Brand Space

Hello and thank you for inviting me, and my husband Ross, to Kapp and to Design Talks. It’s my first time in Norway – we’ve been planning to visit for a long time and we will definitely come back and spend more time exploring this fabulous country.
 
Graven Images
Ross, who’s an architect, and I, (a graphic designer) founded our design business, Graven Images, because we wanted to work together and because we wanted to work across different areas of design. 22 years later, we’re still working together, along with around 35 other people, and we’re working across an ever-widening range of design disciplines to deliver projects for clients in many sectors and in many different countries.
 
We believe that understanding and working across both 2 and 3-dimensions benefits both us and our clients: greater trust, access and shared understanding give us a much wider, more strategic, perspective on how design can help businesses; and this ‘bigger’ opportunity delivers a more holistic and strategic design solution than just a short-term tactical fix. The more we understand about a project, the better we can control or influence its outcome and the more successful it will be. This way of working also gives us a deeper, closer relationship with our client that saves time because we know each other, it therefore saves resources and ultimately, money.
 
Because we’re able to design lots of different things, historically it has been different to explain what we do: “we can design your logotype, print, website, intranet, internal and external communications and marketing collateral; but we can also design your building signage: and we’ll sort our your packaging: and we can design your workplace too, and your retail spaces…” In order to keep things simple we’ve organised ourselves around four teams that are focused on the three broad sectors within which we work: Corporate, Hotels & Leisure and Public Sector & Government. Within each of these broad sectors we do three things: Branding & Communications Design, Interior Design and Exhibition Design.
 
But enough about us – I’ll should probably explain what I mean by ‘Brands’ and ‘Brand Space’ and demonstrate how it works by looking at some of our recent projects.
 
‘Brands’ and ‘Brand Space’
 
Ross and I chose ‘Brand Space’ as the title for this talk because it’s useful in explaining what brands are, how they can be controlled and how their reach and power can be extended into environments and spaces.
 
‘Brands’
Branding is a devastatingly efficient way of communicating often very complicated ideas using a commonly understood shorthand language that transcends linguistic boundaries and that can be precise, malleable (pliable and easily influenced) and can evolve and change over time to reflect cultural change.
 
However, for most people a brand is a flat graphic thing that’s added to a product or service so it can be identified or explained. It’s usually printed or embroidered or stuck-on with glue – like a label – rather than being integrated with a product, a service or even a place. This limited idea of a ‘brand’ persists in many very big organisations because it’s much easier to say something than to actually do it. Our local police cars carry the slogan “building safer communities”, which is a great thing to aspire to but impossible for a police force to achieve. Consequently they look like idealist dreamers or dishonest liars.
 
You might have noticed that there are thousands of brand creators around: graphic designers; visual identity specialists; and so on. But when I was at Art School in the 1980s there were approximately the same numbers of students in each of the design disciplines – in product design, in graphic design, in interior design, and so on. So where did these thousands of brand designers come from? The simple answer is that businesses and industries needed lots of them quickly, because of the globalisation of almost everything (including language – sorry, I can’t speak Norwegian). In order to compete in the global marketplace every company had to clearly identify itself, distinguish its products and its services from its competitors, and communicate its unique offering to prospective customers who could now ‘knock’ on its front door via the Internet.
 
However, if you scratch the surface of a brand you often find that the flat graphic packaging is more impressive that the business contained within it. Few businesses truly live up to the promise of their 2-dimensional branding and their brochures and websites, and fewer still have internal departments that work together to deliver an integrated customer-facing experience that reflects their ‘brand promise’ in all of their many dimensions.
 
One of the ways to find out if a company REALLY is as good its ‘brand promise’ is to look through its windows. And I mean literally look through its windows or walk through its doors. Visit and see how its workplaces, shops and visitor centres match up to the brand values expressed in its literature.
 
 
‘Brand Space’
Around ten years ago we noticed an extraordinary disconnection between a company’s brand, described in its literature, and its physical environmental reality. We discovered this because we design 2-dimensional branding and communications and 3-dimensional workplaces. And our clients would give us different design briefings depending on whether they were from the Marketing Department or from the Property Department. In some really big businesses we discovered that the Marketing Department and the Property Department have never met. Where they had met, they rarely liked each other, and regarded themselves as rivals fighting for resources.
 
According to the Property people the Marketing guys are usually noisy, a bit flaky, impractical, profligate with the company’s money, incapable of sticking to deadlines, and have a huge budget.
 
According to the Marketing guys the Property people are dull, unimaginative, inflexible, slow, and have a huge budget.
 
Both of these scenarios might sound familiar, and there’s probably some truth in both of them – but when you consider that Property is often a business’s second-largest overhead after People, and that Marketing is usually its third – it’s dumb that they don’t talk to one other.
 
And if they don’t talk (which is most of the time), the result is the creation of expensive work environments that UNDERMINE businesses because they reveal the un-branded truth about how much they ACTUALLY value their staff and their customers, rather than by behaving in the ways that fit with their brand as it’s expressed in their brochures and two-dimensional branding.
 
The problem for designers like us is how to mix oil and water: how to mix the Marketing Department and the Property Department: how to mix 2-dimensional branding and 3-dimenisional branding: how to balance customer and employee expectations with business realities. You might have noticed that Brand Designers aren’t good at making things that aren’t flat, and that Interior Designers and Architects aren’t great communicators – in fact Interior Designers don’t see a company’s brand as being relevant to them at all…
 
In order to resolve all of these things we decided we needed a TOOL that would help us to bring the 2-Dimensional and 3-Dimensional aspects of a brand, the Marketing and Property Departments, and the Brand Designers and the Interior Designers, all together so we could have a holistic approach to brand design. Our tool allows us to analyse the sequence of messages communicated to people (including clients and customers) as they move through a business’s interior environment. It’s very simple: first you define a linear route and then you slice it into little bits – like one of those medical scanners – then you analyse each slice and work out how it’s affecting your senses and what that means. We can then compare the result with marketing information about the business and find out if it’s ‘on-brand’ or delusional. More importantly, we can work out what we need to do to make the environment ‘on-brand’, or how we need to refine the brand to fit the real business rather than the aspirational business that doesn’t exist. This is what I mean by ‘Brand Space’ – it’s about ensuring that business expectations are delivered in every dimension.
 
Over the years we’ve honed our tool to make it work really well. We normally use it to show how businesses are subtly and unknowingly communicating messages that they would rather not.
 
Some of our recent projects
In an ideal world the 2 and 3-dimensional aspects of a brand would be developed together but it’s unusual for that to happen because 2-dimensional branding is easier and the name usually comes first because both Brand Designers and Clients share the common linguistic language.
 
But we have put some slides together that illustrate some of the things that we are talking about. I’ve included only five projects including a coffee shop, a hotel, a self-service restaurant, an workplace for an insurance company and a workplace for a big media company.