Using the analogy of builders versus architects in the construction industry, Vicky Bullen and Christian Barnett describe how to move beyond function and become a brand architect in the digital world
EVen a cursory review of advertising history reveals that whenever a new medium appears, it takes time for advertisers to learn how to develop creative approaches that fully exploit its potential. So, early press ads reproduced the salesman on the doorstep and early television ads were simply animated press ads.
Exactly the same argument applies to digital developments. When it comes to branding online, we believe that the digital world is still so new that it is missing a trick or two. But the size and scale of the changes wrought by the digital revolution have been so huge and all-encompassing that it’s hard to get a clear view of what those tricks might be.
Perhaps it’s easier to understand the gaps in digital branding by using metaphor and analogy. For that reason it is illuminating to draw parallels with the way that the roles of builders and architects evolved in construction in order to understand the evolution of digital brand communication.
With early buildings, functionality was everything. But over time, as buildings became more sophisticated, the role of the architect emerged (see box below). This is a specialised skill centred on planning, design, and overview that is distinct from the actual craft of construction.
Applying this analogy to the world of digital branding, it is clear that we are still at the early ‘builder stage’, which is dominated by technicians. Brand design and brand values are added on top rather than integrated from the beginning.
The equivalent of the ‘architect’ has not yet emerged and ‘builders’ still dominate. Time and again digital brand design is left in the hands of digital technicians who ‘build’ first, and then add the ‘design’ skin on top. The result is an emphasis on technical proficiency and functionality but a lost opportunity in maximising brand communication.
Wouldn’t it be better if brand design was built into digital brand thinking at the inception of a project rather than at the end, to ensure that digital brand design maximises the brand piece? But to do that, first we need to find our online equivalent of the architect.
The world wide web started as a crudely functional thing. For example, a screengrab of one the first web pages in 1992 (see figure 1) is the website equivalent of a Palaeolithic shelter.
Like buildings, the web too, soon became more sophisticated. See the screenshot of the 1993 World Wide Web browser/editor (see figure 2) courtesy of the World Wide Web Consortium. There is a bit more ‘design’ in it and a discernible stab at ‘aesthetics’. And the same applies to Microsoft’s first website (see figure 3).
There is clearly a significant improvement from the earliest website. It has colour, slide bars, address bars and many of the things that we would recognise as a web page. But like Neolithic huts and long houses it bears only a superficial resemblance to what we know today.
At this point the web expanded from 623 websites at the end of 1993 to 10,000 by the end of 1994. Web 1.0 was up and running, characterised by static pages, GIF buttons, proprietary HTML extensions, guestbooks, and dial-up. Web 1.0 effectively ended with the bursting of the dot-com bubble in 2001. The era demonstrated the often unfulfilled potential of the web.
Making brand progress
It is with Web 2.0 that the digital world started to explode. Faster speeds, dynamic pages, interactivity and collaboration make it an amazing world to be a part of. But it is still largely made by builders. For brands this means that the full potential of the digital world is not being fulfilled. Web developers may make technically brilliant websites but they may not always be sympathetic to communicating brand values and experience and emotion.
Even sophisticated internet users are missing branding opportunities. Take the big UK retailers. Given the technology and skills available (just think of video games that allow players to inhabit virtual worlds), the experience of shopping online is primitive and could be vastly improved.
For instance, instead of simply listing products why not recreate the store virtually? And why not brand it more strongly while you are about it? Apart from the orange of Sainsbury’s and the blue of Tesco there isn’t much brand personality in the online shopping experience. There is much to do to make the online shopping experience more emotionally engaging without losing functionality. And that is essentially what an architect does when designing a building.
Brands are rich and emotional, and the online world is a perfect place to leverage all their equities – both hidden and manifest. For that to happen, brands need to build the brand into all aspects of the user experience, even in things such as the transition between screens, how the menus work, the drop-downs, the movement, behaviour and sounds of the brand as manifested digitally. Google for instance regularly plays with its logo, tailoring it to topical events.
If a brand was originally developed offline it means thinking about how those offline equities, assets and elements translate to the online world. For example, returning to the supermarkets, Tesco has the five blue wavy lines prominent in its identity. Being wavy, they have an inherent dynamism. They may be the perfect vehicle to add some movement to Tesco’s digital presence. They could exist as a branded drop-down menu, or a transition or a way of helping navigation in some other way. They could be animated into a shopping avatar or simply used as a recurring branded device throughout the site.
This kind of thinking combines functionality with an aesthetic based on brand assets. But it needs brand sensibility and creativity at the inception of a piece of digital brand design, not merely applying as a veneer at the end. It needs the digital brand-design equivalent of the architect informed by understanding of all a brand’s hidden equities and its emotional components.
THREE STAGES
There are three specific areas in which techniques of brand design can be applied to brands online. The first is ‘Visual Planning’ and it is crucial to understanding what the brand is and isn’t, what it can and cannot do online as well as offline. It provides a visual blueprint for the brand, a hymn sheet containing its meaning and its equities. Crucially this vision or understanding needs to be shared among all its stakeholders.
When done well, Visual Planning is flexible enough to be used to define the brand in totality, offline or online, and allows us to develop a digital brand essence for brands specifically for the digital world. This essence explores emotional and visual cues, its movement, how it sounds, its tone of voice and its personality.
We are currently rebranding a global software company following the sale of part of its business so we created a dynamic visual essence using clips of film, animation, sounds and stills.
Much of this work was manifested in an animated logo. For Demos, the UK’s leading think tank, we provided guidelines for how its brand might behave online with new pages, menus, drop-downs and so on.
The second area is the generation of digital equities. These are brand equities that relate first and foremost to the digital world. They may be an adaptation of offline equities moved into the digital realm, or they may be specifically created for the digital world.
They might include any of the little devices and behaviours that surround a brand and its use. For instance, they might include the sound of a can of Coke being opened or the snap of a Kit-Kat being shared. We are working on a well-known food brand and have been amazed at what happens when you take its two-dimensional graphic device into the third and fourth dimensions (meaning time or, by implication, movement).
The third area is that of creating a digital section for master elements within the brand guidelines. All too often, brand guidelines don’t include the digital realm. Given the technological possibilities and the unique qualities of the digital realm, this is a significant omission. So guidelines we produced for Schweppes Lemonade recently, with TV and online in mind, included an animation detailing the speed, size, sound and shape of the bubbles.
UPLIFTING VISIONS
Returning to the world of builders and architects, it’s true that even today builders sometimes design buildings. They are often perfectly adequate places in which people can live or work, but very few actively choose to do so because they also tend to be impersonal, uninspiring and undifferentiated.
In contrast, the very best architect-designed buildings are uplifting, iconic structures that draw people to them and inspire them. They are better places to live and work precisely because they start with a concept that is then followed though in every aspect of the design.
In iconic buildings such as Barcelona’s Sagrada Familia, the Scottish Parliament and the Eden Project in Cornwall, not only do the architects determine the overall structure and shape of the building, they sweat every detail, ensuring they are consonant with and reinforce the big idea. From light switches and door handles to guttering and drain covers, from lampshades to toilet cisterns, every detail is meticulously, painstakingly, thought through.
Do you want your brand to be the online equivalent of the Gherkin, a skyscraper in the City of London that is beautiful, unique and engaging, attracting people from across the world to view it? Or would you rather it was a grimly functional ‘Mc-box’ that inspires no love, no respect and no loyalty?
Vicky Bullen is CEO at Coley Porter Bell, [email protected]. Christian Barnett is planning director at Coley Porter Bell, [email protected]