Brand strategy after a merger

EY reported that global technology mergers and acquisitions activity soared to an all-time high last year. Despite failure rates of 70-90% according to HBR and a run of mega-deal U-turns of the Kraft-Unileverkind, analysts have told us to expect M&A volumes to remain high in 2017. When done in a considered, thoughtful and nuanced way, post-merger brand strategy gives focus and sets a clear path for future growth.

In this, the first in a series on leaders’ questions, we’ll ask how a company can leverage brand strategy for post-merger success. When done in a considered, thoughtful and nuanced way, it gives focus and sets a clear path for future growth. It provides the perfect opportunity to re-evaluate, re-align and renew.

Through our experience with clients over the last four decades, we’ve found there isn’t one solution. We believe in rigour and logic, but we don’t have a framework that leads to a definitive answer. Claude Lévi-Strauss, widely regarded as the father of modern anthropology, said in the first volume of his iconic Mythologiques:

“The scientist is not a person who gives the right answers, he’s one who asks the right questions.”

In the case of M&A brand strategy, the following ten questions are a useful start point:

1. Why are we here? Financials and diligence surrounding hard factors aside, the best mergers happen when there’s a deeper meeting of minds. Common themes across brand, culture and leadership approach are rich springboards for strategic discussion. Much as differences should be respected, shared values point to a common philosophy. Defining this in the first instance grounds harder-edged debate around future propositions and offers helpful parameters for innovation.

2. How big is our future? Mergers fall down on short-term thinking and resulting pragmatism. To avoid this, start with a view of long-term success. Be radical and ask, ‘how big is our future?’ Being aligned around the direction of travel and working back from distant points in time is vital. By factoring in moments for measurement and analysis, you’ll ensure transitional objectives add up to annual outcomes – and beyond.

3. Where’s the world going? Alongside internal ambition and operational reality, external perspective is essential. In planning conversations, global trends should be front-and-centre. Exercises associated with the user experience design discipline can surface previously unanticipated challenge. For example, can you create future-facing profiles or user journeys? Cultivate curiosity and prepare to revisit your conclusions regularly, drawing on Keats’ theory of ‘negative capability’.

4. What’s our story? The world’s an ever increasingly complex, complicated and noisy place. Your brand strategy and company narrative should slice through with a distinctive point of view that captures who you are, what you believe, how you create value and why it’s important. Your story’s a rallying cry for your new workforce, a clear position for external audiences and a point of competitive difference. Renowned Bulgarian writer Maria Popova has these words of advice:

“A great storyteller is the kindly captain who sails her ship with tremendous wisdom and boundless courage; who points its nose in the direction of horizons and worlds chosen with unflinching idealism and integrity.”

5. Who’s driving it? By collaborating and involving a cross-section of people in planning, you’ll get a richer result. A multi-disciplinary taskforce with representation from all former entities helps. The post-merger story needs to be crystal clear in the minds of the ultimate brand advocates – employees – so the importance of internal engagement and communication strategy can’t be underestimated. It should substantiate claims, set the agenda and generate excitement around the possibilities the future presents.

6. Who are the audience? Brand strategy should create trust with shareholders and stakeholders, and build connection with customers. It’s wise to understand what these constituencies need, to craft a compelling story for each and to make sure what you say matches what you deliver. Making this part of the process, and involving the newly-merged leadership team, means everyone’s clear on the mission.

7. How should we organise ourselves? Brand or product architecture isn’t a flat organizational chart, or an abstract exercise in tidying up. It’s a powerful basis upon which to build understanding around your suite of propositions, and connection with your ambition. It informs visual expression and naming systems, and results in perfect coherence.

There are three basic models: In a monolithic structure or branded house, all products take one name, like Nike. In an endorsed model, all sub-brand names are linked to the name of the masterbrand in some way, like Apple and its i-everythings. In a house of brands like P&G, the corporate brand name operates as a holding company and each product or service is independently named. Having a good knowledge of the theory can facilitate effective decision-making.

8. How should we present ourselves? Mergers raise questions not just around what you stand for and do, but how you present yourself and communicate. Do your name, visual expression and communication toolkit best represent your needs? Sometimes a tweak is needed; other times it’s a more radical overhaul. With big changes in play, a merger can offer an opportunity to present your new entity to the world in a fresh way.

9. What can we lose? Mergers usually take place in pursuit of market consolidation and future growth. There will undoubtedly be short-term trade offs as the business realigns around its future, and a brand strategy should make them easy to identify. (This is different from making them easy per se, but that’s no bad thing if you believe Nietzsche’s case for the value of difficulty.) Brand strategy should articulate what the business is becoming, why it’s doing so, how it will happen and the role its audiences will play. This groundwork determines the tone of the transition.

10. What can we learn from others? It’s obviously worth reading around to see how other companies have steered post-merger brand strategy. Grubhub, a partner of ours, has had recent success. The first generation of a fast and growing group of online food ordering businesses, it merged with Seamless in late 2013. Today they serve diners and corporate businesses from more than 55,000 restaurants in over 1,100 U.S. cities and London.

The team, led by Barbara Martin Coppola (CMO), developed an ambition that was translated into a clear brand strategy, a supporting brand architecture and a communications program made fit for all its audiences. The results have been quick and effective.

“Collaborating with Wolff Olins to develop a thoughtful approach to our brand strategy and architecture has been transformative – for consumers, business users and shareholders. Combined with additional company-wide initiatives, our new brand vision helped us grow orders by 21% and revenue by 36% in 2016, based on year-on-year results.” - Barbara Martin Coppola, CMO

Illustrations by Jack Bedford

How to make sense of 8 billion touchpoints

Recently, we welcomed Sieun Cha as Creative Director at Wolff Olins London. Prior to us, Sieun served as Creative Director at Method where she led multi-disciplinary teams delivering integrated brand, product and service experiences for clients including Lush, Sky, Skype, Deutsche Telekom, Google and Thomson Reuters. She collected numerous accolades for her work in multi-channel experiences in health, retail and beauty.

With over thirteen years of digital product and experience design background, Sieun is most excited about expanding the scope and scale of both for Wolff Olins’ clients and is specifically interested in how experience design can help build connected brand experiences. Krisana Jaritsat, our Head of Global Content sits down with Sieun for a quick Q&A to share her thoughts:

Krisana: Coming from your background, what is your perspective on how important the integration of digital is by brands?

