Firebrand

Passion is what fuels brands.

Whether customers or employees, people who are passionate at the people you want to have around your brand. Passionate people are engaged and energetic. Passionate people give both their time and money to be apart of the community. Passionate people keep things exciting, and are more fun to be around. Passionate people attract other passionate people. Passionate people express themselves more, and are more creative. Passionate people are simply more motivated.

There are product and industries that a lot of people tend to naturally be passionate about. Cars, fashion, electronics, interior design, health, music, travel, literature, food and drink, etc. If you are in one of these industries than congratulations: you have a great supply of fuel for your brand.

But people who aren’t, don’t despair. You don’t need a lot of people who are passionate about your product or service. You only need a handful of people who are really passionate about your offering, and build upon them. Seth Godin makes a strong argument for this in Tribes. Because of telecommunications, the world has shrunk. It has never been easier to connect people so even the smallest nieche of passion is large enough. The true work lies in finding and connecting people.

I once was faced with the opportunity to do industrial design for a barbecue manufacturer. I found this exciting because I knew there were people out there extremely passionate about barbecues. To most people they are just another tool to cook food, but to some people they are the symbolic centre of a lifestyle. I dreamt of creating a community of barbecue enthusiasts that I could call upon to validate or critique designs, and generate new ideas and directions.

The passion, the fuel was there.

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By Colin Finkle. Colin Finkle is an award winning industrial designer who works with large brands everyday designing displays for FX Displays in Toronto, Canada. He is the principle designer at Firebrand Creative. He also writes for AMD’s FireUser.com blog.

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Just a quick note: this is written for a small or medium sized business who would like to rebrand. There is alot more involved in a rebranding of a large company, and should be alot heavier on research. If you work in a large company and with design consultants, you could still find this article valuable.

So how do you create graphic synergy between all parts of your brand?

Wee, the first place to start is the graphic design. You need a graphic designer unless you are a graphic designer yourself. Graphic designers have spent years of observing other companies material critically, and can leverage consumer mental links (or baggage) that you would not be able to. They also have the technical skills to make sure the brand is displayed or printed consistently in this complex multimedia world. Even if you are in a creative field such as architecture, I would still recommend bringing in a graphic design consultant on an at least an advisory level.

You can still be the brand manager though, and make sure your designer is working on the right track. Before approaching a designer, I would have these things ready:
1) a positioning statement
2) example companies outside your industry
3) example companies inside your industry
4) ordered list of pieces that need to be redone
5) mock or final content
6) a budget for materials
7) a timeline

Positioning statement: This should be the easy part as it can be pulled directly from your marketing plan. (You do have a preprepared marketing plan, right? Heck, it should be framed on the wall of the entrance to your building.) I won’t go into how to write a positioning statement here. Your designer needs a few things: 5-7 discriptors would you like your business to be described with (fun, generous, serious, professional, out-of-the-box), 2-4 what descriptors you would use when differentiating yourself from your competitors (more dynamic, less stiff, more socially responsible) and your target market.

Example companies outside your industry: Using the descriptors of your business from your positioning statement, look for examples of companies that have a brand that could be described that way. Be careful that you don’t just use what you find “pretty.” Doing that will only tell your designer what your tastes are, and not how to position your brand properly. But if you find a brand attractive and it would be described as the same descriptors as yours than by all means use it as an example. Make sure you use more that 3 examples and tell your designer that you are open to other avenues of thinking, otherwise the examples will tie his/her hands and you will just get a redone version of your example instead of the right solution.

Example companies inside your industry: This is helpful to your designer because it shows what content is typical in the industry, and allows them to implement your differentiation descriptors from your positioning statement. Two or three should suffice. It is important to show the inside industry companies after that outside industry companies so that it is clear you would like to go above and beyond the industry norm.

