How to construct a brand identity in minutes
How would you explain brand identity to people who were completely unfamiliar with the concept?
Once I had to do this very quickly. It wasn’t elegant, but I got the job done.
In 1991, I arrived in Hong Kong as the newly-appointed head of on-air creative for the newest TV channel in Asia.
By the early 90s, MTV had achieved a kind of pop culture brand ascendancy in nearly every corner of the world, with thriving channels in Europe, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Brazil and the Americas (except in Canada where a kind of protectionist scheme blocked US television channels in order to preserve the market for homegrown TV networks).
But MTV had nothing going on in Asia. At the time, South Asia was considered the land of piracy. A couple hundred knockoff versions of MTV had already popped up in the late 1980s, mostly in karaoke clubs in Taiwan. They were cheerfully mining the MTV logo for all it was worth in unlicensed video shops and parlors.
As Creative Director, my job was to restore the MTV brand to its proper place at the forefront of the music industry.
Most of the so-called experts told us it couldn’t be done. They cited all sorts of reasons why MTV Asia would fail: the ripoff artists were too entrenched, the local folks had no interest in pop culture from the United States, and no record labels were eager to spend marketing money in a region where everyone ripped off CDs.
These arguments struck me as pretty weak, so I set out to Asia to prove the experts wrong.
First, I needed to establish a brand identity that blended MTV style with the local flavor.
This task presented a set of challenges unlike anything I had encountered before. In Asia at the time, there was no concept of multichannel television. Zilch. Asian nations had, at most, four channels. Some, like India, had exactly two.
We were pioneering multichannel satellite TV in a region that had no idea what the point of multichannel TV was. It was the ultimate chicken and egg problem: if you did not have a satellite dish, you could not experience our channel. But if you did not know about our channel, then why would you go to the trouble and expense of installing a satellite dish?
Multichannel TV was an alien notion to folks who felt quite satisfied with the local broadcast options. I recall clearly a conversation I had shortly after I arrived in Hong Kong. I was seated on the Star Ferry as it sailed across Hong Kong Harbour. I had just met another passenger, a pleasant English gentleman wearing a black suit. I was trying, unsuccessfully, to explain why anyone would need a multiplicity of TV channels. He smiled at me as if I were slightly retarded, explaining “You see, my dear fellow, here in Hong Kong we have exactly four channels. Two in English and two in Chinese. If you don’t like what’s showing on the first channel, you can always watch the other channel.” For him, this was sufficient. I began to explain to this gent that in New York, where I lived, there were more than 50 TV channels (which was considered a quite lot at the time). These included public access TV channels that mostly consisted of amateur porn. I don’t think I was very persuasive.
I note this conversation because it was the last time in my life that I encountered someone who was unaware of multichannel TV. Looking back at this exchange from the vantage point of 2019, when I have at my disposal satellite TV with 500+ channels, plus 2.6 million mobile apps that include every sort of multimedia and video communication, as well as 200+ OTT streaming video services, it seems almost quaint to consider that there was a time when people were content with just two TV networks.
The second problem I faced in Hong Kong was that we were attempting to broadcast across a very wide region. By “very wide” I mean freaking enormous. MTV Asia was distributed on AsiaSat, which had an absolutely enormous footprint that covered a quarter of the earth’s surface, ranging from southern Japan and Taiwan and the Philippines in the east, to Kuwait and Israel in the west, and north to Siberia and south to the top of Australia. AsiaSat signals could be received in all of China, India, Indonesia, Taiwan, Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Myanmar, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq and Kuwait, as well as a lot of other new nations that were in the process of spinning out of the former Soviet Union.
MTV Asia’s signal could be received by 2/3 of the earth’s population, in the birthplaces of five major religions, and in nations with political systems that covered the entire spectrum from hard right authoritarian military regimes to lively democracies to hard left Communist dictatorships. My job was to build a brand identity that appealed to people in all of these places.
I was cognizant of the fact that MTV is a pretty flexible brand, but this project was going to require Olympic level acrobatics in order to stretch across all this region with all of its cultural variation.
If audiences could even see us, that is. In theory, anyone with a satellite antenna could get our signal, because AsiaSat was “free to air” meaning the signal was not encrypted. Free TV! But there was a catch: quite a few countries in Asia still had World-War 2 era laws on the books that made it illegal to broadcast or receive signals from outside the country.
So, for instance, in India what the Star TV folks were doing was considered a crime. That was problem #3.
