The Better Mousetrap

What’s in a logo?

 

 

What’s in a logo? The shortest answer is “lots”.

You can potentially cram a logo full of all sorts of Meanings & Feelings; make a logo pretty much stand for anything. It’s one of those small, yet great wonders of advertising.

 

A brand's logo can be an incredibly elegant visual short-hand for any amount of Opinions & Ideas & Associations. In observing the finest semiotic traditions, a brand’s logo is a signifier, and when done well, it can signify So Much.

An ironic reference point, but as Naomi Klein puts it in No Logo (2000),

“Brands have become cultural accessories and personal philosophies.”

A brand’s logo therefore becomes a gateway, a portal through which we pass into the emotional, rational, Philosophical Universe of that brand. Yes, kind of like a Stargate if you want to take the analogy in that direction.

Take Nike.

You see the Swoosh, and it’s so identifiably Nike.

And that Swoosh immediately sign-posts Just Do It, and that takes you into a busy and buzzing Universe of Feelings, many you don’t even have to put words or apply labels to. You just feel it.  

 

I cited the Nike Swoosh as part of a global brand strategy I once pitched to Deutsche Bank.

Deutsche Bank were (and remain) very proud of their logo, a square, encasing a rising diagonal line.

 

 

The logo was designed in 1974 by “the pioneer of Constructive Graphic Art”, a German called Anton Stankowski. Probably his most famous piece of design, it was intended to signify “Controlled growth”, and it doesn’t require a semiotic mastermind to derive this clear meaning.

Deutsche Bank’s issue was that their logo wasn't universally recognised for much, "controlled growth" or otherwise. They had any amount of brand tracking which scored high on awareness (in the latent sense) and low on affinity (in the “brand I dig, brand for me” sense).

The world over, Deutsche Bank’s logo was little more than as it appeared to people, a diagonal line inside a square. An added dimension was that Deutsche Bank wanted their brand (and their logo) to stand for, “Passion to Perform”, a tagline in their advertising and literature - but also a tagline that they stressed was So Much More than just a tagline, rather an entire value system and differentiating way of doing business and making money. “Passion to Perform” was the proposition that drove and defined them.

The long-short of Deutsche Bank's brand dilemma, a logo that meant one thing had inherited another, less obvious meaning, and few audiences around the world were feeling it.

Reassuringly, making one thing synonymous with another, even if they initially appear incongruous, is very doable. It’s where Nike’s swoosh provides a handy example.  

The Nike "swoosh'" was created in 1971 by a graphic design student called Carolyn Davidson. She was briefed to conceive a design that could fit on a soccer shoe, as produced by... Blue Ribbon Sport. Blue Ribbon Sport only became Nike, as named after the Greek goddess of victory, in 1978, a whole 10 years before Dan Wieden (of agency Wieden+Kennedy) infamously told his client, “You Nike guys, you just do it.”

 

 

Heavy investment and unswerving commitment behind a big powerful ideal, a philosophy as Naomi Klein might call it, and the Swoosh has become Nike’s semiotic Stargate, a White Hole of Associations, inheriting and expanding and inculcating.

My pitch to Deutsche Bank was simply this.

Your logo is an icon... but not an icon in the sense of a Marylyn Monroe or a James Dean. More like an icon you double-click on. Consequently it packs modest meaning and little emotional punch. Your icon needs to realise its potential, to be all it can be, be a deep well of emotion and meanings, through a consistent set of brand behaviours and activities. It needs Scale & Stature. It needs to become Timeless. It needs to be more than an icon, it needs to be ICONIC. Because being truly iconic evokes awe.

The snappy platform idea for this: FROM ICON TO ICONIC.

We then dramatised a 5-year roll out of this Iconography strategy, proposing that Deutsche Bank work with a number of global media partners (The Economist, CNN and CNBC) to produce the kind of on-message Short and Long-form Content that appeals to CEO, entrepreneurial and high-net worth mind-sets.

Our thinking really resonated with Deutsche Bank; that symbols are felt, not just understood – but that they have to first be taught. And once taught “brand icons” may become powerful emotional signifiers (and not just “message carriers”).

4 months after pitching the over-arching platform, 2 months after successfully being appointed to work with them, Deutsche Bank announced their intentions to the world.