Sieun: Firstly, the digital distinction now dissolves into our daily lives. Digital is becoming more embedded in our daily lives, and soon the term ‘digital channel’ might become so obsolete that we don’t recognise it anymore.

As such, brands have entered into a more complex space: there are more touch points and more communications with more boundaries becoming blurred and platforms becoming more multi-dimensional. Because of this paradigm shift, it’s important to start thinking with a digital/mobile first approach. Digital is not an added touchpoint any more, it’s becoming the primary platform where the customers actively engage with and define brand meanings for themselves through experience.

Krisana: What role does experience design play in this?

Sieun: Experience design is the framework to understand business requirements and distill and translate customer insights into tangible solutions. I’m most excited for Wolff Olins and our clients to explore how experience design approach can influence the brand and works to be more driven by customer insights, helps close the gaps between touch points and ultimately create coherent brand end-to-end experiences.

Krisana: Why is this important to how people interact with brands today?

Sieun: Now people carry brands in their pocket. Research shows that Americans look at their mobile phone 8 billion times a day collectively. We need to understand how to engage with these moments in meaningful and positive ways. These moments are opportunities to deliver a brand promise and a deep understanding of customer needs in contexts is crucial.

Customers don’t see differences between touch points. So when they are moving from one to another, they expect the same seamless experience. No matter how many touch points there are, customers ultimately want simple and elegant solutions that answer their needs.

Krisana: So, how does experience design solve this problem then?

Sieun: Experience design is a holistic approach for businesses to meet customer needs. It starts with collaborating with businesses to identify and solve the right problems, and assumes a deep understanding of customer needs and behaviours in order to create experience solutions that produce value.

The design of brand experiences should not only consider a broad view of the touchpoints where customer interactions with the brand occur over time, but also go deep to create the moments of engagement through products and services.  Looking at the customer journey from mobile/digital perspective helps identify the possibilities that create micro-moments — intent-driven moments of decision making and preference shaping.

In turn, we will be able to deliver clear and connected stories across channels that bring the customer into a deeper level of engagement and most importantly, create a flexible and adaptive brand design system that leaves a space for the brand to grow.

Sieun Cha is Creative Director at Wolff Olins London. You can follow her @sbtwin

Maintaining momentum after the brand launch

In the run up to a launch organisations break out of the normal, they are forced to think more broadly about how their business is positioned and perceived from multiple stakeholder perspectives. Managers work more collaboratively as they are determining how the collective experience and organisation’s culture must reflect the new direction the leaders are setting. There is a level of anticipation, excitement and exhaustion as they plan the fundamental shifts in how they need to operate to deliver change. There is a strong sense of ‘everything is on the line’, which stirs up a multitude of emotions, it’s scary and risky but also exhilarating and liberating.

Post launch often when the problem or issue that drove the brand launch is dealt with, the implementation issues have been resolved and the challenge for the business has returned to delivery optimisation - it’s back to business as usual.  Many of our clients have asked us how to ensure their organisation keeps brand focused – and they recapture the sense of collective involvement that drove the business prior to launch day.  

A key issue our clients have asked is how to maintain the organisation’s brand momentum when the brand has been launched and implemented across the business.  We hosted an event to share experiences and learnings – which started with perspectives from:  

• Ryan O’Keeffe, Enel Group Director of Communication

• Spencer McHugh, EE Marketing Director

• Clare Gambardella, Virgin Active Marketing Director

Followed by challenges and alternative suggestions from the audience including companies such as Facebook, Virgin Media, Skyscanner, Wellcome Trust, Burberry, Discovery Networks and Pearson.

A few themes emerged from the session:

• Do not consider launching a brand as a one-off event but rather the start of a series of launches

• Brand isn’t just a marketing activity but it impacts the whole business so needs contribution from the whole business to succeed

• Brand is now increasingly in the hands of consumers so … let it go and let it evolve.

Overall, the audience walked away with five learnings:

1. Always in launch mode

When a brand is launched the organisation is preparing for massive transformation.  In the case of EE, which was a ‘succeed or die’ launch, it was found that in the 11 months prior to launch, productivity increased 8 times. With numerous constraints- resources, budgets, inflexible commitments etc., everyone was under pressure and so they were forced to resolve problems more creatively.

At the time of launch, employees from across the business are more focused and are all headed in the same direction. This collective, almost infectious, unity delivered transformation across their whole organisation.

Maintaining this collective spirit is a key business asset not just to optimise your productivity but also a sense of revolutionary excitement. To keep working in this way, you can look to see how to integrate launch as a part of business as usual rather than a one-off exercise.

EE does this by creating two launch windows in one year, aiming to create the same energy with teams pitching their products and offers to one and another.

2. The launch is step 0

Once the launch is over, people immediately expect to see varying results when in reality that can take time. It would be a misconception to look at the launch as an answer to a business problem but rather looking at it as a stepping-stone to creating change within the company and creating broader impact externally. By framing the launch only as a part of the bigger brand or business challenge, it acts as a vehicle for movement.

Enel took this approach to their launch, creating a catalyst to drive every aspect of the business. The vision of ‘Open Power’, which is a guiding principle, helps align behaviour, collaborations, products and services. The launch is only seen as a starting point of this journey and will be cascaded to 70,000 people over the span of four months.

3. Encourage ownership

When each project is seen as an individual launch, it helps the company keep momentum. Get a senior sponsor – a person with the ability to call on resources and to make decisions across functions. By putting a product owner in place, there is accountability and drive to see the project through.

Working collaboratively with cross-functional teams is painful but always beneficial. They don’t need to be big teams but sizeable enough to have traction to make things happen. Often after launch, these teams disband and tend to go their separate ways so it becomes critical to have the same level of governance pre launch as well as post launch; this way you’ve got a team that’s really living with the product and taking it forward.

Virgin Active appoints teams to take the ownership of the product through from conception to the end of its lifecycle. There are KPIs in place to ensure the team is always galvanised.

4. Constant evolution

When launch is only the beginning of the lifecycle of a product it is important to identify a winner and contribute to its growth. It’s important to keep a tab on customer metrics and allow them to influence the journey of the product. The launch marks the birth but in no way does it represent the final product will be. So a way to look at the launch is merely that, a birth. After which there needs to be constant adaptation based on what customers have to say. Often how you design a product is not the way the product ends up getting used. So it’s important to introduce the product and instil the spirit with teams to keep the product going and constantly iterate. Constant innovation for changing times, moving quickly.