If we managed to surmount those hurdles, there were also the questions of content. What programming is appropriate for viewers in China, India, Pakistan, Malaysia and Iraq? Youth culture and music culture varied wildly from nation to nation. Not to mention language and traditional culture. How could anyone create a brand that could span all of these nations and yet feels somehow authentic and relevant to, say, a kid on a motorcycle in Bangkok and also a headbanger in Jakarta or a club kid in Seoul?
Take my newly adopted home city of Hong Kong, for instance. In 1991 there was no concept of “youth marketing” or “youth branding” or “youth culture” any place in sight. Yes, of course, there was a large and mostly untapped market of young people, but not one advertiser nor any local ad agency seemed to make an effort to create a campaign that was designed to reach this specific group. The most prominent advertising in Hong Kong was aimed at rich bankers, or so it seemed.
Coming from the hyper-segmented advertising market in New York where youth was extolled as the highest virtue of the consumer economy (youth being unobtainable by older consumers and therefore intensely desirable), I watched Hong Kong TV in horror. The shows were lame but they were nothing compared to the commercials, which were — there’s no easy way to put this — extraordinarily bad.
Many of the Hong Kong TV spots consisted of neo-colonial fantasies of wealth and power.
One particular advertising campaign seemed to be frozen in a bygone era. It featured languid shots of a long black Rolls Royce limousine rolling down a pebbled driveway towards a distant English country estate. The fabulous couple that emerged from the limo was neither Chinese nor Indian. They were English.
Most of the local ads were similar. The aspirational ideal at the time wasn’t Asian or Chinese. It was colonial English. The adverts revealed a great deal about the local power structure in the late colonial era. The residents of Hong Kong in the 1990s were noticeably more British in their mannerisms, style and aspirations than people living in the UK were at the time.
In 1991, Hong Kong viewers (or at least Hong Kong ad agencies) were pining for a version of England that no longer existed.
This incongruity struck me as a golden opportunity to offer something different. Something tailored to the local scene. After all, in the US a decade earlier, MTV had built a brand by openly mocking the lame branding and ad campaigns generated by mainstream TV broadcasters. Conventional advertising was MTV’s favorite banana peel. We had developed a suite of techniques for overturning conventional TV messages: these included jaded sarcasm, blatant parody and blank post-modern pastiche.
MTV was ironic before irony became the default mode for every program and advert in media. No accident that MTV invented reality TV. The channel was a remixer for pop culture. We merrily sampled, digested and regurgitated mainstream culture as part of our design palette.
My most immediate problem was that we were launching the channel in six weeks and we did not yet have any discernible brand strategy . During the pre-launch crunch, I produced more than1500 promos, commercials and short films. I did not get much sleep during those weeks but the task gave me an excellent occasion to immerse myself intensively in the problem of making the MTV brand relevant in Asia.
To get the job done, I was going to need some help.
Our staff at MTV Asia consisted of several Asian, Eurasian and British kids in their early 20s. There were about 20 of us in total, which meant that we each had to generate more than an hour a day of video programming to fill a 24 hour channel. This was a ridiculous, preposterous challenge because most of our staff had never produced a single frame of television before, and many had never seen MTV. Somehow we managed to pull it off.
One day just prior to the channel launch, I was talking to a young Chinese producer about our on-air identity. He told me that everyone in China already knew what MTV was about. He said that the general perception in Hong Kong was “On MTV, anything goes.”
This was problematic. “Anything goes” is a terrible brand perception for any product. No brand can be successful if it doesn’t stand for something.
And actually, MTV stood for quite a lot, including: new music, the freedom to be young and stupid, originality and individuality, dumb jokes, sex as something that wasn’t shameful or bad, rock and roll, rap, big hair, the joyful excesses of spring break and road trips, weird animation and most important of all, a measure of respect for a generation of young people who were trying to figure out their own path in a world devoid of heroes or role models. Then again, it was not clear how all of this would translate to audiences in Asia.
That’s not all. MTV also definitely did not stand for certain other values. In fact, it was easier to define MTV by what it did not stand for. MTV was against conformity, uniformity, conventional wisdom, huge corporate branding campaigns, normal television programming, glitzy rotating 3D logos, anything that was overproduced and slickly packaged, bossy adults, adult bosses, uptight joykillers who were determined to repress all of the natural urges that teenagers have, and authority figures of every stripe.
Now my challenge was to distill this vague mission into something that I could quickly explain to a bunch of kids who had never watched multichannel TV.