Ordered list of pieces that need to be redone: You need to assemble a list of everything that needs to be redone with the changing of the brand. Website, letter head, sales brochure, email signatures, sell sheets, building signs, fax cover sheet, packaging, invoices, ect. Accumulating an exhaustive list can be exhausting itself. I would recommend brainstorming as much as you can, and then leave it on your desk for a week or so adding things as they occur to you. You should be able to get 70% of the list in the first shot, but the final 30% only come in time. Doing it all in one shot will be the most cost effective and beneficial way of doing it, but it can be done in consecutive phases. It needs to be ordered in terms of importance. Use the top 3 to create the art direction for the remaining items, but be sure that there is both print and web.

Mock or final content: You need to provide your designer with realistic text and images that will need to be displayed in the pieces. Having a designer work without content is like having a chef cook without ingredients. Work to have as little content per piece as necessary. It will open doors for the designer, and will be conveyed more effectively to the customer.

A budget: how much are you willing to invest in your materials. This may open doors for the designer, or force them to be creative to work inside a budget. I do not mean what you are willing to spend in the design of the materials (although you should have an idea of that). I mean the cost of printing of broshures, hosting of websites, ect. It will affect the design. You can still have great design whether your a garage band that is photocopying a flier or multi-national with 4 colour packaging, but the designer needs to know what processes they are designing for.

A time line: The quicker your roll out a rebranding, the better. It avoids customer confusion. But your time line should be broken to at least 2 phases. I recommend fully working through the 3 most important pieces first, and then proceed with the rest. The first 3 pieces will set the art direction for the other pieces. The break in the project will allow you to seek a new designer if your first designer is not working out. Just note that professional graphic designers set up their contracts so that you cant legally take their creative, and have another designer execute based on it unless that was specified from the beginning. So don’t think of having the high priced designer do your top 3 pieces, then cheaping out with another designer doing the rest.

The next thing to do is to incorporate that graphic language into the interior design of the company space, and the industrial design of the products if your that kind of company. I would challenge the designer you are working with to incorporate elements that can be repeated in those areas. For example, I once did the art direction a consultancy’s website; in one of the most popular concepts, I had encorporated a double stripe pattern I saw repeated in the architecture of their space.

Next in the series we will discuss what you should receive from your designer to maintain your brand, and how to manage the creative process as a client.

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By Colin Finkle. Colin Finkle is an award winning industrial designer who works with large brands everyday designing displays for FX Displays in Toronto, Canada. He is the principle designer at Firebrand Creative. He also writes for AMD’s FireUser.com blog.

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If you want to build your brand, than you have to standardize the aesthetic of all of your communications, spaces and products. Brands are all about leveraging previous positive customer experience to create future business. You can only do that if customers recognize your brand, and don’t believe that a logo alone will connect all the parts of your brand in the consumers mind.

People recognize things much more viscerally than cognitively. They take in the overall feel of something much quicker than the specifics. Often the feel of something is a gateway to whether it will be investigated further. For example, while flipping though magazine in a split second you recognize an ad for a high end watch though the black background and the gold figure. Your not in the market for a high end watch so you flip the page even before seeing who the watch was made by. Now if your recognized the brand colours or style of a company that made a watch that you had bought in the past, then you may have investigated further. It is important to make your brand consistent on that visceral level, so you can leverage those experiences.

A logo is the first step for a company, but the last step for a customer. Most companies their logo as a band aid solution to link something to their business. People use logos as a means of verification of their impression of who the ad or product is by. For example, “That looks like a Motorola phone. Is it? (Looks as logo)Yes it is!” Motorola has been on a mission to standardize the industrial design of their cell phones under the leadership of Tim Parsey. In doing so, they reduced the cell phone offerings for 96 to 10 in 2002. Now they are just about getting there. The Motorola Q, KRZR, RAZR, and ROKR are clearly related, and match branded industrial design on the Bluetooth headsets. How did they do it while still allowing for personalization? Consistent fonts, colours and graphic symbols on buttons, consistent formal language, and a liberal use of gloss black and brushed metal. All of those thing are echoed in TV, web and print graphic design. (Source: ‘Beyond Logos’ by Clare Dowdy.)

