Projector

Here it is, part two in this two-some of articles, as mentioned previously it will be based upon the more intangible side of branding, rather than the visual aspect. There are far more things you can compare when concerned with brands, than only the physical product, it’s function and visual environment.

There is a great example used by Wally Olins to explain this. If you look at the way we interact with a restaurant, you can begin to understand how different aspects of branding fuse together. Ultimately, the main part of how we judge a restaurant is by the standard of it’s food. The product. However, a significant part of the experience is also the environment, which is very important. If it is well designed, or special in it’s own way, it does affect you greatly. The service you receive, the behaviour of the brand, is a considerable factor also. If you receive a slow inattentive service it can quickly change your opinion of what you thought was a wonderful experience. Communication then plays it’s part by you spreading your opinions of your experience to your family and friends through word of mouth. 

The way a brand communicates (aside from visually), is how it is telling it’s audience about itself and what it is doing. It is important that your brand maintains a coherent and appropriate tone of voice across your organisation that extolls the positive virtues of your brand’s core idea.Take for example, one of our client’s Positive Solutions Financial Services. They are the UK’s biggest National IFA firm with over 1700 Independent Financial Adviser(IFAs), each operating under their own steam, but all of them under the Positive Solutions core brand. These individuals are called PS Partners. Positive Solutions approached us with the hope of creating a fixed tone of voice that would span across it’s range of marketing materials, making it’s Partners adopt it’s tone of voice – and thus keeping the brand consistent. We created a range of personalisable branded marketing templates, ranging from leaflets and posters, to stationery and HTML emails that are available through an Online Ordering System. The content of these marketing materials is monitored with all of the available options being screened through Positive Solutions’ compliance and marketing departments, this ensures that IFAs, when using the PS Branding, are following the FSA’s guidelines. If Partners try and pass through alternative adverts, they are forwarded to the Online Ordering System. Success all round in maintaining tone of voice throughout all printed material.

The internet allows a great amount of communication between company and audience and vice versa, customers also communicate more freely with other customers. It takes a lot of attention and care to make sure your brand is communicating correctly and in turn listening more closely, as there has never been such a cohesive union between brand and consumer. Take for example when a brand uses a Twitter Account. Tone of voice on Twitter is paramount. People don’t follow other users for their background or profile picture. They follow them for what they are saying and how they are saying it. For example if a recruitment consultancy wanted to offer a high quality service, but with the accessibility of lower costs and they wanted to use Twitter as a medium for doing this. Perhaps they could try and exude personality through grown up straight-forward tweeting, but with a hint of humour to promote approachability, so that the audience didn’t deem the brand to be posting their fantastic job opportunities from an unreachable Ivory Tower.

Moving on from communication, what surely comes next is behaviour. How your organisation deals with the people it employs and furthermore the way they deal with your audience. All brands, over all sectors come into contact with their audience in some aspect. This is particularly important when concerned with service led brands. This is due to service brands dealing primarily with person to person experiences. Each employee or customer is different. People vary during the day, have worries and occasionally can suffer frankly amazing harassment from customers. As a service brand the organization is it’s people and those people you must manage. It is impossible to maintain a 100% consistently oustanding brand experience. Through good management of your staff, you can ensure that your goal of going that extra step to be helpful. Help them understand the brand and inspire them to extoll the virtues of the brand to your customers. 

References:

Wally Olins: The Brand Handbook – Thames and Hudson

Projector are currently: Working away, a lot to do.

A logo is simply a recognition device, which has been used throughout history to assure people that the product is associated with the company that provides the product. A common misconception is that the logo is the be all and end all of the visual communication of a brand. It is true that the logo is important, as it should reflect the core idea behind a brand with immediacy. However it isn’t simply the logo which displays a brand’s core idea.

If you look at any industry, you’ll notice that mostly there is very little difference between competitors. It is becoming increasingly harder to stand out. The days of being able to judge a brand on rational terms such as price, quality of product and quality of service are gone. Companies must embrace that a brand essentially, is a product, service or organisation with a personality. A personality which overtly differentiates the company, making people become enamoured with the products or service that the brand offers, “become loyal beyond reason”.

The wingspan of a brand has grown considerably in recent times, with the advent of new technology allowing for a myriad of mediums for a brand to communicate with it’s audience. You need to make sure that your brand has a set of effective visual elements. Not simply a standout logo. Think of brand colours, typefaces, imagery and graphical devices. All of the aforementioned (if deemed necessary to promote the brand’s core idea) should adhere to a coherent system across various media (printed matter, web presence, enviroments etc) that gives your brand idea a unique and memorable appearance.

The times are a changing, and it’s not just clients that need to adapt, as a brand communications consultancy we need to move with the times too. Creating brands that come to life in a physical environment is something that we’ve done very well for years – but the world of social media is changing the goalposts for all. Take recruitment – one of our core service areas which has traditionally needed to differentiate itself, work hard and communicate through the printed media first and foremost is now seeing the vast majority of if it’s work being conducted on LinkedIn and Twitter – the challenge of building a personality through social media is a welcome one (so long as the person doing this recognises the fact they still need to be ‘on brand’) but trying to get across the top-end of sector feel of a recruitment consultancy (which a beautiful printed piece with high end production techniques would do easily) through social media avenues is really when the brand messaging needs to be very joined up.

Over the coming weeks we will be exploring a number of areas which will hopefully inform and inspire you to think more in-depth about how you can make your brand stand apart from the competition! Part two coming soon…

References:
Wally Olins: The Brand Handbook Thames and Hudson
Kevin Roberts, Saatchi & Saatchi: Lovemarks – The Future Beyond Brands

Projector are currently: Ticking those to-do lists off, preparing diaries for next week and allowing a small droplet of weekend fever to creep in.

A quick blog article posted in reaction to the recent Newsnight debate on infographics involving Graphic Design luminary Neville Brody and Information Designer David McCandless of the website “Information is Beautiful”. The debate was at first glance to talk about infographics – but it was steam-rolled by Brody in to a larger political debate – which isn’t necessarily a bad thing for our sector – but it did sort of leave the substance of the topic behind, which is ironic really – as that was Brody’s opinion of many infographics! 

If I were to decide to use Infographics, and I do, then it would be to keep the reader’s attention span when an article were long and dense in content. Innovative use of graphics can draw the user into what was once unsavoury reading. It can’t be denied that a large mass of statistical data does not inspire reading. Infographics can be used to interest people in things, shedding light on some hidden facts they were previously uninterested in.

“Can we get some interesting graphics like the Guardian to help explain the data?” This is an often quoted phrase within the studio by our client base, and we’re not knocking it – the Guardian do it very well, and we enjoy rising to the challenge if it’s the right thing to do. But that’s the point isn’t it? Do it if it’s the right thing to do, but personally, I sometimes find that infographics do stray into the territory of the designer’s personal wants (or clients even), negating their intended use (of delivering a wide range of complicated information in a concise and appealing manner) and being put into use when they aren’t entirely necessary. 

If you wow someone with too intense and beautiful a picture, they may well become entranced with the picture itself, rather than the message it is intended to display. This happens all too often in our industry as it is, and it’s not just restricted to infographics either – how many times do you see a beautifully crafted logo without any substance, or a printed piece without any real content?

Evaluate why you are doing it. Don’t just let the image become the main feature. It’s intention is to visually communicate the data.

What do you guys think?

Projector are currently: About to close up for the day