On the Star Ferry, floating back across the harbor to my home on Hong Kong Island after yet another long day of editing in Hung Hom, I reflected on the brands that I grew up with. When I was a kid, nearly every product had a brand that was distinguished by a unique identity. In many cases, brand identities consisted quite literally of personalities that were constructed specifically for products: instantly-recognizable characters like the Jolly Green Giant, the Keebler elves, Orville Redenbacher, Grandma Smucker, Aunt Jemima, Colonel Sanders, the Trix rabbit were the embodiment of the brand values associated with these goods. (Try to repress your gag reflex and recall that this was in an era before Ronald McDonald and the Hamburglar seemed creepy and weird.)
Inspired by these crusty relics of the Mad Men era, I decided that the best way to inspire my young colleagues to create an MTV brand was to construct a new personality. I started to write down all of the attributes of a personality that I could think of, and tried to match them to an equivalent branding technique that could be used by a television channel. I was drafting a cheat sheet for a crash course in TV brand building.
Every unique human personality is distinguished by a collection of attributes: a face, a voice, a signature, a fingerprint, a sense of humor, a sense of personal style, a catchphrase or habitual expression, and individual taste.
The combination of these unique attributes forms a kind of gestalt, instantly recognizable by our friends and peers. That’s how humans identify each other in public. And it works from a considerable distance away, even when the signals are unclear. We are able to recognize faces in a crowd. We can spot people we know at a distance, just by their gate and posture. I wanted to leverage this built-in feature of the human brain as the basis for the MTV Asia brand.
I had a hunch that these attributes could be transposed onto a TV channel as a means of distinguishing one channel from another. Moreover, I believed that my producers could deliberately construct an Asian personality for MTV by consciously choosing elements that were inspired by the attributes that make human beings unique.
It was not complex or subtle. The whole point was to make this task easy to grasp and completely accessible to every producer working on the channel. Like this:
The face of MTV was our hyperkinetic on-air talent, the VJs who introduced the videos and who, as primordial forerunners of today’s dime-a-dozen Instagram influencers, embodied a kind of upwardly-mobile glamour. The VJs seemed to indulge in the semi-glamourous, hedonistic lifestyle of a person who lived in close proximity to the major recording artists with big hair and questionable hygiene. But the channel never depended entirely on any one particular performer as its sole spokesperson. The VJs were disposable personalities, each of whom represented a single facet of a multi-dimensional persona. Personally I preferred to take a 16mm camera into the streets of Asian cities and towns and conduct interviews with real people. I think that the short films I made did more to establish a sense of Asian youth identity than a hungover show host wearing leather jeans and a funky shirt.
The voice of MTV was our unique voiceover. For Asia, I managed to obtain the services of Rob Middleton, a producer in Hong Kong with a remarkably deep and clear baritone to deliver the ever-present tag line, “This is MTV”.
Our MTV signature was a set of unique fonts for on-air graphics. While most TV network were still using standard fonts that came pre installed in the Chyron machine, I instructed our graphic design team to generate two unique font families that I felt expressed something of the unique quality of life in Asia. They were hand-drawn, reminscent of the popular comic books and graffitti that was starting to appear in the seedier districts of Asian cities (but never Singapore which remains a pristine quasi-police state where chewing gun is banned).
The MTV fingerprint was the classic MTV logo. It was genuinely unique. What set the MTV logo apart from everything else on television at the time was the combination of a fat M and the hand-drawn scrawl of TV that was sprayed like graffiti across the big blocky wall of M. This logo was completely unlike everything else on television at the time. It was handmade, clumsy, awkward, off-center and obnoxiously crude at a time when most broadcast graphics were trending towards hyperstylized 3D renderings in swirling motion with slick light effects and dynamic shading. MTV went in the exact opposite direction from the primary trends of mainstream TV supergraphics. Where TV chose computer-generated, we opted for handmade. Where mainstream TV chose slickness and polish, we went for unfinished, raw and ungainly. Even better, the big fat M could be filled in with motion footage, animation, cut up pictures, faces, eyeballs or teeth, palm trees, or nothing at all. The MTV logo was a moshpit that contained multitudes. It was easy to modify this logo to include elements of rich Asian visual culture.
The sense of humor for our channel was expressed primarily via original short films and animation. These were quirky, weird and unpredictable, and not infrequently gross. I made a special effort to produce a lot of these with local Asian animators and filmmakers and talent. The results varied in quality and relevance, but that kind of variety was also part of our brand identity.
