Looking at brands today makes me feel like a kid in a candy store. Companies are constantly transforming - from the products and services themselves to the communication and promotion surrounding them. There is a completely new array of interactions and behaviours that can be branded and used to deliver specific promises. And I think that’s terrific.
Let’s quickly look back at the branding world a decade ago. In the early 2000s I worked at an international agency tasked with creating a car maker’s brand guidelines. This guide naturally contained hundreds of different formats and executions ranging from copy, photography, video, print, sound, online, textile to 3D environments such as showrooms. It was a gargantuan effort to collect requirements, design, approve, publish and then communicate the overall guide. By the time it was released much of the company’s design and advertising had taken its own direction. So policing and enforcing the guidelines became our next task.
Fast-forward to today and we are looking at an array of new branding opportunities. But they are not so much about the formats or channels (e.g. print) but a mixture of categories playing together, often in a combination of on and offline. Let me give you a few examples.
The “we economy”
Companies are developing cross-industry partnerships and platforms that stretch the boundaries, both physically and metaphorically. We call this the “We Economy”. A good example is Pizza Hut’s partnership with Visa. Customers can place a pizza order hands-free while driving and pay with just a few clicks using Visa Checkout on the dashboard screen. The car will use live traffic data to alert the store when to prepare the pizza so it’s ready as the customer arrives. This connected-car commerce is a meeting of three brands – Pizza Hut, Visa, and the car – creating a completely new service experience. The brand’s touchpoint with the consumer now includes the dashboard, voice control, the personal pick-up experience as well as the follow up content and billing messages.
Brands as APIs
Companies that successfully open up their brand application programming interface (API) can benefit from new brands rather than be challenged by them. But cross-channel experiences can be clunky and Service Design concepts should be carefully considered.
Getting the transition between different channels right is a significant task: you are effectively handing over some of your brand experience to another brand and you need clear rules on the value exchange, speed, type of communication, transactions and data. Uber is a great example of this integration – you can now estimate the travel time and cost of your journey using Google Maps and play your Spotify playlist during the ride. It’s a more convenient and personal experience, yes, but at the same time with transparent and clear delineations of the brands.
Living services
Functionality and interaction patterns have also created new branding opportunities. In the last four years the average number of times we check our phone daily has jumped from 34 to 110. We could bemoan the loss of eye contact and dialogue culture but we should instead focus on making this new habit of staring at a small screen more human, helpful and meaningful.
We can do this through sensors, wearables, cloud computing, gestures or voice interactions. Wearables can for example record our habits and use them to regulate a home’s heat, light and security, thereby eliminating the need for separate control screens. These daily interactions will become the most pervasive experience that some brands have with their users.
Real time brand
Lastly I want to highlight the happy accidents that can happen when transforming a brand. When we engage with clients in rapid ideation or prototyping sessions, we explore possible futures for a brand in quick, iterative ways, unencumbered by details. The results are often rough-hewn. Yet the worst you could do is shut down the opportunity due to a possible breach of brand guidelines. Don’t relegate it to a pure technology project but use facets of branding like visual, physical shape or performance to make prototypes attractive to the world - and the client’s boardroom.
Brands need to be in a state of constant evolution, not constantly trying to lock down the brand guidelines and finding that the world has moved on by the time they start to manage them.
Transitioning to a next era of branding
Seth Godin once defined a brand as ‘a shortcut for a whole bunch of expectations, worldview connections, experiences, and promises that a product or service makes’. This core definition hasn’t changed, but the reach and complexity of those experiences and promises now expands across channels and interconnects with other brands.
Our challenge is to design coherent, meaningful experiences for this new world.
There’s plenty of work to do.
By Tim Buesing
Executive creative director at Reactive (part of Accenture Interactive).