The ultimate test of the graphical branding is if you can show an advertisement or product to a customer that they have never seen before with the logo covered up. Could they recognize what company it is coming from? Some people take this test a little further. Martin Lindstrom described a “shatterable brand” in an episode of The Engaging Brand podcast. It is a mental exercise where you remove the logo from a product and shatter it like it is made of glass. Could you pick up each piece and recognize it as your brand? The advertising equivalent could be tearing up an magazine ad, or showing only a second of a TV spot.

That may seem like a lofty goal, but it is easier than you might think. We will talk about how that is done in the next article.

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By Colin Finkle. Colin Finkle is an award winning industrial designer who works with large brands everyday designing displays for FX Displays in Toronto, Canada. He is the principle designer at Firebrand Creative. He also writes for AMD’s FireUser.com blog.

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I promised that I would talk about brand dissonance in “The Brand Cycle”, well why not do it right away.

Brand dissonance is simply when there is a difference between the brand’s perceived promises or personality, and their actions. It is important because it creates extreme discomfort and distrust in customers. It is the easiest way to loose customers.

Cognitive dissonance is when the mind has two conflicting thoughts in it’s conscious in the same time. For example, my car looks orange here, but I know that it is yellow. At the very least, this is a very uncomfortable feeling because your mind uses cycles and cycles of cognitive power into resolving the difference. The mind will either make a logical bridge between the two concepts (eg. must be the lights in the parking lot), throw out one of the concepts (eg. I know my car is green) or rethink their impression (maybe my car is slightly orange.)

The cognitive dissonance that is closest related to brand dissonance is when a person does something out of character. You subconsciously make mental models of people in the end so you can predict or at least not be surprised by their actions. When someone does or says something out of character, than your mind races to resolve the dispute. For example: “Jim is the most progressive and open guy I know, but he mentioned the other day that he is staunchly against gay marriage.” Your mind will resolve that by either by throwing out that one act, making new assumptions of Jim or rethinking your impression of his personality.

Customers’ brains treat brands in exactly the same way. If a company does or says something that is out of character for the brand, than they will make new assumptions of the company or rethink their impression of a company. A good example is when a multi-national oil company runs an add about cleaning up the wetland. The perceived brand personality of most oil companies would be described as cold, heartless and hurting the environment. By advertising their environmental outreach they are trying to have customers rethink their impression of them. But the dissonance between environmental outreach and big polluter is too much for most customers, and they will either dismiss the advertisement as superficial or make a new assumption of the company (“These guys trow some money to a charity and think they are saints!”) Not the desired result. They would be better advised to do their environmental outreach closer to home, like advertising their 68% decrease in spills in the last 5 years. This would do more to nudge their brand perception in the right direction.

The other side of the coin is when an otherwise positively percieved company does something negative that is out of character. For example, Motrin tried to promote their painkiller to new moms. The TV spot they ran compared being a mom and whereing you baby with a sling was a fashion statement. Well mom’s out there who know that becoming a mother and how they hold their babies have nothing to do with fashion. This is brand dissonance because Motrin is a brand usually in touch with women, but this ad got it so wrong. Customers are going either dismiss the add (“I don’t get it”), make new assumptions of Motrin (“whose running this company now?”) or rethink their perception of Motrin (“they really are out of touch.”) There will be customers out their that react each way, but it will be how the majority react that will determine the extent of the damage.

Brand dissonance is something to avoid, but a the brand personality should be so ingrained into the company that the company can’t possibly act out of character. Where companies get into trouble is when they work with outside agencies that convince them of actions and communications that are outside their brand. But sometimes some dissonance is unavoidable as the company changes or want to shift their brand perception. In this case it is important to nudge and not push. If a leap is too much than customers will dismiss the changes or make new  negative assumptions about the brand.

Hold your companies actions and communications to the yard stick of your brand personality. Does it fit? If not, rethink it. Otherwise your customers will suffer brand dissonance.

