Twitter’s Symbol-Only Branding Strategy

Spot the odd one out.

With its new symbol-only brand identity system Twitter has chosen to pursue a fundamentally different branding strategy than its peers and competitors.

Twitter refreshed and restructured their brand identity system last week. Their announcement post played up some of the detailed design decisions about the geometric construction of their more aerodynamic (and IPO-friendly?) bird symbol. That design narrative is less interesting to me than the strategy behind the change and what affordances it now facilitates for the company. The key decision worth considering is their move to a symbol-only identity strategy.

I think this is a very ballsy move to depreciate their logotype and now have their bird symbol function as their sole corporate signifier.

This symbol-only strategy makes sense for global brands, as it allows their visual identities to sit above the constraints of languages. They can be multilingual in their local written communications, but their brand identity uses a shared symbolic language. This branding strategy may also be taken as a statement of intent; positioning Twitter within the most elevated strata of brands.

Starbucks did this in 2011 when they streamlined the visualisation of their siren symbol and upgraded its status to that of sole corporate signifier. Apple and Nike were two of the global brands to realise the power of this approach earlier. It is fascinating that Twitter has taken this step after only six years, whereas those other iconic brands needed decades to achieve a symbol-only system.

One key difference between the way the Twitter brand operates in comparison with Apple, Nike and Starbucks is that it is most often used by third parties rather than under direct corporate control. You are as likely to encounter it within the context of someone else’s web page or app as you are on Twitter.com. It is dispersed across the Internets. There are endless user-generated customised Twitter icons in use.

In addition to being the symbol of the corporate entity, the bird icon sometimes serves double-duty as a proxy for the verb “to tweet”. It also is intended to indicate the phrase ‘Follow me on Twitter’ when used in conjunction with an @username within a badge device.

Interestingly, the other top-tier social media companies, Facebook, Google and LinkedIn, all lack a comparable symbolic component to their visual brand identities. They either use their full names or else tend to co-opt the app-inspired ‘initial-letter-in-a-box’ visual convention. The increasingly generic nature of that visual convention could be one of the reasons why Twitter have depreciated its use themselves.

Operationally, having the minimum number of brand mark variants in use will simplify brand management and compliance, and ultimately should reinforce user recognition.

Facebook have adopted a different branding strategy with very different affordances and benefits. That will be the subject of a follow-up post.

Update: this post is based on an answer I wrote to a Quora question. Forbes picked up on my Quora version which they republished on their blog with my permission.

1. Some (not-really) rejected alternate titles for this post might have included: ‘New Twitter brand identity takes flight’, ‘Twitter brand spreads it wings’ and, ahem, ‘Ornithology Trumps Typography’.
2. The depreciated Twitter bubble logotype was always inelegant and amateur-looking to my eye, so I will not miss that at all.

Implications of Multi-Variant Brand Mark Systems

© City of Melbourne

© London Olympics

© MIT Media Lab

Technology now supports the implementation of complex brand identity systems where the most fundamental elements, such as the brand mark, may now readily have multiple variations (examples include MIT Media Lab, Aol and London 2012 identities). In practice, what is the trade-off between the flexibility and freedom of expression and the overhead of time and resources needed to make such identity systems work effectively?

Rebranding the Office for Social Media Effectiveness

I wrote this fake news story for April Fool’s Day 2011 and we hosted it on the BFK site for that one day. I still like it, and want to archive it here.

Social media solutions within the civil service and the broader state sector.

We have just completed a major rebranding programme for The Office For Social Media Effectiveness to help them deliver on their strategic objectives. Established in 2009, the role and remit of the Office has expanded alongside the adoption of social media solutions within the civil service and the broader state sector. From today it is relaunching with a new name and corporate identity as “Status:State”.

Nine Recommended Books on Branding

I have curated this short list of recommended books on brands, brand design and other related branding issues for a lecture on corporate identity and branding that I am giving at the School of Art, Design and Printing in the Dublin Institute of Technology. I am sharing it here as it may be of broader interest.

Identity Design Systems And Co-branding

Considered thinking about corporate identity today tends towards systems with some capacity for formal play built into them, rather than merely focusing on maximising uniformity, as tended to be preferred before. This can be delivered on a sliding scale. At its simplest iteration it means building in enough variety to allow for appropriate modulated treatments in different scenarios. All the way up to very sophisticated, free-flowing identity systems.

