Brand identity as an organic system

A company’s branding is its personality. Brand style guides define that personality and inform the design choices that are made when producing websites, products, marketing, etc.

Brands grow, adapt and evolve over time. Styles change slightly depending on context. They must apply themselves and submit to different operating systems, print techniques, and audience demographics. Sometimes the results survive the particular campaign and are absorbed into the identity systems permanently.

There’s something organic to a brand identity, when you think of it like this. However, most organisations don’t allow for it. That’s understandable, a brand identity system has consistency at its heart, that’s the point — recognisable uniformity across communication platforms.

When change does come it’s often sudden and violent; a commissioned redesign intended to make a splash and correct outdated values. Total realignment. A recent famous and somewhat controversial example might be Airbnb. It had outgrown its logo, its way of communicating; the scope and direction of the company had changed and left its brand identity behind.

But what if a brand identity was allowed to change and develop? What if it was encouraged? Try to ignore the negative connotations of the following simile, but what if we designed a brand that behaved a bit like a virus? Able to mutate, spread and grow, while maintaining a collection of unique and unmistakable traits at its core. Recognisable but not constrained by a single style or structure.

At its core would be a kind of DNA, possibly expressed as a code or formula that could be used to produce visuals, sounds, words with a distinct flavour to them all. As long as the starting point is the same, the end result, in theory, would be recognisable.

How complicated this first step would be and how much chaos, or human creativity would be introduced before the results are produced is up for discussion. Leaving decision making in the hands of a system, especially choices that are traditionally considered creative or people-focussed, could be fatal…

In nature, only those mutations that reach maturity can reproduce. That’s the safeguard against failure. A form of Darwinism might be the answer here too. Could there be a success feedback loop built in to this adaptive brand system?

Perhaps instead this would be a tool that humans would regulate, just a process to ensure a level of brand consistency, spitting out lego bricks for us to arrange.

Process design is nothing new, and discussions like this one are ongoing, but branding agencies have not yet taken their discipline and tried to automate all of it. I’m interested in pushing this to an extreme and exploring the implications of process-driven creativity.

Drop me a tweet or an email if you want to help.