tomatolounge

Thanks to Shauneen our QA specialist, we can start celebrating.

In branding circles we used to say, ” you can’t completely embrace the future if you don’t get rid of the past.” And this is precisely how I felt when heard about this Continental Airlines and United merger.

What a great opportunity for these two companies to start a new brand carried by strong values and customer service dedications, something that has been seriously lagging over the years in the domestic airline industry. Poor on-board experience, constant delays, long waiting lines at boarding etc…

I thought this was going to be the opportunity to finally dust off the Continental brand that has served its purpose over the last two decades and now ready for some new fresh altitude (or attitude?) air. United has also been plagued with serious set backs over the year, not even mentioning the unfortunate connection to the 9/11 events. On the plus side, Continental retains a strong business customers community and extending the continental brand to its final stretch sound like a possible option.

While I was reading articles in the press, my attention was drawn to the backdrop set up for press purpose featuring the “new” brand. Same Continental color, same Continental globe, same typography (or it looks like) but the name has been switched to “United Airlines”. I didn’t know rebranding was going to look this easy.

I would hope this is just temporary until a more uplifting brand is relaunched when the two companies are set to merge next December and beyond: something that make us want to fly again or more often and collect these branded items they used to distribute in the planes.

This is a internal sales event for a global Telecom carrier company that took place in Montreal this week.

More precisely, TATA Communications’ voice business unit organized an internal sales event gathering a hundred or so employees from all over the world for a few days. Here is a fast recap of the design process. Our sketches explored the theme of  “raising your voice ” and submitted a few ideas that could relate to potential locations on the Eastern Seaboard of the Atlantic. In the initial exploration, the client was exploring multiple venues and we naturally devised a set of ideas around hosting the event in New York City.

The below drawing demonstrates various applications to the New York City environment, a city world renowned for having a voice.

Once the client approved the idea we moved on to developing more the ideas more precisely and creating a visual language through a set of colors related to the overall company branding as well as insertion of duotone visuals. the overall identity for this event was all about loudness so we worked around large and bold typeface intricated to always create one core block to illustrate the sales team effort.

The next step was all about the environmental branding for the entire event  from signage to in-room drop out items to make sure that the entire experience was carried throughout at a spatial level as well.

Brand Guidelines shouldn’t become that unpenetrable fortress. I cam across this article today and couldn’t relate more to a current project we are working on where a brand is taken over by another one and we have to channel the merging of the old into the new while preserving the spirit of both. A rather challenging similar exercise we came across with the Tata Communications project as well about 4 years ago that was even more complex; channeling five brands all located in different global markets into one large global brand.

I found this paragraph so true that I decided to quote as is, coming from Craig Stout at Interbrand and related to a visit they made to the New York Times Office.

“From a design and creative perspective, The New York Times does not adhere to a stringent set of guidelines. Mr. Bodkin feels that an overt adherence to guidelines does not allow for the publication’s artists and designers’ creativity to shine through. The approach seems to work as proven by The Times’ ability to have a fresh look that is constantly relevant, surprising and engaging without veering too far away from the spirit of the brand. In general, the great brands that stay visually engaging over time–Nike, Target, Starbucks–have a single or small group of directors who maintain tight creative control and make decisions based on creative executions rather than a strict adherence to guidelines.

There is nothing more true as often brand become the prisoners of their own guidelines. “No you can’t do that, no you can’t do that either, you can do that only in this color. Sorry that’s not going to be possible”. At the end of the day most guidelines are the brand biggest enemy when conceived superficially. Very often Marketing director or brand manager overrules these guidelines because they were conceived outside of the brand positioning and brand strategic approach.

Today’s communications/advertising/marketing environment calls for constant changes and adjustment and evolution of the brand. This a end-user market and there are so many channels of communications today as opposed to 20 years ago that the brand need to have a voice that can express itself either in print (advertising, corporate communications etc), in motion (interactive, TV advertising), in space (event, retail experience) or even in sound (radio, interactive, etc).

Today you can’t possible restrict how one brand can grow without hoping to extend its own reach.So if you are going to develop and launch a brand the best way to control it is set a minimum of guidelines but allow maximum of creativity while preserving the core messaging.

Once a turn-off, music bands are learning how to expand their fan base by reaching out to the brand they love in a consumer market where social networks and branding is a pervasive lifestyle.

A big no-no until the 90′s, mega band now discover that dealing with large brand and sponsoring is one crucial step on the path to mega record contract and success. Tony Bennett, U2, The Rolling stones, Sting have gone this way.

Now quickly, can you name the band that had three  #1 hit song this year and is under contract with Samsung, Blackberry, Apple, Honda, Pepsi, Verizon and Target? The band that goes to a meeting with a power point deck and is very aware of font sizes and brand colors?

The answer is here: read that great article by John Jurgensen on the most branded band.

Time to move to a larger data center.

Make my Logo brand bigger.

We are often confronted to a dilemma when developing identity for a new brand. With creating a new visual language, where does consistency become copy and paste and how do you expand brand recognition by not using the same logo mark anywhere? Over the time and experience I became I big supporter of brand identities that develop a language and visual system, rather than really focus on implementing and applying a same design on as many formats and platforms as possible.

Today it remain one of the most difficult sells to corporation because the brand is an important asset that can be measured in billions of dollars (Coca Cola, the brand and not of the brick and mortar assets, was valued in 2002 at 69.6 billion dollars). Many executives have a hard time buying into a mutable identity that express a brand through variations of visuals as opposed to the strategy or repetition and memorization.

One of the reasons I think variable visual for brands are lot more interesting is because when well crafted they extend to the infinite the reach of the brand in a 360 degree radius. We live in a era of flexibilty and malleability where brands are manipulated and shaped by the end user (think AOL’s new brand by Wolf Ollins – although I criticized the quick rendition as a shortcut to express an idea earlier on this blog, I believe the strategic approach is correct)

Today brands are  a lot more pervasive and need to conquer a lot more of our selective minds and taste.

An evolutive brand is also showing more depth and more meaning than one that just satisfy itself by just replicating an icon all over.

Here at two great examples of this case of mutative brands where the logo isn’t really the logo: Saks Fifth Avenue by Michael Bierut at Pentagram and The City of Melbourne Identity by Landor Australia.

And the city of Melbourne below

These examples shows that a brand is a lot more than a logo and how it is applied to stationery or a website. Its in fact a company largest assets because it convey its vision and philosophy as well as its way of communicating through a visual language.

In case you haven’t seen it, check out Logorama, the 16 minutes brand-based short from French Agency that won in the short -animated category at the latest Oscar.

Speaking of Subways; Ikea’s undeground ad campaign in Paris’s subway. Definitely noticable. Although I don’t see where I could use a red and white stripe sofa!