5. Share the burden

Often companies are under the impression that their marketing teams are solely responsible for the marketing success of that company. That doesn’t always have to be the case. In fact, now marketers are not the primary owners of the brand, it’s created at the intersection of the consumers and marketers. Consumers are now increasingly able to express their opinions and expectations from brand so mobilising the consumers helps keep the momentum. Identify hooks to get the customers interested and build a pipeline of demand.

The Grid from Virgin Active is an example of a functional product. During the design of this the team made hand gestures that signified the grid. It became a favoured hashtag, poses after class completion and merchandise as well and a nice way for people to interact with the grid and share it with their friends, thus building talkability.

The launch is often looked at as the big bang or the result of a radical change. However, it is much more invigorating to flip it around and look at launch as the beginning of a transformation. In which case, you’ll be able to continue spotting the opportunities to bring more meaning and value to the company, long after launch.

Illustration by Oliver Thein.

Mallika Reddy is Insights Strategist at Wolff Olins London. Follow her@mallikareddyg

Thriving on disloyalty

We’re on the top floor of the Whitechapel Gallery on a grey February afternoon. Outside we’re surrounded by tower cranes, as the glass boxes of the City edge further into the old east end. Inside, thirty arts marketers come together to talk about how their world – and branding in particular – is shifting too.

The exploration is fascinating. Everyone is dealing with change: new artistic directors, new audiences, new activities. Most people are trying to reconcile the whole and the parts: how do we make sense of all the things we do? And how do we strike the right relationship with the parent organisations that own or fund us? Many are concerned to push their brand message downwards to all their staff, or upwards to their trustees. Behind all this, though, is a familiar question: how do we increase people’s commitment to us? And a newer one: what, these days, does that commitment look like?

Brand loyalty has traditionally been the nirvana of branding. When Madison Avenue invented modern branding in the 1950s, the aim was to win consumers’ lifetime loyalty. But we all know that brand loyalty is on the decline. Back in 2009, an Experian Insight report showed that ‘half of all consumers say they are now less loyal than they used to be’, and that trend has continued. This is partly the result of a general decline in deference and trust, partly because of a massive increase in the choice and information available to consumers, and partly because the internet has given people new power and new confidence. Passive, obedient consumers have becoming what the French call consommacteurs, half consumers, half actors: knowledgeable, assertive, experimental, and instinctively disloyal.

Our Whitechapel discussion confirmed that this trend holds true for arts organisations too. Large, loyal audiences are becoming a rarity. Drawing on my own experience, I used to go to several concerts every year at the Spitalfields Festival, just down the road from the Whitechapel. Out of London, I’d drive miles out of my way to visit a National Trust place. I was a loyal fan of both. But no longer. There are just too many other options.

Why has this happened – just at the time when the sector has become so good at branding? Perhaps it’s exactly for that reason. Every arts organisation now brands itself so professionally that all are equally available and attractive to audiences.

So how can we respond? To answer this question, it’s worth digging deeper into the idea of loyalty – which actually comes in two flavours, attitudinal and behavioural. The first is about feeling loyal to a brand: you might, for example, defend it warmly in a discussion at a dinner party. The second is about acting in a loyal way: going out of your way, perhaps, to buy the product.

True fans are both attitudinally and behaviourally loyal. They still exist – I’m a true fan, for instance, of First Direct and Pret a Manger – but they’re becoming rare. And even true fans aren’t always loyal, as Liverpool Football Club found out a few weeks ago when its supporters refused to pay the ticket price increases it wanted.

And here’s what our rivals say that make us different.

Much more often, these days, we’re loyal in attitude but promiscuous in practice. I feel warmly about Waitrose, but also shop regularly in Tesco and Morrisons. The academic Byron Sharp, in his delightfully contrarian book How Brands Grow, called us ‘loyal switchers’.

At the same time, we can be behaviourally loyal – we keep using the same product – without any warm, fuzzy attitudes. This is obviously true for banks, where switching is still very rare, but emotions decidedly cool. And many online brands work this way. We use Google, Amazon and LinkedIn not because we love them, but because they’re useful. We’re not loyal fans, but habitual users.

And then, much of the time, we’re simply floating voters, neither attitudinally nor behaviourally loyal. Most of us, for instance, buy petrol at the next station we come to – and the brand hardly plays a role at all.

The temptation is to try to sweep people into ‘true fans’ category: to make loyal switchers act more loyally (hence the ‘myWaitrose’ card), and to make habitual users feel more loyal (which is why people like Lloyds Bank and Google run emotional television advertisements). But my suggestion is not to try to force people into loyalty, not to row against the tide, but instead to recognise the stubbornness of the consommacteur, and to go with the flow.

For loyal switchers, the smartest strategy may be to help them switch, recognising that later they may switch back. The airline KLM, for instance, ran a service where it sold competitors’ flights too, if they happened to be a better deal for the customer. For arts organisations, this would mean promoting rival brands – and indeed not seeing them as rivals at all. The National Trust has a brilliant ‘London Partners’ scheme in the city, cross-promoting other attractions like Leighton House and the Freud Museum.

For habitual users, the trick may simply be to be as useful as possible, and not to expect deep emotional loyalty. The Art Fund has had huge success by marketing its National Art Pass as a discount scheme, rather than expecting people to become members and sign up to its charitable cause.

For floating voters, the best plan is to make it easy for them to try you out – to float in your direction. Britain’s fourth biggest arts festival, the Norfolk and Norwich Festival, runs free outdoor events – including this year an intriguing Beethoven Safari – that reach people who might never encounter the brand.

Which leaves the true fans – and arts organisations are now enlisting them as insiders, turning them into collaborators, sparking their creativity, and treating them in fact as consommactuers. National Theatre Wales has its TEAM of participants out in the community. Live Theatre in Newcastle enlists audiences to test-drive new plays. The publisher Faber teaches its readers to write, through the Faber Academy. And there are hundreds more examples.

