This week BT has joined the ranks of many other (predominantly fashion) brands that have undergone a re-design over the past year and like many of those other brands they have emerged from their re-design with a minimal, black-on-white, sans-serif (Helvetica, is that you? — not really) logo, losing all distinctive qualities that their previous brand identity may have had.
Designers around the world shake their heads in disbelief (some are getting quite vocal about it). What has happened to our craft? It doesn’t require much adeptness to create a generic looking artefact like this. Logos used to be the primary showpiece of a brand; an important interface between the company and the consumer.
The idea of the logo as in glyphs and symbols to represent an entity, dates back to the time of Egyptian pharaohs who chose to represent themselves with unique symbols that were to be connected with them until long after their death. In medieval Europe, Heraldry was used to identify different families, states and organisations. Logos as we know them today emerged due to the 18th century industrial revolution. Consumers who were used to buying local products from local merchants, were now offered a plethora of mass manufactured, generic products, so the need for brand distinction emerged and mass branding was born.
Looking at logos from the perspective of the digital revolution, today, there is of course a technical need for a responsive logo that works across multiple channels in various sizes. While this may push the requirements for a “good” logo towards simplicity, this alone isn’t reason enough to set off a tidal wave of “blanding”. Design as a discipline has changed, as has the way that people interact with brands. Design is not so much about a highly skilled designer showing off the physical craft of design (that has taken them years to master) with artistic or complicated designs anymore, as much as it is about the shaping of an experience by pulling on psychological levers. Brands are not about expressing carefully crafted personas through visual styles anymore. Brands have in fact, in many cases lost the mandate to carefully craft their own personas. The rise of the experience economy and the prevalence of Social Media in our lives, have caused a proverbial turning of the brand-table and pushed brands into a passive, and consumers into an active position.
The democratisation of self-expression through social media (a cliché I know, but still) has opened up a stream of multi way communication between brands and people. Brands are not in charge of their own stories anymore — people tell them. This loss of control could be seen as highly damaging, since the core of a strong brand used to be a steady and consistent brand story, but some brand have managed to play this out to become a strength.
Many brands don’t want to dictate their values and brand style anymore, but want their image to be shaped through their customers and their experiences with the brand. We have entered the age of fluid brands, in which the same brand means something else to different people. Rather than weakening the brand, this strengthens them by opening up their addressable market, as in an ideal scenario people project themselves and their values onto these brands.
An anti-brand is not for everyone though. Most brands that make the move to a generic logo are long established and well known. One could say it is almost an emblem of brand success and maturity if they can pull off an anti-brand. Other brands have succeeded with similar egotistic moves in the past:
Marlboro defied new regulations for cigarette packaging by producing a packaging in which they identify their product only through a red triangle, with no need for a brand name or product description at all.
Since 2014 Coca Cola has been running several bold and highly successful campaigns in which they swap their iconic logo on the bottle for the most popular given names from different countries. Not only does this allow for people to identify themselves with the product in the most direct way possible, but it conveys a message that defies traditional brand theory: “our brand is so strong, we don’t even need a name”.
Despite the opportunities that may lie within the new black and white, Helvetica-loving anti-brand, a fundamental aspect of branding is nevertheless lost.
Sight is our second strongest sense for creating memories (smell is the strongest if you were wondering, even though it is more abstract, everyone knows what “summer rain” smells like). The strength of our visual memory is easily exhibited through the following exercise; have a look at the fragmented logos below and tell me which brand they belong to. Our visual memory easily fills in the missing pieces of the logos that we have seen over and over again, consciously and subconsciously. This skill of ours plays to brands’ favour, as the game of mass-branding is commonly seen as “brand recognition is everything”. This is less easily done with the new wave of generic logos.
Whether this loss in logo recognition actually matters from a business perspective will be shown over time. As the way we experience brands changes, their meaning and their path to success may be redefined as well. Beyond social media, new channels such as voice, are set out to become the predominant interface between people, products and services, forcing marketeers, advertisers and brand specialists to question and re-learn everything they know and believe in.
I may of course be wrong and this is simply the well orchestrated revenge of the graphic designers; a misunderstood species that has been underpaid, abused for the creation of corporate power point presentations and ridiculed on social media for years. Think about some graphic designers that you know and tell me that there isn’t even a slim chance that this may be true…
