By Catriona Burgess
Recently I was at a trends lecture by UK retail forecasting gurus The Future Lab. Among the many useful insights they shared, one thing really stuck – the fact that many retailers still haven’t woken up to the fact that we’re now 13 years into a new century and are still using 20th century retailing models when consumers have long moved on.
This got me thinking about how branding too has entered a new century, yet many clients and agencies are still stuck in old models. Take the latest debate over the South Australian logo. Whether you like it aesthetically or not, it demonstrates a very literal way of thinking about brand identity – we need people to know where we are and we want them to come, so let’s have a map of Australia with a door. It seems very 20th century to me.
The fact is consumers have become a lot more savvy about brands and how they are represented. Identity as embellishment or a literal translation of product is becoming increasingly old school.
When you think about the real purpose of an identity it’s just that – to give a brand distinctiveness and a pathway to recognition. It doesn’t have to be literal representation of the business. Nor can it tick the boxes of every brand value – these days brands need to focus on bringing values alive through behaviour and product/service design.
What the identity must do is demonstrate genuine difference and create what we call a mnemonic – something to be remembered by. In the “Apple Age” consumers are aware of design as a nuance and capturing an emotive quality, the tone of the brand and its personality. And it needs to connect and engage in a way that brings value to the customer.
Brand identities are becoming increasingly reduced to their essential elements, as simplicity and a strong ownable idea rule.
This trend becomes even clearer when we see look back of the latter part if the 20th century and see how globally leading brands have been stripping themselves back. Nike is becoming just a swoosh and Apple has removed the colour from their symbol, becoming virtually monochromatic. In the model followed by South Australia these brands would be represented by a shoe and a computer.
There’s something about this simplicity and single-mindedness that appeals at a time when we are all overloaded with imagery and information. And it also reflects the app icon test – can the identity still do its job when it’s smaller than the now defunct one-cent piece?
Consumers increasingly see simplicity as a sign of transparency and confidence. For example, when Frost* recently worked on a campaign for ending HIV for the AIDS Council of NSW, market research told us people just wanted to see the message in a straight-forward way. Hence we created a series of striking black-and-white posters that get to the point and are instantly recognisable for their stark qualities.
The thing about simplicity is that it’s much harder than shoving everything in. It requires stronger capacity for critical thinking in clients and better conceptual and ideation capabilities in creatives. And brand strategists need to watch for developing positioning ideas that have this sort of creative potential.
It’s much easier to deliver on literal criteria than to judge an identity by the feeling it creates – yet we shouldn’t forget that a lot of the job of design is to appeal to the sensory and not the rational part of the brain. Don’t get me wrong, this doesn’t mean everything has to be minimalist or abstract, but it does need to be what I deem “essentialist” – have a genuine and compelling reason to be there.
If you look at the work of many of the great creatives, they would probably argue that the need for brilliantly simple thinking has always been true. What’s changing today is that now we can hear more directly from consumers (and our peers) whether we have passed or failed the test.
