flexible in another way, it consists of a visual expression and identity system that features colour and language that moves and flexes. This makes it instantly recognizable and constantly renewable. For Beeline the challenge was to become a brand that could stand apart and compete effectively in an already saturated Russian mobile market. The very easily recognizable black and yellow stripes on otherwise completely different objects have made the brand to the most valuable in Russia for three consecutive years. Still, what makes all three of them easily recognizable are some character trait kept solid.
A diversified media landscape
In the previous issue of Brand New we wrote about online marketing and how new media habits have challenged the marketing business. Visual branding is meeting the same kind of challenges for the same reason. Today’s diversified media landscape and growing competition makes it much harder to come across and get attention, we get bored much faster. Modern society is information-rich and time-poor. Brands no longer only have to convince us, they also have to be compelling and entertaining.
Working with branding is challenging for another reason too, companies
no longer have the same control over how their brand is going to be received as they used to. A brand is not what the company says it is.
A brand is all about how people feel about it. The new rules of branding
are defined by the public and new ways of communication has made it much easier for consumers to express what they think about a brand. For the younger generations, not used to anything else, this is how they expect it to be, for the older generations this has started to be a preferred way to communicate to.
Breaking rules
The change in media consumption is a driving force in the transformation
from static to flexible and dynamic brands. The technological progress
has made this transition much easier and inexpensive. Flexibility has turned into a surviving capacity. It is a way for brands to change appearances and operate freely in various media channels and it makes them able to renew themselves and keep attention. It enables brands to gain and keep visibility not only targeting diversified audiences, but also over time. This is how a brand can evade commoditization. But flexibility is nothing new. The Michelin Man, or Bibendum, has had it as a character trait since the launche in 1898. The Michelin brand has tended to break most design rules since the beginning, he smiles, waves, runs and folds his arms. The actions do not erode Michelin’s brand recognition — he is still the Michelin Man. He has, like most strong brands, another trait to; he is so easily recognizable that he can stand on his own, without a name. And he has, again like other successful brands, managed to get his own fan club.
Solidity
Still, this does not mean that all the different parts of a brand should be flexible and changeable. There should always be a few strong characteristics in a brand. It just does not longer have to be all the traditional traits: logo, lettering, colours and other graphical elements. It can be just one of them or it can, and often should be, something totally different.The black and white tire form has always been the stable traits for
the Michelin Man. Even if the version appearing now is somewhat slicker than the original, he still is the same. Nike’s swoosh and Apple’s colourful apple are two other flexible brands easy to identify and who also can stand on their own, without the brand name. Absolute Vodka, another highly recognizable brand, has managed to build a unique flexibility around its brand in a somewhat different way. The shaping of the bottle with different elements is the main constant characteristic in the campaign, and it has made it to one of the longest living ones.
Changing rules
Innovative brands are breaking and changing the rules, with success. And even if it is important for companies to keep the overall control over their brand and brand architecture in an environment where users have a higher level of influence, there are opportunities for those who explore the possibilities. It will be interesting to see how brands will evolve the coming years when technology gets even further explored and brands can be influenced by the way the audience is using the brand, a product, or a service.