Exploding the brand model.
It feels to me that the discipline of brand strategy is undergoing a bit of a crisis at the moment. While the classic models of branding still have their advocates, I think a lot of us are fairly certain that many of them have become irrelevant and worse, that adopting them leads to hackneyed, old-fashioned and one-dimensional brands.
Whether it’s the pyramid, bullseye or layer cake, most of the frameworks for expressing and organising a brand’s various bits and pieces feel overly linear and prescriptive. Ultimately they are about commanding obedience to an immutable set of values, attributes and benefits. In an age where we are drawn to dynamic, surprising, innovative individuals and brands – most brand models are there to ensure that our brands stick doggedly to a single-minded idea.
Yet while it’s easy to criticise these frameworks, there is clearly some level of organisation that is required in order for those who are responsible for shaping brands to create and evaluate potential actions that a brand might take.
I took a crack at a different approach for a car pitch I worked on a few years ago. The client had a brand model they were pretty happy with. We went through an iconography audit and added some other assets that had strong linkage with the brand.
We then created the model you see above, but instead of making it a static construct, we printed it on magnetic-backed paper and cut each piece out – turning it into a “magnetic poetry” brand model. The idea was to allow people to break apart the attributes and re-combine them in different ways to see if that inspired more interesting and more diverse ways to “communicate” the brand’s values.
For example: the central belief for the brand is a progressive view of prestige and luxury. Combine “sophistication” and “design” and that leads you to one set of ideas around how you’d demonstrate a progressive view of prestige, but combining “progress” and “performance” would lead to a completely different set of ideas. Each set would be coherent with the brand idea but would allow the brand to have different faces and to participate in different social groups.
The desire was to turn the brand model into a creative brief. A document that inspired development rather than a document that was used to evaluate development. And to create a more multi-faceted, surprising and innovative brand.
It had limited success, but I’m still hopeful that an approach like this could work.
Any takers?
georgencopy Says:
April 18th, 2008 at 10:49 amAdrian Ho, you have a taker for this idea in George Chalekian. A static, 2-dimensional branding model makes little sense in the world where for client and agency alike, brand ownership has become, at best, brand stewardship, and users/consumers hold increasing sway. Your “magnetic mandala” is a very clever way to capture the dynamics of this dialog and put into it motion so that conversations (not chaos) can take place.
Adrian Says:
April 18th, 2008 at 1:40 pmGeorge! great to hear from you!
How’s island life?
nien Says:
April 19th, 2008 at 12:00 pmI like this. We always hear about how brands are people – which to me connotes complexity – but we never have a structure to build it. I like this and I think I’ll steal it if you don’t mind.
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