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Sourcing Identity Work
Will the
real branding specialist please stand up?
To whom should a CEO (or CMO or CCO) turn,
for corporate identity advice and assistance? Today it is easier
than ever to be led astray. “Branding” is arguably this
generation’s hottest buzzword, and to ride the trend many design
firms, consultants, and advertising agencies selling quite
different kinds of services have all repositioned themselves as
“branding specialists.” But for corporate branding assignments,
who is actually qualified?
Most corporate
identity work today is done by one of three types of firm —
graphic design, identity specialist, or advertising/marketing
agency. Informed (biased?) by 15 years' experience as an
independent identity consultant who teams with graphic-design
firms, with 10 years prior experience in identity firms and
another 10 years in advertising agencies,
I offer these guidelines.
Graphic-design firms can do outstanding identity work. The
late, great Paul Rand, who counseled IBM and Westinghouse,
worked alone, preferably one-on-one with a CEO client. Graphic
designers are best used when the positioning issues are
relatively simple—with no subcorporate branding and association
issues, no other constituencies who want to be consulted, and a
CEO who is already engaged and brings the designer clear and
actionable strategic direction. At the very least, you can be
sure that a well-trained graphic designer understands the
directness and simplicity of a functionally effective logo.
For a starting list of qualified design firms, see
Affiliations and
Links pages.
On more
complex assignments, graphic designers are likely to team with a
consultant, and to outsource naming.
Identity specialist firms like Siegel&Gale, Landor, Addison,
FutureBrand, and Interbrand are a good choice when the CEO may
not yet be fully engaged, the desired positioning is not yet
clear (or clearly supported with a management consensus), and
there are complex organizational and relationship issues and
subsidiary-brand equities—and as a result, a need for a
comprehensive situation analysis, consensus-building, and
planning phase. (In candor — a big budget helps, too.)
Advertising
agencies can do good branding work — planning,
positioning, and promoting category brands, that is — but
have rarely done good corporate-identity work and as a rule, in
my opinion, should not be expected or asked to do so.
[There are, of course, exceptions. See, for example, the 2005
EDF work by the French
agency Plan créatif.]
My heartfelt
analysis:
·
Ad agencies are about marketing and are
totally—indeed, passionately—focused on immediate campaigns.
They should be. But identities are more basic and must outlast
campaigns, and are more concerned with leadership issues like
destination-setting and employee motivation. These are
management issues; compared to which today’s marketing
issues are generally of secondary importance. A good agency
however, just doing its job, will always confuse identity with
campaign and, therefore, put corporate marketing ahead of
corporate essence.
·
Agencies seldom have qualified identity analysts
and designers on staff. Even the largest agency can’t generate
enough corporate-identity programs, from its existing client
roster, to support them. And a great agency art director may or
may not be a good graphic designer; they are quite different
jobs.
·
There is a good deal of technical knowledge
involved in structuring corporate-brand architecture options, in
building visual systems beyond the logo design, and in applying
identities in media beyond print and broadcast; agencies must
reinvent these wheels and are prone to miss them.
·
For agencies, a long-term relationship is the
ideal. Design and identity firms, too, appreciate lasting
relationships, but identity work, I suggest, is best viewed as
episodic, and best done by service firms that consider
themselves expendable. To best serve their clients, they must
constantly prod, educate, and challenge, at continuing risk to
the client relationship. For this reason alone, thoughtful ad
agencies have seldom sought to build an internal identity
practice.
Missing from
this list are the management-consulting firms, whom one
would normally expect to compete for the corporate-leadership
and positioning counsel that identity work requires. It’s true
that the long-established identity firm Lippincott & Margulies
is now a member of Mercer Consulting Group (a Marsh & McLennan
company). L&M has worked hard to cross-pollinate the
management-consulting and identity-consulting cultures, even
changing its name early in 2003 to Lippincott Mercer. To my
regret, other consulting leaders have traditionally treated
identity work as somehow beneath them, and there are as yet no
signals that firms like McKinsey & Co. are exploring corporate
identity practices.
Also largely
missing, perhaps curiously, are public relations firms,
who seldom seem to think about identity issues and frankly, I am
not sure why. Perhaps PR professionals are so good with words
there is little room left for visual skills (a theory supported,
in my own experience, by the abysmal design of their own
marketing communications and trade journals.) They are also, of
course, legitimately preoccupied with such matters as investor
relations and (it seems) executive branding.
Bottom line?
Go with a full-service corporate identity specialist firm or --
for smaller budgets and more personal control -- a combination
of identity consultant and graphic design firm.
By Tony Spaeth, February 2003 rev. October, 2005,
originally appeared in Across The Board
Other comments
"Maybe Iceland differs from the rest of the world in its
smallness" writes Oscar
Bjarnason. "But there are hardly any graphic design
firms here so about every major branding is made by advertising
agencies, who compete to hire the best designers. I don't think
the quality of the work is any less than what you'd expect from
the biggest companies out there."
Agreed, Oscar; the work is good. Specialization does relate
to size and volume, and Iceland just might be an exception that
proves (and challenges) the rule. |