The MTV style was not really expressed by the flashy, clubworthy wardrobe of our on-air talent but rather more successfully conveyed by a particular editorial technique for combining a multitude of cultural influences referred to as a mashup. The purest distillation of MTV style was contained in the intensely quick-cutting video montages in our short promotional clips. Stuck with low budgets and lots of edit time, we developed a way to convert stock footage and clips from music videos into something entirely new. It was like recycling the tropes and iconic shots of our video environment into something entirely new. My colleagues in the on-air promo department in New York were constantly experimenting with layering subliminal messages and cutting on frames, pushing the editorial technique to the utmost, turning montage into its own expressive medium, quite separate from film production. We generated video from inanimate junk, by cutting up magazine pages, by still animation with badges and stickers and club fliers and fashion spreads. I once created a package of spots from cardboard cutouts. The international channels exported this mashup style to the rest of the planet where it became the global vernacular of a particular demographic segment. This pastiche style wasn’t limited to visuals, either. MTV spots were often scored with complex layered sound design that was unlike anything on broadcast television: a mixture of ambient sounds of traffic and noise from the city environment, sampled hooks from hit songs, and industrial scale beats and feedback.
The MTV catchphrase consisted of the slogans that we used to tag the ending of each spot. These gems were concocted by the copywriters in New York and we adapted them for use in Asia. The guiding principle was that it’s preferable to give your audience the words to describe your channel, otherwise they may find their own words to describe it (and that might not be so flattering). Usually our tag lines emphasized difference, as in “It’s not TV. It’s MTV.” Or “MTV your TV.”
MTV taste was eclectic, odd, embracing and celebratory. The channel itself was a mashup of incongruous music styles: rap mixed with heavy metal, arena rock, grunge, pop, acoustic and hip hop. It was like someone took ten minutes from every radio station in the world and tossed it into a blender with the pages of two dozen glossy magazines heisted from a grocery store checkout lane. The pulp that emerged was the MTV style. It managed to embrace the broad possibilities of post-mall culture, even stuff that you kinda hated, and made it cool. I recognized at the time that this could sound a bit like “anything goes” but there was one more piece of the MTV brand: every producer shared a clear understanding of what MTV would never do. There were some shows we would never put on the air and would never be associated with. The channel was embracing, but it wasn’t all-embracing. Sometimes the stuff you choose to leave out of the picture says more than what is included.
Beneath all of these disparate elements was a unifying core promise: MTV would accept you. Every producer on our small crew intuitively grasped the notion that teenagers all over the world suffer from the same anxiety: that they would not be accepted, might be rejected, might be laughed at or ostracized by the cool kids. Even the cool kids live with this worry.
Ultimately MTV was against coolness, at least the lame way that coolness was conventionally defined in high school, which required the exclusion of entire groups of misfits and losers and dorks. MTV was the preferred hangout for rejects and misfits and regular kids who were not fabulous. Our brand promise was open acceptance of all the weirdos that did not fit into the slick confines of modern shopping mall mass culture. We celebrated that fact.
In some parts of Asia, however, we faced a particular challenge. The classic rock and roll attitude is deeply individualistic. That works pretty reliably in the United States and other cultures where embracing rock music was an act of personal rebellion against strict schoolteachers, parents and other authority figures. But in some Asian communities in 1991, the notion of an individual who stands apart from the group was quite difficult for many folks to accept. Individualism wasn’t exactly an aspirational ideal: instead it represented a kind of exile, a loss of connection. So we modified some of our messaging to be more inclusive. We asked, “Are you part of the group?” instead of defining individual identity as somehow distinct from all groups. This modification worked much better. It made the MTV lifestyle something to belong to.
Familiarity was another big priority. I felt it was important to link the MTV logo to Asia so that it did not get pigeonholed as a foreign import. So, into the whirling pop culture blender we added regional influences, including visual elements of the scenery, textiles, textures, traditions and booming pop scene in the megacities of South Asia, as well as the almost tangible feeling of optimism that characterized every Asian community in the 1990s. I spent most of my spare time gathering visual artifacts, ranging from comic books and club fliers to wood-block batik textiles and hand-carved wood. All of this stuff found its way onto the airwaves.
Attitude was upbeat. At a time when US teenagers were disaffected, jaded, sarcastic and skeptical about adulthood, Asian kids in the early 1990s were looking forward to the Pacific century. The general mood was — and remains— upbeat. We captured that sunny feeling, too, and wove it into our brand promise. It was a sharp contrast to the dark, depressive post-industrial grunge vibe that was dominant in the US at the time.
