Adidas and IKEA recently announced they were joining forces in a slightly surprising brand partnership. But is it such a bad idea for brands which don’t immediately seem natural bedfellows to team up? Let’s remove ourselves from the world of brand for a minute, and look at the world of…

Brand is used to appeal to peoples’ emotions, by creating meaning that has a value to someone. So why is there any surprise if people react emotionally when organizations (or their brand agencies) make changes to a brand? Meaning And Self-Identity Brands are laden with symbolism and meaning, and a large part of that meaning is the idea of identity. Of course, there is the identity of the brand itself — what the brand represents and how it appears — but a brand can also go to make…

Why do people remain loyal to a brand? There are a myriad of benefits that brand experts claim people want from a brand — collaboration, service, innovation, relationships, and the current favorite, purpose. Obviously there are many reasons people are loyal to a specific brand, but what about when a brand is simultaneously extremely successful and unpopular with the people using it? Why would people remain loyal to a brand they didn’t like?

People don’t really care about logos anymore, do they? Well, over 18,000 page views might tell a different story. I recently shared a post on LinkedIn, which showed the changes to four leading brands’ logos — Google, Airbnb, Spotify and Pinterest — which had previously been shared on Twitter by Oh No Type Company. The recent rebrands of all these companies seemingly followed a trend of moving from characterful to clean, sans-serif styles. I compared this trend to 1960s corporate America, which reminded me of an article in the Guardian in 2014 on Helvetica’s use in that era.

What is a brand? This is a question I’ve discussed many times with many people, and have had a myriad of responses consisting of various [interesting] definitions and theories. However, if I strip all of the responses back to basics, there are fundamentally two types: the brand is the appearance…

It has become widely claimed that ‘Millennials’* are driving businesses and organisations to be more socially conscious and responsible. There are seemingly hundreds of articles regaling us with statistics which supposedly bear this out. But is it true? What people seem to have taken from the statistics quoted in these…

It seems to have become popular to talk about brand in terms of a story. Let’s be as clear as possible with this, a brand is not a story — if it was then it’s created using William Burroughs ‘Cut Up Method’. What have you got against stories? Nothing, it…

Introducing Charlie Mullins who is founder of Pimlico Plumbers, London‘s largest independent plumbing company. We asked him our #5brandquestions (When we talk about ‘brand’ here we refer to the ideas and attributes associated with you and what you do, as well as the ‘things’ such as logos and products. …

A large part of a brand is the meaning which is shared between people and business. So a new visual identity or strategic proposition is not a ‘rebrand’. Using ‘rebrand’ to describe a new identity or approach perpetuates the idea that the brand is simply the appearance or the one-way message from business to people. Which it isn’t. You can’t Rebrand. You can Redefine your brand Refocus your brand Repurpose your brand Refresh your brand Revive your brand Reinvigorate your brand