It’s Easy to Make it Pretty, But It’s Hard to Make it Matter.
Hi. We’re OMFGCO, a creative studio based in Portland, Oregon, focused on branding and interior design. This is the third installment in our series “Every Decision is a Brand Decision.” You can find the first and second here and here, respectively.
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The world today feels so saturated. We don’t need more stuff — we need better stuff. What we all do every day helps shape our world in both big and small ways, and that’s a responsibility that we at OMFGCO take seriously.
When we feel like we’re doing our best work, it falls into one of two categories. Either we are:
1.) Taking something that already exists in the world and making it better, or
2.) Creating something new that should live in the world because nothing else in the world is like it.
It’s a win-win for both brands and for consumers. Finding these types of potential clients is a harder row to hoe, but when we do we find them we can achieve things that are truly dynamic and have real staying power.
If we have a mantra about what makes our work unique, this would be it:
It’s easy to make it pretty, but it’s hard to make it matter.
We do both.
This mantra emerged organically from a realization we had early on with our work. When clients came to us for help in the early days, they often conflated the notion of brand with a logo (or worse: a font). They just wanted us to turn around a quick logo for them, as if this would magically solve their problems or impact their brand and their customers’ perception of it in a meaningful way. This is an understandable misconception, but a misconception nonetheless.
A brand is so much more than a logo — it’s the music playing in the lobby, the scent in the air of your spa, your packaging, and the way you’ve trained your staff to speak to customers. It’s the materials you use in your environment, all the way down to the drawer pulls. Every person who works for you is a brand ambassador. When it comes to being an authentic, relevant brand, every decision truly is a brand decision.
Unfortunately, focusing on looking good has a few fundamental problems:
- Looking good is fleeting.
- Looking good only engages one of the senses.
- Looking good is just not rare anymore. In fact, it’s arguable that the number of good-looking things in the world is fairly overwhelming.
- Looking good is a matter of personal taste, so by definition, “looking good” means different things to different audiences.
Plus, it’s shallow. What we define as “beautiful” by most standards is often formulaic. Any designer or artist with a year or two of design work under their belt (sometimes less!) can learn how to make a decent looking logo. If this wasn’t the case, 99 designs and Fiverr wouldn’t exist. Hipster businesses wouldn’t be so easily pegged. Like it or not, it is easy to make it pretty.
Furthermore, people are smart. Everyone is getting really good at identifying pretty visuals that have no deeper story attached. When people call something “too slick” or, “not authentic,” they are really commenting on a lack of depth. They are reacting to the fact that there isn’t any substance beneath the eye candy provided.
Don’t get us wrong — it’s not that we don’t like pretty things. We LOVE pretty things! Visual attractiveness is a crucial component in the overall branding equation, and it shouldn’t be overlooked. But “pretty” by itself really doesn’t make a business or a brand great. If you’re setting out to make a difference or offer a solution, “pretty” simply isn’t enough.
Too many brands fail to take a stand with something more meaningful, mainly because it’s more difficult. It requires a lot more work up front, and also more work to maintain. But that work is the most important work of all. Without it, your brand is a façade, and people don’t trust façades.
How to Make it Matter
Long before we touch a pixel or write clever lines or pick a material palette for a project, we start by asking a lot of questions. Even if it’s something that we’ve done dozens of times before — perhaps especially in those cases — it’s always a good idea to start with more questions than answers. Good questions inspire curiosity rather than judgment, and being curious often takes you to places you might never have explored. The right questions can open doors you didn’t even know were there.
What questions do we ask? Our focus is to define the goals of a brand, what defines success for that brand, who the brand is speaking to, and most importantly, why. We really want to get to the heart of why a brand deserves to exist at all.
We also focus on why the company exists. Since the gap between company and brand is shrinking, “the reason why” behind the business is crucial. It will eventually manifest itself in how the brand treats customers, employees and how it comes to market. These are all things that impact the brand much more than the logo.
We call this initial phase of work the “thought work.” We sometimes jokingly consider ourselves to be “Brand Therapists” (or perhaps “Branding Personal Trainers”), because we make our clients do some inward thinking and soul searching about what makes their brand tick (being sure to differentiate between this and how they themselves tick).
The real goal here is to protect the brand both from ourselves and from the client — both of us are capable of messing it up along the way, so a system of checks and balances is imperative. When it comes to branding, personal taste can be a blessing and a curse. Most of the time, it’s the latter.
This is because humans have a really hard time being truly objective — our feelings and tastes are almost always tied consciously (or, more often unconsciously) to our internal belief systems. At some point in our lives, we’ve grown accustomed to seeing things a certain way, rather than being open to a larger objective reality that includes all of our experiences in a less judgmental way.
In other words, personal taste is arbitrary, and a good brand is not built arbitrarily.
You don’t get to say your brand matters — your audience gets to decide that. So ultimately, what makes a brand matter is what it does for others. (In fact, that’s what makes just about anything matter.) Things that matter are predicated on needs (conscious or not), and good brands exude the sincere desire to meet those needs.
We’re now in a time and place where making things look good isn’t a need in and of itself anymore—it’s table stakes. There is a dimensional and perceptual shift happening in our world (thankfully), and people want things to be good. In a world glutted with thoughtless branding, we all deserve to have quality experiences. We owe it to ourselves and to each other.
We’re trying to do our part. How about you?
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Original illustration © 2018 OMFGCO