We ended our Whitechapel afternoon by brainstorming similar solutions for some of the organisations in the room. One team of delegates planned to enlist a museum’s fans as contributors to an anthropology blog. Another group developed new ways to share audiences between arts organisations in one city – fuelling loyal switchers. A third team hatched an imaginative plan to overturn the norm, and make an arts festival’s indoor events free – reaching more floating voters, and perhaps bringing some of them deeper inside.

Ideas flowed freely, demonstrating that, in many ways, arts organisations are already in the lead in this new territory of brand-building. Ahead of many commercial companies, they recognise that people’s commitment these days is usually merely provisional, and they’re learning to thrive on disloyalty.

Illustration by Oliver Thein

Robert Jones is Head of New Thinking at Wolff Olins. You can follow him @RobertJones2

That Coke repositioning made me do a cry

The greatest brand of the 20th century is catching up, and that’s a shame.

Businesses have always understood that by appealing to a person’s emotions rather than their rationality, they can create huge desire for their products. This was the founding principle of mass marketing in the early 20th century; many of today’s most successful brands owe their prominence to it. Coke is the strongest example of branding there has ever been, creating a globally accessible and globally cherished brand from a simple consumer product of very limited practical utility.

The narrative of how to market your product successfully has changed in recent years (as this excellent article by Ian Leslie describes). As chronic neophiliacs, marketers have looked to innovative tech companies disrupting categories left, right and centre to borrow from their success. Out with emotionally led brand marketing and mass communications, in with product benefits, user experiences and rational messaging. Fast, simple, intuitive, easy. Ad finitum. Coke, a behemoth from the 20th century, with a long line of questionable-to-failing innovation attempts behind it, has clearly got a problem making people happy with their product. So it drunk the kool aid.

With much noise, it has replaced its positioning of Choose Happiness with Taste the Feeling, apparently signalling a focus on the product (the word taste must represent this because it is a drink and you taste drinks). There is a beautifully considered and highly produced campaign to accompany it, with a specially written yet generically emotive song, and the product itself features in every shot I’ve seen so far. There’s also some interactive ‘Make your own gif’ feature, because why not?

Choose Happiness is not exactly pointed (and sounds a bit like a CFAR doctrine which judges anyone who fails to choose correctly) but it’s kind of bold. It is a carbonated sugar drink trying to ‘own’ the largest and broadest inoffensively positive emotion there is. Taste the Feeling makes Choose Happiness look niche. Taste the Feeling suggests that it is moving away from emotion to product by leading with taste, but it’s pretty clear that this is a clever rhetorical trick. Taste the Feeling is afraid of losing relevance by talking about happiness, and instead just wants any reaction, any feeling, from its audience. Coke seems so needy that it needs to own the entire market of all human feeling.

For a long time, marketers intuitively clocked and subsequently exploited the power of creating an emotional response in people. Today, measuring that emotional response is much more professionalised. As William Davies has written in The Happiness Industry, our emotions are nothing more than a new metric to be monetised, with crude proxies such as likes, shares and rudimentary brain scans to value them. However, the blunt, sledgehammer approach that marketers often take to try to elicit emotions is patronising and basic. Of course a communication or message is substantiated by an emotional response, but that doesn’t mean you need to say “feel the thing” in order to make someone feel some thing. In fact, it can be inflammatory: this Atlantic article shows how people mischievously riff on Coke’s user-generated gif feature, and how Coke pre-empts this with blacklisted words which doesn’t convey the right tone.

It’s easy to see how Coke has got here, and the clever thinking that has gone into it. It appears innovative (seemingly product-led when actually about big marketing) and democratising (not everyone can get happiness but everyone can get feelings). It is a line that doesn’t really mean anything and yet means so much, appealing for attention in the blandest possible way, reflecting the tone of a childlike internet generation that cannot stop emoting but cannot possibly emote with any subtlety, depth or fluency. It is sharable catnip for the ‘this cat video got me in the feels’ generation. It appears to be modern whilst being conventional, and with its broad coveting of all feelings it is all-measurable – the highest praise of all.

There’s something a little sad about a great brand (even one with a questionable health legacy across the planet) becoming so mundane. If Coke, a product of little practical utility to people, had anything to offer, it was the unashamed, optimistic spreading of hope, joy and happiness, and the creating of Santa as a red suited jolly man. Changing tack and getting in behind everyone else doesn’t just undermine its heritage, it also feels a bit flat.

Illustration by Vivian Yang. 

Dan Gavshon-Brady is a lead strategist at Wolff Olins London. Follow him at @DanGB88

Open for business

Today, dynamic and vibrant brand identities are no longer just the preserve of broadcast channels or tech start ups.

Established businesses in critical industries like health, finance and energy do not have to be constrained playing by a traditional, monolithic corporate rulebook when it comes to they express themselves.

More than ever, it’s important these big organisations, which touch our lives everyday, begin to look, feel and behave in new and ever more compelling ways.

It’s always been the job of a brand identity to amplify and emphasise the world view of an organisation. But at a time when technology brings us closer together, it is also critical the same identity is able to empathise and respond to the needs of individual users.

In a year long collaboration, we worked with Enel’s leadership team to design an Open Power strategy. Helping to position Enel as the first open, responsive and sustainable modern utility company, the new brand identity aims to capture and convey the spirit of moving and active energy.

It began with a period of intense exploration as the whole design process embraced the idea of being open and collaborative, working closely with the client team and a range of partners, specialists and cross disciplinary mix from our four studios.

At the start of the creative process together, we explored how to visualise different kinds of power, including kinetic energy, physical phenomena and data driven systems. Using what we learned from these experiments, we put a cursor at the heart of the new brand; it is the starting point of an energy that is always moving and visually echoes the core behind the power of a light bulb – the filament.

The cursor informs the look and feel of the new brand and creates a consistent design language. This ensures everything from the word mark logo, to print and digital applications tie back to the principles of the Open Power strategy.

The brand is intentionally experimental; the cursor can be used in new and unexpected ways to create endless interpretations of Open Power. This means the brand is truly open to others and we encourage people inside and outside Enel to play, innovate and experiment with the cursor.

Visual scalability, flexibility and downright desirability is a must for any modern business. A brand presence should engage and inform your user and be as comfortable in the hand and in motion as it is in the FT on the side of a building.

To make this happen isn’t easy, it takes vision and self confidence but the brands that really change the world always look like they mean it.