Writing this down, I can see that this probably seems like a “garbage can” approach to building a brand. But my ad hoc formula for building a brand identity worked better than I hoped. It left a lot of room for young producers to fill in the gap with their own ideas, and it required constant replenishment to stay fresh. Which meant we were continuously adding more campaigns, more images, more faces.
MTV Asia was a huge success. All over Asia, kids were tuning in and authority figures were freaking out. I got yelled at by management. The government of Indonesia was outraged. Religious groups in India lodged a complaint. Perfect.
A few months after the launch, MTV Networks Chairman Tom Freston sent me a note of congratulations on launching the most successful MTV in the world.
After two years of roaming through Asia with a camera, I returned to New York where the media landscape was continuously evolving. By 1993, video games were stealing attention and mindshare from TV, particularly among our core audience of teenaged boys. And dialup internet was emerging as a new distraction. This process began to pick up momentum by the late 1990s. Every additional channel, medium, or entertainment format presented a further fragmentation of audience and awareness. The simple brand-building techniques of the early multichannel TV days were becoming less effective as competition proliferated across platforms.
Fast-forward to today. In our current media-saturated environment, it is incredibly difficult to cut through the clutter of logos to build a brand identity that really matters, or is even recognizable. Surely some of the old techniques still work, but the method of applying them must evolve continuously.
Sometimes we rely too heavily on technology and not enough on common sense. Marketers now use a variety of hyper-targeting systems to deliver the right ad to the right person at the right moment. This approach is hardly foolproof, as a quick glance at the irrelevant ads filling up your Instagram feed will amply demonstrate. The marketing whizkids may have optimized the delivery, but the actual content of the message remains far from optimal, as the dismayingly low clickthrough rates on the Web attest.
Contemporary advertising on the Internet seems to have done a good job of mimicking the form while missing the message. A visually catchy pastiche devoid of relevant content or aspirational lifestyle info is a colorful tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing.
Moreover, hyperpersonalized ads, by definition, must fail to establish a broader brand identity that spans entire generations. Personalized brands don’t unite: they divide. A brand that is idealized for you is unlikely to provide a cultural context shared across an entire demographic, and it will thereby fail to perform the job of stimulating broad demand for a mass produced product.
How can marketers contend with the collapse of traditional TV and the ideal branding environment that it provided?
One solution might lie in the development of an entirely new branding system based on synthetic personalities. Imagine a turbocharged version of my simple brand identity system, powered by artificial intelligence. In my next post, that’s exactly what I’ll explore.
I am writing about identity — both product identity and brand identity, as well as human identity. The previous post in this series is called “The Rumored Death of TV is Really About Transforming Branding and Advertising.” You can read it here. If you enjoy it, share it with a friend. If not, share it with a random stranger and move away quickly.
The next article in this series is called “The Decline of Mass Advertising and the Rise of Fake Influencer Culture.” I had fun with this one, and I really hope you enjoy reading it here.
+++++++++++
Digital identity is a complex and sometimes bewildering topic. I’m writing this series of articles to help clarify my own understanding, and I welcome your comments, corrections and contributions. If the topics in this series of articles interest you, then why not join me for a discussion in person? I will be the host and master-of-ceremonies for the Innovation Track of GS1 Connect, the biggest gathering of supply chain experts in the world. I will interview the leading experts on digital identity in a roundtable discussion at GS1 Connect on June 19.
If you are interested in any of the urgent topics that pertain to digital identity and product identity, such as blockchain for supply chain, business process automation, the application of artificial intelligence to manufacturing and retail, then this is a conversation you don’t want to miss.
This year, GS1 Connect takes place in Denver Colorado on June 19 to 21..
For 30 years, I’ve been focused on designing and launching new digital services. In the process, I’ve grown fascinated with the way we are constructing a digital version of the real world. During my career, I’ve supervised the launch of the world’s first mobile video services, some of the earliest PC games, online games and mobile games, and the biggest live online learning programs in the world. I’m also the author of the award-winning book Vaporized: Solid Strategies for Success in a Dematerialized World which you can read in entirety here on Medium (or if you are feeling generous, you can buy the book on Amazon . Thanks, I love you for that!). Today I serve as the Special Advisor for Digital Identity to GS1 US. GS1 is the global standards body for product identity.
