Does Branding Matter?

As I’ve been charged with explaining the fundamentals of branding, let’s get two things straight—branding is the ‘emperor’s new clothes’, and, you have invited me here to tell you something that you already know.

Branding is a new name for a very old activity—that of human communication. To understand brands you must first of all understand how people communicate.

We communicate not only through spoken and written words and still and moving images, but through all of our senses; through touch, sound, temperature, movement, colour, smell and taste. This is called the sensorial vocabulary. (You know that you’ve entered a church, even if your eyes are closed, because …)

While we’re processing all of the information collected through our senses, we’re also making intuitive decisions predicated on our own values: is a thing made of stone or concrete; how heavy is it; how high is it; how big or small; where is it located; what’s it next to; is it glass or plastic, chrome or gold; if it’s a space—is it large or small, warm or cold; how much does it cost per square foot? This is called our cultural vocabulary.

The qualities and values that are important to us, may not be important to others, they vary from country to country and region to region, and sometimes even from street to street and door to door. This is why global organisations invest in big Human Factors departments in order to understand and meet the needs of their diverse target markets.

All of us collect and process vast amounts of complicated information all of the time we’re awake. We use this information to tell us how to act; who to trust, what to buy and where to go; its how we survive. We’re all experts at doing this because we’ve been doing it for thousands of years before the word ‘brand’ was ever invented.

The best way to understand how we now communicate using books, brands, buildings and all of the supposedly inanimate stuff around us, is to slow down and ask ourselves questions about why we’re doing something, exactly what we’re doing and how we feel or behave when we’re doing it; whether its choosing to walk down one street rather than another; buy one kind of washing powder rather than another, flick through a magazine then finding ourselves drawn to one story rather than another; or altering our voice, pace and demeanour when we enter a pub, or a church or our own front room. All of this will help us to understand exactly how our environment affects our behaviour. Brands are one of the ways in which designers manipulate our behaviour. Understanding how we react to brands is the first step in learning how to control brands.

Winston Churchill said; “First we shape our buildings, then they shape us”. Or in other words, we collude in the creation of our own environment. This is especially true of brands. Brands only become brands if we want them to. Brands demand our attention and support if they are to exist at all. And brands demand our collective recognition if they are to survive.

The word ‘brand’ was born when cattle in the great mid-West were burned with symbols that represented romantic sounding ranches like the ‘Lazy S’ or the ‘Broken O’. This simple exercise in remembering ‘who owned what’ happened at a time when manufacturing industries were gathering steam throughout the developing West.

People could now identify which ranch an animal came from, they also knew which ‘make’ of cigarettes they smoked and which kind whisky they drank. Brands became synonymous with ‘place of origin’; products like ‘Virginia tobacco’ become ‘Golden Virginia’; which was regarded as much more than an adequately good smoke; by unspoken consensus it inferred that the product was something that was somehow ‘rich’, ‘natural’ and ‘wholesome’.

A brand, originally often crudely composed of letters, words and marks, came to represent much more than the sum of the its tangible parts; a whole corollary of intangible values were bundled along with it.

We’d invented an efficient, shorthand way of communicating lots of complicated ideas and values using an apparently simple system of letters, words and marks.

Today, the intangible parts of many brands have come to mean more that the tangible bits—Coca-Cola isn’t ‘It’ without the stuff that surrounds it—it’s only a drab-coloured, foul-tasting, fizzy liquid; the product has become a by-product. Likewise, Tara Palmer-Tomkinson, the ‘It’ girl, is little more than an empty vessel without the added-values of her branded lifestyle. Other brands even replace generic terms and enter common speech, such as ‘Hoover’, ‘Bovril’, ‘Oxo’, ‘Rizla’, ‘Coke’ and ‘Sqezy’.

The rise of the brand as a system of communication was cataclysmic because most new products and services were made and sold in North America and Europe, where people shared much the same values and attitudes. And, because the system was flexible it meant that as ideas gradually changed and progressed, the brands imperceptibly, incrementally adapted to accommodate that change; think of the evolution of Ford, Guinness and Coca-Cola; brands that have been around for over a century. They were created at a time when brands represented ‘progress’ and all progress was good.

Despite anti-globalisation and anti-brand, anti-consumer feeling, ‘brands’ continue to be so successful for two big reasons; brands are flexible and fast. Firstly, brands aren’t absolute, we get to put our own spin on what they mean to us, and our cultural group. Secondly, we now have so little time left in our busy lives that brands allow us to say lots of things, quickly, and that can be really useful.

But don’t be fooled—brands aren’t simple systems of communication. As the saying goes, ‘we get from art what we take to it’, and so it holds for brands; we get from brands what we take to them.

Some of the best brands may appear to be simple but they have many layers of meaning, and entire departments within global corporations dedicated to re-investing them with new meanings; to cleverly and covertly prompt generations to think about what Citroen, Burberry, P&O Cruises or Maclean’s toothpaste could mean to them.