Chris Moody is Global Principal and Creative Director at Wolff Olins. Follow him @MoodyThinking

UX & Brand: A Marriage Made in Heaven

At what level should UX operate? As a community of practitioners, UXer’s have become the advocate of the user. We’ve convinced our clients to undertake the research to understand user needs and goals; we’ve developed tools to help communicate and work with those needs. But what about the needs of the company? Or the brand? Surely this should be under the jurisdiction of the team as well.

Recently, I spoke about this at the UX conference Interact 2015. Interestingly, what resonated most with the audience and on Twitter was the idea that brand wasn’t marketing, a logo, a typeface, colours or advertising; rather, it was what a company stood for and how they differentiate what they do from others. When I was initially asked to speak about the subject, I was disappointed to speak about something I believed to be, while fundamentally important, quite obvious. However, with the reaction I received, I could understand why a gap existed between the two.

In my ten-year career span working at various digital agencies, I’ve been typically embedded with the IT or marketing departments. Only once did I work closely with a client’s brand team and even then, all I knew about the brand was based off visual guidelines. As a result, we lacked an established set of tools to help develop branded experiences and remained behind in how to think about the brand as a critical influencer of the UX design process.

As digital experiences mature and brands become savvier at meeting the needs of their customers, I forsee a worrying trend towards what I call the race to the ubiquitous experience. Many banking, retail, healthcare businesses are suffering from optimisation and streamlining with their logo and colour palette often being the only elements differentiating them from competitors. For instance, I once had a client, who owned two different brands offering the same service, suggest I took the work I’d done for one and replicate it in another colour for their other brand. While there are certainly initial cost-savings to this short-sighted approach, it is not the aesthetics but the experiences we have with the brand that will ultimately influence who we decide to spend our money with.

So what can be done differently to stop this downward trend? We need to collaborate more, break down the silos and make sure brand, IT/digital, and marketing teams all have equal stakes in the customer’s experience.

We must develop tools that actively help us understand and engage with the brand’s purpose and values. We must utilise our experience principles and journey mapping to ensure they are practical and inspiring in equal measure.

We must identify the moments along the customer journey where it’s most appropriate for the brand to come to life. It won’t be everywhere; there will be moments where pure function and best practice have a role. But in those places where it makes sense to imbue the company purpose in the experience, we need to be more mindful and proactive.

And finally, we need to take our time. Crafting an experience that can’t be stolen by a competitor takes creativity and discipline. It’s easy to fall back on best practice and not move past the obvious solution. But this is the experience Holy Grail and it’s where the biggest rewards for the brand will come from.

View the presentation here

Sarah Morris is UX Director at Wolff Olins London. You can follow her @sarahbear28

Pensions in uncertain times

Last month, The Pensions and Lifetime Savings Association (previously the National Association of Pensions Funds) announced their new purpose: to help everyone achieve a better retirement income.

Pensions. Before this work, nothing about that word felt relevant to me — I hadn't put any thought into them and assumed it was for older people; the word itself even sounds old. Then two big catalysts changed my view (and it certainly wasn’t my parents telling me I should get one).

First our office set up auto enrolment ahead of the Government’s desire to get everyone onto a pension by 2018. Then I ended up on a pitch team for an organisation in the pensions sector. I had to learn fast— suddenly that word I had no interest in was thrust into the forefront of my mind. I asked myself, what’s the deal with pensions?

Once I had a better understanding of the ‘p’ word, why it was so important to my life, the economy and potentially the lives of others close to me, I was amazed by how interesting the pensions world became.

Working with the Pensions and Lifetime Savings Association has felt critical. After 90 years as an association, they sit at the heart of the auto enrolment shake up and have multiple audiences looking to them for guidance: their members, regulators, the government and millions of SMEs needing to arrange pension schemes for their employees. Now more than ever, they needed ways to demonstrate how they can help.

The Pensions and Lifetime Savings Association are an interesting bunch — you probably hadn’t heard of them before now, and beyond the need to be more widely known, they are also an organisation made of members that all have a different position on pensions. They needed a brand that would help them cut through the noise and stand above all of the groups and people clamouring for share of voice.

It was a complex challenge: the brand had to help galvanise their voice, while still be balanced and work with everyone to help savers. Though they are understood as the authority on pensions in the industry already, they also needed to look to the future with optimism as more people are now looking to their retirement. The new name includes ‘Lifetime Savings’; it’s a people-focused phrase that reflects how people talk about their money later in life.

Guided by this strategy and an assessment of the industry we took advantage of a bold colour palette, very different from other organisations in the industry to help them have a new active presence in a very blue world.

The new icon, which works with the content, is a lens that moves and changes size to visually guide audiences through the association’s wealth of information to the most useful content.

The wordmark and typography are clean and functional, alluding to editorial aesthetics so that their many audiences quickly recognise the quality and depth of information available to them.

Being thrown into the thick of such a topical, significant and rapidly changing world has been really rewarding personally (as well as hopefully rewarding in my ‘later life’). Beyond that Joanne Segars, Chief Executive of the Association summarized it best at their annual conference:  “For nearly everyone, it takes time, often a lifetime, to build up savings for retirement. And for our members, old and new, from the biggest defined benefit schemes to the smallest and newest automatically enrolled employers, we want to make that process as straightforward, efficient and clear as we can.”

Ben Gibbs is a Senior Designer at Wolff Olins London. 

What I Mean by Promise + Delivery

This week, we welcome Tim Allen as Wolff Olins’ first North American President. Tim comes to us having led world-class product, experience and technology teams at Amazon and R/GA. Over 18 years, Tim has collected numerous patents and awards as he’s sought to help companies build human-centered experiences.

Here, Tim shares some thoughts:

The expectation of what a company can provide has exponentially increased in relation to the unprecedented access customers now have, the proliferation of choice, and the explosion of new value derived from technology.  Because of this shift, companies can no longer be isolated from the experience customers have with them through media or technology.  

Not so long ago, businesses could follow a familiar formula to identify a market whitespace, fill it with a product, determine a price, and force the product into relevancy with a barrage of advertising and placement. A brand could fit nicely on a piece of paper or television screen and the impression resulted only in a binary response, “Will I buy this or not?” The people that chose to purchase products became consumers of the associated brand and were labeled as such. The relationship with the consumer typically ended after the sale and additional contact with the consumer was predicated on product maintenance or replacement.

