Design magazine has launched its annual Benchmark design award for branding programs that demonstrate skill in creating a total brand experience on behalf of the client. They require three or more treatments across more than one platform (the new fancy name for medium), which covers all the usual suspects as well as “other platforms”, items that fall beyond their stated examples but clearly demonstrate delivering a brand message through design.
For a number of years the Centre for Integrated Marketing gave its Integrated Marketer of the Year awards, so I understand the principle and applaud it. However, from my experience with clients like IBM, UNICEF, NSPCC and British School of Motoring (BSM), I would suggest that they could usefully add two elements to their competition.
Firstly, I think there is a contact channel that is not explicitly recognised in their award: people. This often represents one of the most important brand leverage points, as a primary interface with customers (IBM’s Watson computer taking on the top guns in Jeopardy; the design of a working or customer space – as we did with IBM in India; the performance of a leader in communicating to staff – IBM has 500,000 IBMers, including its contract staff, so internal communication is significant; redesigning the employee performance measurement system, and the managerial interactions that go with it – we found single-point entries in IBM that could have dramatic effects on sales performance and client perception, and indeed the whole business model and culture; at BSM, the interaction between the learner driver and the instructor is absolutely fundamental to the brand and to its protection).
At the moment, most of these would at best sit in the area of “other platforms”. I suggest therefore that there could be a further category, namely the co-worker/associate/employee/service person as a brand interface and the design interventions that affect this performance/treatment area.
It might be argued that this is difficult to judge, butthere exists a very good tool in the concept of “talking actions/action talking”. Talking actions are actions that tell a story, that communicate emotion, meaning, significance. Action talking is more conventional communication that brings its own message to life, perhaps by storytelling, and indeed is one of the staples of design and advertising communication.
All treatments, whatever the medium/channel/platform, depend on an understanding of the system of the brand. Which brings me to a second suggestion: I believe that Design is a perfect place to host an award for the design of the brand system itself, as well as for the interventions and treatments that affect its performance. In the work that we’ve done, we found that most brands/enterprises are exceedingly fuzzy and fragmented in their understanding of the brand as a system, which includes such elements as the business model, culture, core competency, vision, and purpose alongside more conventional branding elements such as product design principle, positioning, brand personality and brand essence. This is one of the key areas of the research and practice that I’ve found represents the cutting-edge of branding today.
Advance can be loss
November 8th, 2011Found a great comment:
Source: http://www.mathpages.com/home/kmath581/kmath581.htm
This anonymous source also gives us: ” Why can’t somebody give us a list of things that everybody thinks and nobody says, and another list of things that everybody says and nobody thinks?” by Oliver Wendell Holmes
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