Such is our collusion in the creation of brands that this process is even regarded as a game by both producer and consumer—consider the ‘Guinness is good for you’, and, ‘Genius’ advertising campaigns, or those of Silk Cut, Benson & Hedges, Walker’s crisps, or even Pot Noodle, ‘the slag of snacks’.

The really clever brands aren’t even product or service specific, they can shift from their core area of operation and transfer their power into new areas: Tesco, M&S and Asda sell financial products and petrol, most broadsheet newspapers sell holidays, Harley Davidson earn more from selling swimsuits and aftershave than they ever did from selling bikes, and David Beckham earns more from sponsoring mobile phones and leisurewear that he does for playing football.

Businesses dealing with branded consumer goods spend much of their time tickling, twitching and winking at their would-be customers in order to get them to think about their products in new ways. It’s a subtle game, but we’re all experts at it, and sometimes unconscious participants in it.

Graphic brands are generally composed of letters, typography and marks. But it’s important to realise that language is more than words, it is an enabling mechanism that encourages people to behave in particular ways. The ‘It’ in, ‘Coke is it’, isn’t just any old ‘it’, it’s the exact groovy, hip, in-thing ‘it’ at any given time and for every social group, from skateboarders to stockbrokers. The context in which the words are presented, and style of the typography in which they are typeset, affects the meaning of ‘it’.

Typography is a container for language that changes its meaning. Just as water served in a crystal glass appears to be of different value than water served in a plastic cup—the setting of words in different typefaces has the same effect on language.

According to Umberto Eco, there are three classifications of marks, or ‘signs’; these are symbols, icons and indices.

Symbols literally symbolise the things they represent. They’re really useful when you’re trying to find the toilet but you don’t speak Chinese. You find them in airports but you can also find them on Mont Blanc pens and Apple Mac computers.

Icons are a mirror image of the thing your trying to communicate, they’re often representational or figurative in form, like the classical figure of Justice with her scales, or the mark that tells you where to dispose of your rubbish, or which port to plug the printer into.

Indices make the most powerful and memorable marks. They are usually surreal and enter our subconscious at a deep level. Think no further than Nike’s Swoosh.

Language, type and marks, together with still and moving images, form the basis of a structured system of graphic communication.

Less then 5% of the investment in a branded system is spent on the glamorous ‘creative’ stuff. The really creative bits are often hidden and include working with organisations to find the best possible structure for their communications, which often doesn’t mirror their legal or organisational structure. Over 95% of our time is occupied in the development and testing of robust and stable systems that allow businesses to communicate with their target markets in consistent and controlled ways. They often allow them to speak to different audiences, using many different ‘voices’, simultaneously.

The process of organising your corporate communications is an excellent way to rationalise and streamline your business processes. Design is essentially about control, and using the creative process to bring order to the world, and to your business. This is why re-branding is often in the business pages—not because of what it does to the outside of a petrol pump or a carrier bag, but because of what it does to the business behind the brand.

But, graphic designers don’t have a monopoly on communication. Objects, spaces and buildings communicate too.

How often do you receive brochures and leaflets about a banking service that portrays an organised, friendly and customer-focussed organisation? Only to turn up at the bank to find long queues, unfriendly and unhelpful staff and rampant bureaucracy, but always lots of posters that show the same (now) irritating graphics that persuaded you to go there in the first place? This isn’t just true of banks, but most service industries.

The Marketing departments and Facilities departments in most big businesses never meet, let alone discuss how they can work together to ensure they’re both on-message, and to deliver an integrated customer experience. And by this I don’t simply mean sticking a logo on the carpet—that’s probably the worst thing you could do.

At Graven Images we’re familiar with the problem of communicating across two and three dimensions, because we’ve always worked across traditional design disciplines and employ architects, interior designers and graphic designers.

We’ve even developed our own methodology that analyses and controls how messages are delivered in three dimensional spaces. We can then track the information delivered along a given route to ensure that visitor and customer experiences meet, or exceed expectations.

To recap, branding is about helping businesses communicate appropriate, consistent and controlled messages across two and three dimensions.

At the beginning of my presentation: I told you that you’d invited me here to tell you something that you already knew, and that remains the case, some of you maybe just weren’t aware of it.

And in answer to your original question, Does Branding Matter? Yes. It does. Whether you like it or not.

There are two big reasons to invest in design. Leon Allen, the man who worked for Nabisco and Procter & Gamble before buying Del Monte, Devro and Tetley Tea explains the first.

“Almost no-one really buys on price—they buy because they trust the brand, like the company or like the packaging.” Leon Allen.

The second reason is because the best designers are educated to analyse tangible and intangible data. To quickly unpick complex webs of communication. To structure information in ways that make it comprehensible, to you and your clients and customers, here and abroad. Designers can help you to control how specific messages are delivered, in two and three dimensions, and in still and moving media, time after time after time. And clear communication usually makes cash.