Today’s customers reject that relationship. Customers are no longer consumers. They no longer buy brands.

They join tribes.

Customers demand control from the products and services they love. They want to co-create and collaborate. They want to feel a part in deciding what gets produced and how it gets delivered. They’re willing and definitely able to participate in product development, marketing and distribution. When brands match their promise to their delivery, associated tribes voluntarily create and promote a message of empowerment, satisfaction and love. That spirit of participation extends and defines them. The resulting level of investment also creates an expectation that a brand will learn, nurture and rekindle customer activity long after an initial purchase.

In his thought-provoking book “The Brand Flip,” Marty Neumeier points out that modern customers want more than products, more than features, more than benefits, even more than experiences. They want a sense of belonging and creative control over their life stories. And they’re likely to assemble those stories from all the elements they find around them, including products, services, and brands. They ask, “If I buy this product, what does that make me?”

Today’s businesses are increasingly defined by the full experience they offer customers rather than the messages accompanying their products. They are evaluated on both their promise and delivery. The primary good that a brand can offer its customers is empowerment and the feeling that comes with a newfound ability. In the new customer-centric marketplace, the story to be expressed is a celebration of who the customer is as an individual and member of a tribe.

But it’s not just a story.

It’s a promise.

It’s an opportunity to seek out ways to uncover more greatness in your customer; to place the goal you’ve helped them reach on a stage and revel in it. And it’s a promise you better deliver on.

Tim Allen is the President for North America at Wolff Olins. Follow him @timmmeh

Is Google’s New Logo a Moonshot?

For a company trading in the expansion of the known universe, giving a logo a short back and side will inevitably fall flat. Pixel perfection it may be but snarky designers will still sneer; others may wonder 'Where’s the moonshot?'

To all you naysayers and doubters I say 'Don't be so hasty.’

Let's imagine for a minute the new Google identity is a moonshot. Not graphically but as part of a bigger master plan- perhaps one to ultimately own your future.

Make no mistake, in the coming years, Alphabet will own or at least have a meaningful stake in every part of your life. What does that kind of ubiquity and presence feel like for a business that has never shied away from the limelight?

If I were Google I'd want all my brands to play together. To stick together, all Lego brick-like.

If I were in a bunker, mustering up a way for Search to project onto Glass in my Self-Driving Car while I'm Moon streaming my Play-playlist to my Skull pumping mind-phones - I'd be thinking about identity in an equally new, interconnected and fully fragmentable way.

What if those four dots were the start of an identity that could switch brands, quantum-leap products and roller coaster through experiences and functionality?  ID that really knows it's ABC's.

What if the un-weirding of the wordmark means they're de-emphasising Google? To make it feel part of a pack? Because the way we'll interact with the alphabet soup of the future will be through voice- without screens and visual signposting. Brand communism in the interest of the M for Motherland.

Branding the collective isn't easy. Google has had an interesting journey with icons, products and brands - but who's nailed it? GE made everything make sense and feel safe. Branson's Virgin empire rocked uncorporate throughout the 80s and 90's but now resembles Bez's burned-out cerebellum. The UK's Channel 4 continues to nail that just-enough cohesion but have the luxury of a controlled space for their brands to sit together.

Maybe Google's moonshot is they're not thinking about identity based on the old rules; they’re thinking identities and how those identities interlink with one another. Google is approaching a new age beyond the pixel perfect horizon where experience and expression already have Gen-A tribal children- strange beings that will dictate how we move between the physical, digital, and audio experiences of the future.

Exactly what constitutes an identity and where its’ boundaries lie has fundamentally changed and exponentially multiplied.  In the context of one of the world’s most radical business, we can surely expect our meager minds to be blown.

So yes, maybe a moonshot.

But if not, it’s still a very tidy, tidy- up.

Neil Cummings is Creative Director at Wolff Olins London. Follow him @NeilCummingsEsq

Your brand...but more

Last month, our Head of New Thinking, Robert Jones, wrote an article in the Guardian titled “Brand is becoming meaningless”. As always, the sub-editor had some fun with this title, and it wasn’t quite what Robert meant. But the thinking behind it raises some interesting issues.

We don’t look in awe at Apple, Google, or Virgin for nothing; we think of them as awesome brands. But in reality it’s the myriad interactions we have with them that make the brand up in our minds: not a shiny identity, but the meaning and the utility of our daily experiences with them.

The fact is that brand is not on the mind of today’s leaders, or, at least, what is on their mind is not articulated as brand. As we have interviewed over 40 leaders in the past few months, we have an idea of what is on their minds: how to build a long term culture while trying to achieve short term goals; how to take advantage of new opportunities and inspire innovation without unleashing chaos; and, in an age where the CEO is more of a designer-in-chief than commander-in-chief, how to deal with new problems like competition, a changing sector, or a business that has run out of steam – all of this while leading when everyone is their own leader.

So what can we do as marketers? I believe there are three ways of thinking that are useful here:

1. Think about your own purpose and be your own leader. Take your cue from the corporate narrative of the business, but then create your own north star for marketing. At Wolff Olins, we have a distributed leadership ­: people know what they are on the hook for, but have freedom to make decisions and create great, impactful stuff.

2. Think conversation, not broadcast. In today’s hyper-connected world, we (us and our customers) are in this together. We aren’t, and shouldn’t be, telling customers what to think. Customers are partners to help shape products and offers (they will make these their own), and not an audience to talk at (they won’t listen anyway). And customers need to think of us as partners. In this way, we invite participation rather than unleash chaos.

3. Think experience ecosystem, not just identity system. Healthcare practitioners, for example, don’t care about brand. However, they do care about how technology can help them interact better with their patients, or how they can access more useful information from their suppliers. And we can affect what that experience feels like. That is one of the best ways to get mojo back and keep it there.

Get all of that right and there’s your brand: the effect of everything you are doing, not the cause of it; the bunch of experiences out there in the world; the way your customers feel about you; and the purpose you stand for.

So brand is not meaningless at all. The very point is that brand is now infused with a lot more meaning.

Rose Bentley will be hosting a webinar exploring how business leaders get more creative around growth, leadership, vision, culture and what that means for brand. Sign up for ‘Is brand becoming meaningless?’ here.

Illustration by Sidney Lim.

Rose Bentley is Global Head of Business Development at Wolff Olins. Follow her @rosembentley

What is Tidal’s brand saying?

