A Tech Guy in Brand Land
Ahoy internet! Today I’d like to take you on a little detour — my personal experiences with brand models. First off, I’m not the typical biography you’d probably expect to find in a branding agency: I’m a tech guy originating from game development. I spent quite a few years on my PhD in Artificial Intelligence, working on bots for games that come with a semantic understanding of the game they are supposed to play. Also I´ve been working on video codecs, accessibility and game engines.
I really enjoy getting familiar with new disciplines and finding synergies between apparently unrelated areas of application. And here I am at Strichpunkt, Germany´s most creative design agency where I dive into the (in the tech sector greatly underestimated) field of brand development.
Naturally, when arriving in a new area, you’d first take a look around to see how the local culture ticks — and that works just as well for arriving in a new discipline. Interestingly, I never thought much about brands to begin with. Sure, I’m running a Windows OS on a Alienware notebook playing games on my Logitech mouse via Steam. They are all around me, you passively inhale their ‘essence’, but I never wondered how they were designed. I guess my relation to brands is best compared to my relation to my favorite IDEs: you take their comfort and safety for granted and only notice them when they are missing!
Consequently, I was quite blown-away by all the effort, concepts, design, planning and just outright amazing ideas that are required to get a brand rolling. It’s like a cover was lifted and I saw the backside of the mirror for the first time. That happened to me before: the deeper you get involved in game development, the more you find yourself leaning forward, closely inspecting a bunch of triangles on your screen (in something that’s supposed to be a dramatic cut-scene) and wondering what kind of shading technique they used for this whisky-in-a-glass effect.
At the heart of a brand design process is the brand model. You are probably more familiar with them than I am, but let me briefly dissect them: essential, a brand model is a layered structure, with a brand identity at its core, on which different aspects of the brand are built, depending on the company, product and audience targeted. Finally, in an outermost layer user interactions are derived at the individual touchpoints at which a user will interact with the brand, be it a digital interface, a physical device or direct customer contact. Brand models often use adjectives or personas to define their character, such as being bold, aggressive, or thoughtful. As such, a brand model seems closer to a description of a person, rather than the technical architecture diagrams for pieces of software that I was used to.
Most interesting for me is how these brand models are used and what problems they aim to solve. Here, every use case demands its own alteration of the branding process and no two brand models look exactly alike. Thus, let’s better focus on what they are supposed to solve, what questions they answer and what they help you with.
I did a weird drawing on some whiteboard trying to wrap my head around just that, when a question started lurking in the back of my head: Is that really it? Are the brand models put to use today really the final answer to branding? Isn’t there something missing? Obviously, they are a battle-proven tool that drives many of the most famous brands out there. I’m sure there are countless examples where they failed, too, but that can be said of about every widespread approach. I just started to wonder, from my ‘outsider’ perspective, whether they could be improved — or replaced.
The past
So, let’s start with what branding was about in the past — and I’m not referring to the beginnings of Coca-Cola. Let’s take a look at digital branding, in the early days of computers. By then, most corporate identities were concerned with how their menus or web pages should look like — very similar to their print media. It was all about colors, logos, their placement, art styles, and so forth. Methods were developed to translate the adjectives that a brand model comes up with into design parameters: how do you place a logo in a bold way? How do thoughtful headlines look like? What are young color-schemes? As such, the methods for physical branding could be applied just as well. And if you recall some pages of the early 90s, they were just digital versions of physical booklets you could click through.
This is still an important dimension of putting a brand model to use — and from my perspective, it’s the origin where their terminology came from: it’s still pretty straight forward that one could associate character traits with visual styles — after all, we often express our own character traits through our visual style, such as the clothing we wear (and that’s from a nerd wearing t-shirts all day long).
The present
Meanwhile, the internet happened. And that changed a lot. The internet has been there for over a decade, but its widespread adoption as a communication media took a bit. I could start rumbling on all the technical changes we observed and how that changed society, but let me take you into my little tech corner for a minute: let’s talk about HTML.
The Hypertext Markup Language was the heart of the internet for a long time. And guess what: it was originally designed as a document markup language, storing information and structure about the content of a document, such as a physical sheet of paper. CSS is then used to encode the visual appearance. As such, in the past, the heart of the web was always about encoding documents, tables, and information — quite similar to the way information was stored in physical media.
Nowadays, the internet is much less about encoding structured information and then layouting it: it’s all about interaction. Web pages are now interactive programs driven by scripting languages, mostly JavaScript and its many derivatives. Consequently, brand models evolved. If you take a look at branding concepts today, they are more concerned with how buttons behave in their various states, how the navigational flow of a web portal is structured, how an upload process works and whatnot. They morphed from describing how things look to how things behave!
The future
When it comes to interaction within a system, the conventional brand models were confronted with many new technological and social requirements that didn’t really map well on the adjective-like character traits. A button in a responsive design, for example, has to have a “waiting” state that pops up between the actual button press and the response from a server — and talking about mobile, this can take seconds. No matter how you imagine the interaction in your brand design, you can’t get around these delays. Further, social media are a core channel of communication, but do brand models really tell you if and how you should use them? Don’t get me wrong: they are an awesome tool, they can give a lot of guidance, but I get the feeling they are about to break, if not right now, then in the close future.
Talking about the future! So, what’s the next technology that could have a similar impact on brand models as the internet? If you open up any tech journal, you are sure to find articles on Machine Learning. Whether or not ML will really be the solution for all the problems it’s currently being applied to is a topic for another post (I’m skeptical!), but let’s focus on Artificial Intelligence in general: systems are getting more and more autonomous. Very similar to how digital information moved branding from describing appearance to describing behavior, AI will push it one step further: now, we will have to describe how systems can act on their own. And this is quite a difficult problem!
At first, you might think that this actually brings us back closer to the original brand model idea: why not just implement the core identity of a brand within an AI, so that it puts the character traits into action? However, we don’t really have a clue on how to define character traits and its emergent effects! How do you limit and express how a system should behave? How do you describe how a branded AI should argue with a customer? How to deny interaction? Autonomous systems will encounter many new situations!
The brand models of the future might get far closer to actual psychological profiles, describing either traits an AI could be governed by (see the rather sarcastic JARVIS from Marvel’s Iron Man) or somehow determine how the AIs are perceived.
But here’s the bad news: I’m not aware of any robust model or even vocabulary on how to define an AI’s character, in neither AI research nor branding. There are some approaches in game development, but they don’t aim at completely autonomous systems either.
I wonder whether the brand models we put to use today will survive, or whether we will have to alter or replace them.
What are your thoughts on the topic? Any ideas on how to combine brand models and AI? Do you foresee other technological challenges than just autonomous systems? Many difficult questions for which we will have to find not just answers, but rather branding solutions on how to solve them in a generic way!
STRICHPUNKT DESIGN is one of Germany’s most honored design agencies based in Berlin & Stuttgart. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter & Instagram to keep in touch with us and our latest work.