There seems to be two ways people use the word brand, and one is right and one is right, or at least one is the definition I will be using in all posts on this blog. People some talk about their “brand” in reference to their logo and other graphical material their company has. For example: “That ad has our brand all over it.” That is your brand graphics, or your brand look and feel. While originally a brand was a logo, the word has evolved and has a new much more rich and subtle meaning now. The subtleties come across when you get to know the brand cycle.

1) A brand does not exist in the absence of an potential customer.
This is the major point of contention for me. A logo is not your brand. Your website is not your brand. Your advertisement is not your brand. It is the same argument as if a tree falls alone in the woods does it make a sound? If a brand doesn’t have anyone to percieve it that it is not a brand. So when someone says “Company X has a brand problem” they are not saying that the logo looks ugly. They mean they need to change the brand in the eyes of the consumer.

2) Communications is the first part of the brand cycle.
This is the logo part of the brand. It includes everything that is out there about your company to judge: logo, website, advertisement, sales people, store environment, location, associated brands, promotions. Everything from your tag line to the way your employees dress. Anything that the customer comes in contact with that a person associates with your company can effect how they perceive your company now and in the future, ie. your brand. The things that are hardest to control are often the things that have the greatest effect on your brand on a per customer basis. For example, a snarky sales person can put off a customer for life. But it is important to note that this is the only part of the cycle you control as a part of the company.

3) The second phase of the brand cycle is consumer baggage.
All of the communications are filtered through the collective experience a consumer as with your company, other companies and everything else. Someone will see your logo and interpret it in their own way because of their experiences in the past. For example, someone had a great experience with a purchase and it colours the way they see your brand in a positive way. Thankfully, on average people have the similar experiences and you can play on mental associations that are already established in the public. When I do brand graphics, I ask the descriptors that a client wants their brand to be perceived as, and then I ask of example large companies that could be described in that way. Than I use a visual language similar to those brands to play on the mental associations that have already been developed in the public. For example, if there was a jeweller who wanted graphics that were modern and high end, I would look at the brand language of BMW, Mercedes, Jaguar, Hammacher Schlemer, Harmon Kardon, and Sony. Those companies have already associated quality in the consumers mind with their use of san-serif text, white space, geometric lines and black, white, grey and punches of colour. This is because of the associations or baggage that have been built into the consumers mind over time, consciously and unconsciously.

4) The third part of the brand cycle is the viewers projections onto the brand.
We project on everything. Have you ever thought of the personality of a number? Do you think that rainy days are sad days? Do you ever look at a car and think it looks aggressive? Well I hate to break your bubble, but numbers dont have personalities, the weather doesn’t have emotions and cars are not aggressive nor passive. We are hard wired to deal with people, and we treat objects in the same ways. People do this with your brand. They take in your communications, run it through their baggage filter, and then project attributes onto your brand. For example, an ad may come on for Sony’s Walkman brand MP3 players, and you remember that time you had to return that faulty mini disc player that would get loud spontaneosly. Then you project those feelings of annoynce and mistrust onto the Walkman brand, whether the advertised product is deserves it or not. This cycle is rehearsed so much that it doesn’t happen on a concous level. The emotional response is sudden, subtle but powerful in the way it affects behaviour.

While everyone has a different perception of every brand, the aggrogate (or collection) of everyones brand cycle is your brand. So when someone has a good brand, their communications are embued with positive attributes from the good experiences they have had in the past. When someone has a brand problem, than they have built a negative experience in a peoples brand baggage and their brand is attributed with negativity. There is another aspect called brand dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is the feeling that humans have when there is two conflicting thoughts in their mind at one time. This is always an uncomfortable feeling because our brains are working overtime to try to resolve the difference. Brand dissonance is when a customers sees a brand communication that is out of character from their mental model of the brand. We will discuss this in a future post.

So the brand cycle is the communications being filtered through a persons baggage and coming out as projections. Knowing this on a theoretical level is powerful in making decisions that to move your company into the brand you want it to have.

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By Colin Finkle. Colin Finkle is an industrial designer that works with large brands everyday designing displays for FX Displays in Toronto, Canada. He is the principle designer at Firebrand Creative. He also writes for AMD’s FireUser.com blog.