Recently, a group of the world’s biggest musicians gathered on stage for a press conference. A “declaration of independence” (from other streaming services?) was signed. A promo video capturing the super serious gathering ran on television. Oh, and of course, the requisite Illuminati accusations ensued on the Internet shortly after.

All in the name of Tidal, the new music-streaming service backed by Jay-Z and his equally impressive peers that aimed to “change the course of music history”.

The backlash was swift – the majority of it in response to a tone-deaf image widely circulated in the media of millionaires like Jay-Z, Madonna, robots Daft Punk, Rihanna and Kanye West looking like they were asking to get paid. Not a good look for a brand aiming to “restore the value to music”. How? By claiming to pay the highest royalty percentages to artists and songwriters for their music. And how would this affect the listener? Well, they’d get access to exclusive content direct from artists themselves. Everyone wins. Or at least, they’re supposed to.  

Tidal is a brand that should have everything going for it, but whose key messaging got lost in the media debut and then in the subsequent media commentary.

Curiously, what they failed to communicate was exactly how this ‘for artists’ platform would specifically compensate artists more than its competitors. But perhaps more importantly, exactly why we - as consumers - should care enough to fork up more money (or at least dump our current streaming beau) for Tidal.

What the brand stands for is convoluted. That’s not to say the service itself can’t go on to be a success. After all, the criticism was never really aimed at what Tidal is offering - part music streaming service, part platform for emerging artists via their Tidal Rising, Tidal Discovery and Tidal X initiatives.

The scale for Tidal feels tipped in favor of the artist, meaning that the value exchange for the music fan just doesn’t feel enough. At least not yet. While we all understand why its important for artists to get compensated fairly for their art, the rest of it - the exclusive content, the subscribers-only concerts, the discovery platforms etc - is not as enticing as it sounds. At least not in our current landscape where everything and anything can be ripped and pirated (just ask Dick Costolo who actually won the Mayweather – Pacquiao fight).

This is why it was so important for Tidal to clearly communicate its intentions for all - artists and fans - at the start.

The unfortunate truth is that your brand is whatever people perceive it to be at any given time. Social media has democratized the forum for public discourse. Any and every opinion can have equal weight depending on for instance, how high it gets voted up on Reddit. You can control your messaging but unfortunately not how it’s received, dissected and spirals once it’s out. Because once supposed mass consensus is reached, it’s hard to rectify.  All you can do is be crystal clear in your narrative to your audience at the beginning, back it up through your actions, and make sure your actions live up to what you’re promising. Tidal showed us its declarations do not a brand make, it’s the evolving brand story communicated distinctly that ultimately convinces us why we should care (and if they need help doing so, they should contact this gentleman.)

Making people understand the value of Tidal is still necessary, but winning them over so they choose it over every other option is another point. Artists, well some of them anyway, clearly understand and applaud its value, now its time for the fans.

So don’t count them out yet… regardless of the impact of the wave Apple may make when it unleashes their service in June.

Krisana is Communications Director at Wolff Olins. Follow her at @krisanajaritsat 

Congratulations to our client Orange!

Today I’ll be with them as they launch their new strategic plan and brand experience to the world at an event at the Grand Palais in Paris, twenty years on from when we created the brand in the first place. I know they’re as proud as we are of the success of our recent creative partnership in reinventing the phenomenon for a much more complex and demanding world.

We’re looking forward to telling you more about it but for now we’ll just say bonne chance as they connect their customers to what’s essential to them!

Update: The new strategy plan is all explained here.

Sweat the big stuff

What kind of toothpaste do you use? Which side of the fridge did you return the jam to this morning? How many emails did you flick through and ignore? Do you know for certain? Can you really remember? Do you really care?

Routines make life easier. They’re reassuring, consistent and comforting. They get us through the days. From the little things like the time we get up, to bigger things like the meetings we attend and the way we interact with each other, having a proven way of doing it just makes logical sense. Right?

“Relentless work can also be a form of laziness, because it is work that is comfortable and familiar to us, that we know how to do. And it allows us to avoid the truly hard work and bigger questions about our present and our future: What shall we become? How must we change?”

Who said this, do you think? A great philosopher? A wise, grandfatherly type on his deathbed? An unnamed source on a “Cool Quotes” board on Pinterest? Actually no, it was Arthur Gregg Sulzberger the chairman of The New York Times.

I’ve been slowly working my way through the 97 page New York Times Innovation Report since it leaked last month. It’s high drama akin to reality TV. Reality corporate existential crises are my jam because - like the Kardashians - it always comes down to people. Whether its in a large organisation or a private jet, how people navigate the regulated normality of everyday life to achieve a wider, less tangible ambition for the future is gripping stuff.

Maintaining his Yoda-esque proclamations, Sulzberger also said this, “We need a mindset shift that allows us to invest in things we think are important simply because we think they’re important”. Shift we must, indeed. Here at Wolff Olins, we’ve been working with a client who - like The New York Times - were so busy focusing on their day-to-day, they didn’t know how to begin to focus on their wider goals. They could see their future but not their place in it. Facing EU legislation, changing consumer expectations and new, nimble competitors, it’s no wonder that everything felt important. Our task was to guide them in how best to break it all down, prioritise investment and define a roadmap for transformation.

Making large-scale shifts in these types of organisations can’t happen overnight, nor should it. Of course we helped our client to define their vision and identify their objectives, but we also developed a series of small-scale projects that would signal change and kick-start an ambitious transformation. In short, we enabled them to sweat the big stuff by doing some useful small stuff.

Habits, rituals, routines. Behaviours, processes and structure. They all add up to something eventually. For us lot trying to live lovely, happy lives as well as big organisations looking to thrive in an uncertain future, finding the time to sweat the big stuff now and then is vital. Doing so reassures us that those little things are not only comforting but also meaningful, and that they’re getting us somewhere. “It is easier to do trivial things that are urgent that it is to do important things that are not urgent”. John Cleese said that one. Pop philosophy and a wafer thin mint, anyone?

Camilla Grey is a strategist at Wolff Olins London.

Wolff Olins welcomes The Space

The Space, a new creative online platform to showcase the most exciting new digital art, was launched today with the support of artists and tech stars from across the world.