One sophisticated approach is where I have developed a suite of decision-making trees for my client for various applications. ‘If the advert format is tall and narrow and the constituent branding elements required are X, Y and Z, then the correct approach to using them falls within this class of patterns.’ This is a scenario where I am showing the user conditions and matching those with their desired outcomes and asking them to make some decisions as to how best to achieve those outcomes within the palette of opportunities available to them. I like to think of it as the designer’s role as one of defining the idea-space of the identity system and then letting its users explore the landscape within that topography.

Contrast that concept with what so many organizations still want, which is branding equivalent of lego blocks. All of the visual elements locked together in one immobile set of ratios and relationships that can merely be dropped into place. The design equivalent of ‘place tab A into slot B’. This methodology results in co-branding relationships that are consistent across all applications, but it is a crude sort of consistency. Almost by definition this is going to be inappropriate (or at least sub-optimal) in many many applications.

What this often boils down to operationally is, where do you want the expertise to lie along the chain of responsibility? Or where does the organisation choose to deploy its resources. If an organisation wants its most junior personnel to knock together documents and adverts using modular graphics in MS Word, that is a valid choice for them. But it seems unrealistic, in that scenario, for them to then be concerned about measuring the ‘brand efficiency’ of their outputs. The greater fallacy is then believing that the solution to the problem is to build better templates. Or, as it is often phrased ‘templates that are easier to use’.

I will add more posts about this topic as I build out my thinking...

It Is All Too Similar, And Yet It Is All Too Dissimilar...

Is your brand undergoing a period of consolidation or diversification? I have observed this organisational pattern where the approach to brand identity management follows a cycle over five to ten years: consolidation, followed by gradual drift towards diversification, then re-consolidation. It can be useful to examine where your organisation is positioned on that continuum.

The benefit of the O2 visual branding system is that it has become instantly recognisable to consumers. All you really need are some shades of dark blue and some bubbles and people will know that it is a communication from O2.* However, to achieve such a high level of recognition involves some interesting trade-offs on the marketing and design side of the equation.

As this class of strongly homogeneous and distinctive visual style is excellent at presenting the master corporate brand, it must, of consequence, be weaker at separating out individual products, services and offers. Think about it: the suite of posters for pre-pay mobile offers that you see in O2 store fronts this week are never going to be all that visually different from the preceding week’s posters for a different service offering. This implies that O2’s marketing teams are going to have to work harder coming up with the core ideas associated with promoting each of their individual products and services.

In my experience, one of the key reasons why visual brand identity systems devolve into inconsistency is that product managers (or whomever owns the organisational briefs informing the marketing department's creative briefs) are often measured by their results at the level of their products and, crucially, not at the level of overall brand performance. This implies that they have some incentive to make the creative work associated with their personal fiefdom as different from the master system as they can get away with. This is why so many design briefs begin with some variation of “...this new product/service/widget is very special and unique and really needs a design that stands part from, and above, whatever we happen to be doing over here, over there, and also over there...”

This push-and-pull between (for lack of two clearer terms) the top-down design centralisation imperative and the bottom-up design autonomy impulse from the tactical managers is a key generator of many design and branding briefs.

Hypothetically, this is how that organisational dynamic typically plays out.

Firstly, the head of Corporate Marketing looks at the collective output of the company and throws her arms up in despair. To her everything has become inconsistent, it looks more like the output of a group of companies rather than the one coherent corporate entity that she needs to communicate.

Consumer research can often reinforce her opinion. Although when brands have a strong and distinctive, yet relatively inflexible, visual system, consumer research often reveals a desire for some more diversity between the individual marketing elements. Conversely, a more varied, looser visual system usually researches as needing more consistency to help it all hang together. (Go figure.)

To resolve this inconsistent brand identity drift, a detailed brief for a new Unified Visual Style becomes the basis for a tender process. A branding or design consultancy is commissioned and produces the new visual system which then unites the design of all of the communications material to the required degree. This new identity system rationalises and coordinates the current state of the organisation’s master brand and sub-brands. It reflects the current structures of the organisation. If the brand consultants do their job, it will be forward-looking, with as much future-proofing built in as is feasible. Obviously no-one has a crystal ball. For example, how many brand guidance systems can have factored in the arrival of the new social media applications at this stage?

* Disclosure
I tend to use O2 as my example when discussing this topic, as I find that their established visual style has such high recognition that everyone knows what I am referring to. BFK has done some work for O2 in the past. However, as of this writing in 2007, I have not dealt with anyone in that organisation in more than three years.