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”.

Achieve Better Value From Your Design Spend

In today's market conditions, organisations need to achieve maximum value from their creative agencies. By investigating cost over-runs on design projects, I have identified opportunities for efficiencies and savings. Internal practices and behaviours can add inefficiencies and costs to the relationship between you and your creative agencies. Putting these suggestions into practice may result in superior outcomes for less expense.

Assess current design investment
Review where your resources are being spent on design today. Are all of your current communications materials required? Have any recurring design projects outlasted their usefulness? Evaluate all outputs of those projects and consider which you can abandon.

Rationalise brand identity
Many organisations still use redundant variations within their brand identity, with non-standard variations of logos and symbols developing over time and replication of effort in designed materials; from low-cost items such as business cards, to high-cost investments like websites. Standardise the design and centralise the production of your communications collateral.

Rationalise sub-brands
Organisations succumb to logo-creep, whereby individual units, departments and projects develop their own identities. How much is it costing you to maintain these? Are they detracting from your core brand identity? Which can you dispose of? Of those remaining, have you clarified and standardised their relationship with your core brand identity to manage them most efficiently?

Standardise core design decisions
If you do not have identity management usage guidelines, now is the time to invest in this essential management tool. Think of a concise, relevant document bringing tangible benefits; not a massive folder taking six months to produce. Many organisations constantly re-invent the wheel when using the core elements of their brand identity. Make fundamental decisions about how your brand identity is to be used and then record them. The instant benefit is that this allows your people to concentrate on important decisions about content, rather than discussing logo sizes.

Clarify project objectives
In my experience the single greatest cause of cost over-runs on design projects is additional chargeable hours being added when briefs change mid-stream, often due to differences of opinion within the client organisation. ‘Ready, Fire, Aim’ is too often the mantra. Take extra time at the beginning to organise your thinking and clarify your project’s objectives with all relevant parties. Doing so ensures you get best value from your agency’s time.

Pursue value-added creative services
Are your creative agencies merely delivering on what you asked for, or are they truly adding value? Does their business insight help you to achieve your communication goals? Successful creative relationships are those where the client has the most trust in their agency. Seek out agencies who give you the full benefit of their thinking and experience and offer a useful external perspective that challenges your preconceptions.

Set realistic time-lines
Project time-lines often over-run without planning for internal decision-making requirements. Always factor in your internal reviews, particularly for executive sign-offs. Will your project need board approval? If so, then integrate upcoming board meetings into your schedule. Often an eight-week project can stop dead for weeks awaiting the next monthly board meeting.

Maintain momentum
Review internal decision-making practices. How many layers are in place? Are there any you can bypass? Design projects benefit from focus and clarity in decision-making. Drawn-out review processes can create more heat than light. If a project disappears into a maze of sub-committees, the creative impetus may have dissipated when work restarts months later.

Have your agencies only do things once
Certain definable tasks, such as typesetting, always take a certain number of man-hours. Who gains if your agency has to charge for typesetting a second time because of a rewrite? If people within your organisation will not review text until they see a fully typeset layout, perhaps it is time they review their own practices.

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My article was originally published in the September 2008 edition of Business Plus magazine.

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.