 

Deutsche Bank makes bold move with visual identity

By Russell Parsons in Marketing Week | Wed, 10 Feb 2010

Deutsche Bank is to separate its name from its logo as part of its new brand identity in a bid to demonstrate it has the confidence to be part of a “very select set of global superbrands.” The company’s visual identity will display its logo with the bank’s “Passion to Perform” claim, which is now hand written. The bank says it wants to emulate superbrands such as Nike, which is known by its swoosh logo and “Just do it” strapline.

 

Starbucks too have set themselves on a semiotic path to wannabee "Super-brandom". To mark their 40th anniversary, they announced January 5th 2011 that "Starbucks Coffee" was being dropped from their logo.

 

After 40 years of devoted service, CEO Howard Schultz declared that "The Siren" was long over-due her promotion. More so, she just didn't need the sign-posting (any more than the nipples she once sported).

 

"We’ve given her a small but meaningful update to ensure that the Starbucks brand continues to embrace our heritage in ways that are true to our core values and that also ensure we remain relevant and poised for future growth."

Howard Schultz, CEO, Starbucks

 

The move by Howard marks a shrewdly calculated emphasising AND de-emphasising of Starbuck's visual identity; a "pairing back", a de-branding gesture, which may also underline the brand's strength and stature. The removal of lettering arguably "softens", may offer soothing retort to the Anti-Corporate Brigade and No Logo trumpeters, while at the same time inferring a confidence that Starbucks is a brand so big it no longer needs to spell it out.

Is it possible to take away, but also add? To maximise two meanings, even when they're inherently contradictory? To turn up the dials on Bold & Global and Cuddly & Local at the same time?

 

Only time, brand tracking, and coffee sales, will tell.

 

In toast of all things logo, a final word on this should go to former Apple executive Jean Louis Gassée, who had this to say of the company’s bite-afflicted fruit motif:

 

“One of the deep mysteries to me is our logo, the symbol of lust and knowledge, bitten into, all crossed with the colors of the rainbow in the wrong order. You couldn’t dream of a more appropriate logo: lust, knowledge, hope, and anarchy.”

 

Lust, knowledge, hope, anarchy.

 

A logo is never just a logo.

SP.

 

Footnote:

This is brilliant. The Noun Project; making the world a better place, symbolically speaking.

http://thenounproject.com/

 

Reframing: Originality & Busting It Up

 

No one said being original was easy. Coming up with something new, fresh, and dazzling? Seldom the consequence of a walk in the park, proverbial or green.

In answering the call to originate, create and conceive, how do you pick up the gauntlet, put it on, and come out swinging?

 

James Dyson argues the Inventors Endeavour is NOT born of trying to meet an existing need. I heard him speak a few years back, where he happily admitted that no one was crying out for cyclonic suction. His invention was the equaliser to a personal frustration. He hated his vacuum bag filling with lots of lint and hair and suckable household crap.

 

Dyson figured he could do better – “Why bother with the bag?”, he thought – and no question, he has.

 

Invention is born of frustration – a frustration at the way the world is, and an endeavour to try and fix it. Invention is a positive, out of a negative. Dyson’s start-point is The Negative.

 

The same is often said of Great Comedy. Comedy is born of anger. Most comedians are angry people. They’re angry and Truly Miffed at the way things are. They need to “call it”, to mock and usurp it. Comedy and Invention are the consequence of every “Don’t you just hate it when...?”

 

 

Denis Leary - Everything Was Better In Former Days (Part 1)

I think "Originality" may be curiously interpreted as a simple shift in the frame of reference. A matter of “Reframing”. Originality doesn’t have to be about wholesale genesis. More so, it’s simply “a build”, an added layer on that which “already is”.

 

Dyson is still all about vacuuming. They just debunked the mun’danity of the categories age-old conventions. Vacuuming was previously framed within the housewife’s problem-solution. The contextual frame was one of domesticity, of chore and utility. You could follow a thread back to the most brazen chauvinisms of mid-century advertising.

 

 

But Dyson came along and made suction sexy!

 

 

Dyson inverted the convention and flipped the energies. They turned negative into positive, “reframed” the Consumer-Brand debate. A design you WANT to own, and functionality that’s superior. “Dyson” – vacuum cleaning products to Covet & Desire! Inventive genius.

 

And yet, at a brand communication level, Dyson really just “did an Apple”.

In an earlier posting (Colour me happy! – Aug 2010) I toast Apple’s invention of “Tech-Sex Desirability”.

 

Apple reframed what computers and computing was all about. The category conventions generated advertising eulogising The Spec, detailing the technology on the inside, as sexy to MIT and IT types, all geek with no chic.

