Identity from the inside out
Strong brand narratives are experienced, not told.
How do brands cut through the noise, build loyal and loving fans, and have a sustainable impact? The one asking is Tom Morgan from ANTI Bergen, in a nice reflection on their approach to brand building. Tom and his colleagues do great work, there’s an intellectual, interesting edge to their design approach. I am really happy to have them as competitors and sometimes collaborators in the design cluster here in Bergen, Norway.
Their design philosophy circles around the idea of interference — the creative communication signals that cut through noise. According to Tom brand building requires a mix of “good old fashioned brand management, down to earth authenticity and captivating creativity”.
Tom’s text made me reflect on the evolutionary backdraft of Netlife Research, where currently I work. Netlife Research started out as usability testing experts in the early days of the web. The founders were psychologists, focusing on functional aspect of interaction between humans and the stuff inside the browser. They fought an heroic battle against the overpopulated, unprioritized, inaccessible websites of the early millenium. Our product was the evaluation report, where we complained about creative, but quite often dysfunctional solutions from other agencies.
In other words: We started out as whiners, not designers.
Structured user testing with professional eye tracking equipment created a deeper understanding of how we read, interpret colors, symbols and written information on screens. This is useful knowledge in any design process. The company evolved. We first started designing wireframes, working with content and IA, then graphic design, — increasingly in the form of rich HTML-prototypes. Today, Netlife is a full-fledged interdisciplinary design agency including frontend-coders and developers. We’ve grown from usability testing and user research, without the DNA of the marketing bureau. Yet we do increasingly work on projects involving identity design and brand building. How do we differ?
Inspired by Tom I made a mashup of partly overlapping, randomized observations. All of the following should be considered though-work in progress:
1. We are still biological beings
Even if we live in a time defined by rapid technology shifts and societal changes, the basic functions of our Homo Sapien brain stays pretty much the same. We have a given set of cognitive and sensory capabilities. We respond to certain colours. We recognize some patterns better than others. We process data better if it is formatted in certain ways. Tone of voice affects emotional response. We are lazy. We tend to quit if a sequence of actions becomes too complex or long. We need subtle motivation and nudges along the way to help us stay on track or fulfill complex tasks. Design can make information more digestible, reduce barriers and motivate. Building a brand is building associations. What we try to redesign are the synaptic patterns in the brain of the end-user. We do this by enabling new forms of interaction.
2. Brands are not unified things
Companies and organisations are complex constructions. There are often conflicting internal incentives. There are never-ending negotiations between freedom and borders. There are questions with many correct answers. And questions with none. There is evolution: Looking back you see the legacy. Looking ahead you see many different futures. There are the best intentions, and the worst effects. And there are the effects of time. Any brand will be exposed to entropy. The second law of thermodynamics states that there will be increasing molecular disorder within any complex system. Entropy is a measure of this disorder. Every organisations experiences a similar natural law. Every new project, every added channel, every new business entitity, will inevitably casue less consistency.
3. Less noise = stronger signal
We are all, in some form or another, brand-bearers. Brand is a shared story, a meme, a narrative shared within a social structure. Brands are tools to tell the world around us who we are, or aspire to be. A measure of a brands strength is the consistency of storytelling and interpretations. The official meme of the company and the unoffical ones living amongst its customer should be similar. Way to often the value proposition does not reflect the actual customer experience. To remove this discrepancy is a really important part of any long term brand building process. To strengthen a brand does not have to involve rewriting the story. You want people to hear your signal? The first, and often most important measure is not the turn up the volume.
It is to turn down the noise.
4. Brands are both emotional and functional
This is why our design philosophy is still very focused on the functional aspects of visual elements, content and code. No bullshit. No “interestingness” for the sake of attention. Just the hard, sometimes painful work of deleting stuff, prioritizing, creating consistent hierarchies, building easy-to-implement system and testing creative ideas to their limits — sadly, quite often to death. At Netlife Research we always work metodically to identify user tasks, because digital interaction is a very task-based activity. We use the core model, to get rid of the idea that we build “pages”, and to anchor what we do in the user experience and strategy. Over the last years we have worked closely with strong brands within banking, air travel, tourism, retail and the digital service economy. Many of our projects started out as UX projects or website redesigns, and end up with a brand focus. The borders are increasingly becoming blurred.
6. Perceived identity is an emergent phenomenon
Yes: Interference — in the form of bold, brave and attention-driving uniqueness — is important. It can create a powerful meta-structure that shapes and transforms the surrounding matter. But this dynamic goes both ways. Increasingly, identity is being shaped and maintained by the minuscule, often overlooked, details in the actual experience. Personally I often use a term I learned from biology while trying to describe the way Netlife Research works: Emergence, defined to be “a process whereby larger entities, patterns, and regularities arise through interactions among smaller or simpler entities that themselves do not exhibit such properties.”
A well known example:
Flocks of birds don’t follow an overarching plan. They follow really simple individual rules for decison-making. The amazingly complex patterns are the result of simple if-then-encoding into each individual bird. According to system theorist John Holland emergent phenomenons are “changeless and changing, constant and fluctuating, persistent and shifting, inevitable and unpredictable”. Similarly, the overall user experience cannot be decided top-down, or made up. The show has no conductor. A brand is built, like an ant hill, by micro texts, buttons, consistent tone of voice across channels and personal encounters. We don’t build brands. We enable a swarm of brandbuilding moments, modules and details. We do this by mapping out strategic ambitions, user needs, target groups and channels, bioling it all down a very simplistic rationale, the strategic DNA of the brand. With this as the backdraft we make useful stuff: Guidelines, style & tone guides, flexible design systems that can be reused for different purposes. It is modular in form — to creating consistency and flexibility in a changing environment. And, like we did we the Norwegian Brandbook, we create tools for distribution of this DNA across organisational entities.
7. Brands are fractal experiences
So, there is an important meta-structure to great brands — the story. And there are important details — the experience. Good brands are able to create an inner consistency along this dimension. You might think of it, metaphorically, as a fractal structure, defined by “similiraties across scale”.
Dizzy? The point is that you experience the same concept even if you zoom out or zoom in. The tone of voice in the confirmation email should, somehow, reflect the overall personality of the brand.
8. Strong brands are sensoric and responsive
To create the brand as an “authentic” and consistent experience in a digital, changing world is not easy. It requires organisational anchoring, clear KPIs for the user experience and willingness to adapt and change in accordance with feedback from users and the markets. Any organisation need to develop this sensoric capacity and establish metrics that measure value creation in broad sense, reflecting both user experience and simple-to-understand business logics that can be distributed broadly. This is not easy.
It is more than anything a cultural transformation.
9. Brands are not built through monolithic projects
Creating the foundation for this long-term brand building process, could be organised as a project, a short term ad-hoc operation. But the actual work of building a brand requires systematic efforts and stamina. Too many projects are ambitious and inspired, but lack the long term commitment needed to establish the actual brand experience across channels and internal silo structures. This is why we at Netlife put a lot of emphasis into smart and practical ways of distributing guidelines, code snippets and graphical elements to relevant stakeholders within and outside the organisation.
The conclusion? Let’s keep the conversation going. In my opinion no solitary design agency in the world is able to do all the work needed to bring a brand into sustainable life. Our job is to help the identity grow, from within. The job takes interdiciplinary team work across agency and client, and a the continous stress testing between inside out/outside in-perspectives. “Meta can change matter. Matter can change meta”, says Dan Hill in his inspiring little book Trojan Horses and Dark Matter. Both interference and emergence, the high level structure and the enabling details, are needed to create impactful, sustainable brands.
They are parts of the same picture.