We are proud to have worked with The Space on its new brand. Working within an incredibly tight timeframe we alighted on a simple idea using universally available components; the font Arial, and blue – the colour most closely associated with Internet via hyperlinks. The simplicity of the identity system mirrors the democratic and accessible philosophy behind The Space. It is versatile, efficient and easy to implement but allows for endless forms of animation, play and experimentation.

The Space is where art can meet everyone and everyone can meet art. Like the rest of the digital world, The Space is not constrained within a white cube instead it’s an endless digital landscape that will continue to grow and grow, shaped by the art that sits within it. It’s like a famous landmark that is within everyone’s reach and its collection changes with every visit. Our work reflects that boundless and limitless nature. 

The four core elements of the identity – letter form, colour, name and call to action, (‘this is The Space’) - come together to make repeat patterns that can be animated, rescaled, reshaped and activated by artists, artworks and audiences.

Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web and co-founder of the Open Data Institute said, “Artists wake us up to all that happens in the world, The Space can make that happen on the web.”

Digital artist and Creative Director of the Data Arts Team at Google Aaron Koblin is excited to see the concept of digital art being challenged and hopes The Space will further bridge the gap between art and technology: “We live in an exciting time where technologists and artists are increasingly coming together in a new creative age. Together they’re helping to define a new digital world. I look forward to seeing how The Space will challenge the concept of what ‘digital art’ is, and what art can be. Hopefully it will give a voice and platform to artists and technologists from around the world and foster some amazing collaborations between the worlds to bring them even closer together.”

For more information visit, The Space and The Space's open call for artists. 

What do you learn for?

Innovations in education are missing much of what makes it so special. We need to remind ourselves that learning is not just about economics.

Earlier this month, I had my first official university reunion, and have been thinking about my time there. I have also been involved in two types of teaching recently, in a one-on-one academic capacity to secondary-school level students, and as a co-facilitator to professionals for Kitchen, Wolff Olins’ new school venture. These two different environments required very different types of attention and approaches, but in both cases the reasons for learning were similar: people want to equip themselves for the future.

Why we learn

Typically, we learn for one or a mix of the following reasons:

1. Economic – as an investment in our future utility and earning power, and eligibility to employers

2.  Moral and Social – for our personal and intellectual development with a view to social responsibility and democratic citizenship

3.  Epistemic – for the development of knowledge and understanding, learning for learning’s sake

New routes to learning

It is an interesting time in education. The rise of MOOCs (the fastest-growing instructional form of education globally) and SPOCs are well documented, with many platforms offering courses, programmes and schemes which threaten traditional models of access and price.

Earlier this year, an app called Spritz was announced which claims to enable people to read a novel in 90 minutes. The press it received isn’t surprising, it has all the hallmarks of extreme click bait (More! Faster! Apps! More efficient and faster apps!), and the product sounds attractive until you start to think about it (which, incidentally, you couldn’t do if you were reading this argument, or any, on that app). This Atlantic article suggested, far more eloquently than I could, that the app is not really even trying to make you read faster, but to transcend reading altogether. It is as if the only benefit of reading something is the ability to declare that you have read it.

There are other examples too. Coursmos, a platform for micro-courses, presents itself by saying, “Always wanted to learn, but were too busy? Education for Generation Distracted”.  At the time of writing, five of the first pages of recommended courses on Mindsy were about making an activity more productive, faster or easier. The only discernible function of learning is to help get it out of the way as quickly as possible.

And so this faster and easier swathe of learning allows people to remove themselves from the actual experience of learning.

Obsessing on productivity and economics

Learning at its best does not come easily (and often the challenges involved are what makes it enjoyable). Nor are its benefits limited to its measurable outcomes (a certificate of completion, a symbolic stamp of achievement, employment after the event and so on). Spritz encourages you to have read so you can say you’ve read something; it doesn’t allow for the absorption, contemplation or playing around with what you read. Having gained a qualification in five easy steps does not mean that you really understand it. The quality not only of the education, but also its subsequent application in the world, is threatened.

One concern about this goal-oriented, end-supersedes-the-means emphasis is that we stop thinking about quality, and only think in terms of economics and efficiency. Another concern is that learning increasingly becomes a solitary pursuit for individual self-actualisation: of course, people should learn for themselves, but learning with and amongst others is where so much real understanding, collaboration and progress is made.

Universities have traditionally rooted themselves in ‘the disinterested pursuit of knowledge’ but our increasing obsession with quantifying, measuring and ranking results, efficacy and outcomes threatens this. Students are increasingly being treated as customers, and if only assessed in utilitarian terms the product (of education) will become less impactful in moral, social and epistemic terms. Martha Nussbaum has argued against the increasingly utilitarian expectations placed upon education. It should not be subsumed into the business of economics, and students should not be treated as customers.

Despite some teething problems and legitimate challenges about quality, new models of education and learning will improve. This should be a positive and exciting prospect, but it is important to consider why and how we want to learn. If we read and study only for the outcome, not for the journey, it will be a great shame. Learning should offer us so much more.

Dan Gavshon-Brady is a strategist at Wolff Olins, London. He can be found @DanGB88

20 reasons why everyone should be Orange

Orange is one of those companies that we're incredibly proud for. We helped it come into the world in the 90s, we've been invited to explore it further over the years since then... but more than that it's the brand that most clients want to be more like.

Why? We asked around the office for 20 Reasons Everyone Should Be Orange. This is what we heard:

1.   a little challenger that conquered the world

2.   seeing the world through the eyes of a 7 year-old

3.   captures the optimism of a period before 9/11, Lehman or Putin

4.   small innovations that make a big difference, like per-second billing

5.   simple, accessible, optimistic, vibrant.

6.   brave: who'd call a company 'Orange'?!

7.   free cinema tickets that created a time for friends to meet each week

8.   magical swimming baby adverts

9.   everyone knows what "I am a Dolphin" means

10. proud black, white and orange

11. 24hr service repair

12. friendly, trustworthy and always looking for the fun times in life

13. stopped the industry talking about itself

14. confidence in content

15. ironic cinema ads that told people to switch off their phones

16. magic numbers

17. friendly no-BS attitude that looks humble really it's just being human

18. solar-power charge up tents in festivals

19. the future's bright

20. it's a fruit. Everyone loves fruit!

Morgan Holt is a Principal and Senior Director at Wolff Olins London.