I’ve been posting a lot lately about branding and about logos because of a book I’m reading, “Building Brand Identity” which is a fantastically competent, textbook really.
The interesting thing is, having gone through 2/3 of the book, learning a great deal, I come to the last 1/3 of the book which consists of many examples, illustrated and described.
Wow.
Here you have fantastic skill applied to the development of brand identity. What the book doesn’t cover is what that rests on: the definition of the brand and how the brand identity should express that. They only describe a process for getting agreement.
This is where the whole subject often goes completely off the rails. I mean, nowhere in sight.
Three out of four of the examples could be classed as sheer foolishness based on their philosophical premises. Many times the brand identities still work because they are aesthetic, distinctive, set the right tone, and have all the mechanical characteristics of good branding in terms of clarity and usability across a wide range of media and applications.
But not all.
And that’s where it ends. The common sense that is.
These are companies that have spent a fortune on re-branding. Cingular when it was created by a merger spent $200 million on its new brand launch. Accenture (the new name for the consulting company half of Arthur Andersen when it split from the accounting company) spent $160 million launching their new brand.
And yet they are doing stupid, stupid things.
I saw this recently when I judged the Sizzle Awards (a national trade show marketing competition). Fortune 500 multi-national corporations were spending as much as $900,000 for trade shows and being beaten out by companies spending $20,000.
I guess if there’s any point here it’s being big and spending lots of money doesn’t mean you are doing anything sensible or going to succeed.
But I guess we knew that from the recent examples of General Motors and Fannie Mae.
Not to speak of the Federal Government.
Just to end on a positive note, the flip side of that is: You don’t have to spend a fortune to achieve sensible and successful things with your brand.