 

“High performance computing” = small copy, lots of bullet points

Apple’s originality didn’t just reframe the computing category. It took a sledgehammer to a set of conventions that were doctrinally held, busted ‘em up real good.

 

Apple: computers... reframed as a lifestyle (app).

 

And Apple marketing genius continues in its ability to be a product range that reconciles (the fundamental contradiction of) Tribal Belonging and Brand Badge Individualism. In this achievement of course, they’re not alone.

 

To a degree, Apple “just did a Nike”.

 

Rewind to the mid-late 80's, where commercially Nike was being slammed by Reebok and the aerobics craze, where Nike products were a bit too much for hardcore athletes; a dry brand that took itself too seriously.

 

Then, 1988 and "Just do it" cried out from TV ads with end lines like, "And it wouldn’t hurt to stop eating like a pig.”

 

Yes, that's what she said. Nike's 'Just Do It' launch spot (1988).

 

And have that! Provocative, daring, in-your-face creative executions, literally shaming people into working out. Detractors at the time called the ads (of which there were 12) “sociopathic”, possessing a “poverty of warmth”. But in a big way, the detractors were in the minority.

 

“With its “Just Do It” campaign, Nike was able to increase its share of the domestic sport-shoe business from 18 percent to 43 percent, from $877 million in worldwide sales to $9.2 billion in the ten years between 1988 and 1998.”

Source: CFAR – Centre for Applied Research

 

“Cha-Ching!”, as they say. What’s the power of branding? What’s the ROI on creativity? For Nike, $9bn plus over 10 years.

“Nike rose about as high and fast in the ‘90s as any company can. It took on a new religion of brand consciousness and broke advertising sound barriers with its indelible Swoosh, “Just Do It” slogan and deified sports figures. Nike managed the deftest of marketing tricks: to be both anti-establishment and mass market.

Jolie Soloman, “When Nike Goes Cold”,

Newsweek, March 30, 1998

 

Nike, Apple, Dyson – these are “Original Brands” and business über success stories, born of reframing the categories in which they operate.

 

(We’re on the home straight now, but indulge me; I ask one more swing at this.)

 

“Originality”, through breaking norms goes by another name. Genre-busting. To which I offer 3 exhibits:

 

Exhibit A: The Matrix (1999).

 

 

I defy anyone to say this is not one seriously cool film. Seriously. Doesn’t matter what you think of Keanu Reeves. Box Office takings of $171m in the US, and $460m worldwide. The Matrix is maybe the archetypal genre-buster. A Jap-anime inspired, kung-fu super-hero sci-fi action romance, against a cyber-punk dystopian backdrop. Now that’s some heavy-duty reframing.

 

Exhibit B: For pastiche, homage, blatant rip-off, and an all round Post Modern melting-pot celebration of pop culture... Quentin Tarrantino, the referential Reframing Grand Master.

 

Tarantino even homage’s himself, which pretty much takes it to a place where Post Modernism folds in and over and around itself... and Pop Culture implodes... or explodes... or at least goes pop... or maybe nothing happens at all? Whatever. Either way, go spend 5 fun minutes over at: http://vimeo.com/19469447 

 

 “Everything is a remix: Kill Bill”

 

For Exhibit C: Shakespeare’s canon; 400 years old, and it always will be alive, kicking, and doing the rounds in one form of re-imagining or rebooting or another.

 

The latest , Prospero as Prospera; part Mad Max, part Gandalf, part Yoda, all Helen Mirren. Go see at: http://www.wired.com/underwire/2010/12/shakespeare-reboots/ - “The Reboot’s the Thing: 10 Genre-Busting Shakespeare Remixes”.

So I say this. Originality can never die, which is a reassuring thought for us all. Originality is a new take on whatever currently exists; is simply an “add-on”, which may sound rather “small”, but an add-on can be epoch shifting in effect.

 

And if you’re still here, thanks for staying the course. This one’s been a bit of a tour. Dyson, Apple, Nike, The Matrix, Kill Bill, The Tempest. Finally, comic book writing legend, Alan Moore...

 

"Life isn't divided into genres. It's a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel. You know, with a bit of pornography if you're lucky."

 

Maybe this is The Other Moore’s Law? And if so I rather like the balance; one for computer science, another for “the essence of originality”.

 

We divide life into genres, just pigeon holes, so we can make some sense of it all; but that’s not how we live life. And an equal and alternative sense comes through living it, and looking upon it differently, through which we may mash and bust it up.

 

Happy mashing.

 SP.