Research: Branding - books

Corporate Identity
by Wally Olins
1989, Thames and Hudson, London
pg 7
The identity of the corporation must be so clear that it becomes the yardstick against which its products, behaviour and actions are measured.

This means that the identity cannot simply be a slogan, a collection of phrases: it must be visible, tangible and all-embracing.
In the sprawling, complex corporations with which this book is mostly concerned, where innumerable interests - each supported by individuals - conflict and compete for power and influence, the company's long-term purpose, its values, its identity must be managed consciously and clearly, or they will be overwhelmed and disregarded in sectional infighting. The organisation will simply become an inert victim of the various factions that seek to control it.

pg 9
Identity is expressed in the names, symbols, logos, colours and rites of passage which the organisation uses to distinguish itself, its brands and its constituent companies. At one level, these serve the same purpose as religious symbolism, chivalric heraldry or national flags and symbols: they encapsulate and make vivid a collective sense of belonging and purpose. At another level, they represent consistent standards of quality and therefore encourage consumer loyalty.

[This book] It also takes the view that the corporation is, whether it likes it or not, becoming more closely integrated into society, and that society is becoming increasingly judgmental about the behaviour and actions of corporations.We are entering an epoch in which only those corporations making highly competitive products will survive. This means, in the longer term, that products from the major competing companies around the world will become increasingly similar. Inevitably, this means that the whole of the company's personality, its identity, will become the most significant factor in making a choice between one company and its products and another.

pg 29
Corporate identity is concerned with four major areas of activity:
Products/services - what you make or sell
Environments - where you make or sell it - the place of physical context
Information - how you describe and publicize what you do
Behaviour - How people within the organization behave to each other and to outsiders
All of these communicate ideas about the company. But in fact the entire corporation communicates in everything it does all the time. The fact that the company exists at all is itself a form of communication. The potency of different forms of communication varies, however, together with the degree to which they are modulated.

pg 33
Because communication, more particularly advertising and packaging, gives life and personality to consumer products, advertising especially has become a prism through which many products that we use in everyday life - fizzy drinks, soaps, toothpaste, breakfast cereals - are projected. Almost inevitably, therefore, many people have come to associate advertising with identity, or with image.
This is a misleading and potentially dangerous idea, because it has the effect of devaluing the real power of product, environment and behaviour in the identity mix, at the risk of overvaluing information techniques.
Perhaps even more importantly though, the idea that identity is somehow inextricably associated with conventional communication techniques, and particularly with advertising, inevitably distorts the reality, which is that identity is usually a manifestation of what the organization is all about; and that in the end, identity is the responsibility of the people who run the organization and not only of its designers, public relations people or advertising agencies.

pg 35
Increasingly therefore, we, the public, are having to make a choice between one company, one product or one service and another on the basis of factors that are very difficult to quantify, such as reputation. It's certain that the companies with good products and powerful, well-coordinated identities, will beat their competitors whose products are just as good, but whose identities are weak.

pg 45
New techniques in information technology, market research and production are increasingly driving successful manufacturers into making products that are alike in all tangible and quantifiable characteristics - price, quality and service, and even to a certain extent appearance.

pg 56
One way or another, whether they are conscious of it or not, most commercial organizations use design to delineate their relationship with their customers.

pg 78
If a company has, say, five divisions and it uses one name, one set of colours, one symbol and typestyle in all of them, it will convey a simple, centralized idea of itself. If the same company gives each division a seperate colour, it will inevitably project a more decentralized identity. And if it uses different names, symbols and logotypes for each division, it will give an even more disparate impression. The identity resource can clarify an organization's structure - and enable its purpose and its shape to emerge clearly.

pg 115
Once the idea of separate target audiences grew up, the permutations were endless. You could produce a whole range of products aimed at different groups; it didn't really matter if the intrinsic difference between the products was negligible, providing they all had individual names and packaging, and were promoted separately in ways appropriate to each target audience.

Branding soon became the magic ingredient that enabled companies to sell variations of a single product to the greatest possible variety of people.

Branding is one of the most powerful ways of promoting a product. The greatest single strength of the brand is that, because it is created carefully and deliberately to appeal to a particular group of people at a particular point in time, it can be imbued with powerful, complex, highly charged and immediate symbolism aimed at a specific marketplace.

Over the last generation the change that has been taking place in the retail stores in many countries has been revolutionary - almost as revolutionary as the growth of the manufacturer's brand itself at an earlier period. Where the branded products were king for over a century, while the retailer was for the most part supine, the monolithic identity has now been 'discovered' by the retailer. In a sense we could say that the retailer has found his strengths and suddenly emerged from nowhere to take a vast slice of the market. In certain countries and in some kinds of market, retailers with monolithic identities in environment (shops), information systems (packaging and advertising) and products are busily knocking the traditional branded manufacturers cock-eyed.


Understanding Brands
by Don Cowley
1991 by Kogan Page Limited

BRAND PACKAGING

pg 137

Ideally it should project a personality, instil loyalty, forge emotional links, and actively persuade people to ‘buy me’.

Packaging design has become ‘active’. An exciting new agenda has been set which combines the creative with the commercial, and explores the intuitive alongside the rational.

Pg 139

It must flag down the prospect in mass display; involve on an emotional level, strike a chord, touch a nerve; symbolise the brand’s core proposition and differentiate it from the competition; project the brand’s personality; persude and seduce; communicate information; provide a functional cover for the product in transit and in the home; and be ecologically friendly.

Brand packaging continues to work after purchase. […] We were brought up with the friendly faces of Kelloggs, Heinz, Cadbury’s, and Johnson’s Baby. They are part of life. But where it works hardest is at the point of sale, at the critical moment when the purchase decision is made.

The Corporate Brand 
by Nicholas Ind, 1997, Macmillan Press Ltd, Hampshire

CYNICISM OF CONSUMERS

pg 20

With consumer confidence also comes cynicism. Consumers do not necessarily believe what companies tell them about themselves or their products. The growing distrust of institutions and in particular central government is borne out of us knowing more than ever before about the realities of what goes on and the accumulated evidence of broken promises.

CHEAP ALTERNATIVES

Pg 23

If the consumer fails to perceive a relevant and distinctive appeal in a brand, then they will purchase a less expensive alternative.

They were certainly cheaper, but most were also poorer quality. This was reflected in the approach to packaging, which was minimalist and designed to emphasise the functionality and value of the product.

No Logo
Naomi Klein, 2005, Harper Perennial, London

BRAND NOT PRODUCT

Pg 4

These pioneers made the bold claim that producing goods was only an incidental part of their operations, and that thanks to recent victories in trade liberalisation and labor-law reform, they were able to have their products made for them by contractors, many of them overseas. What these companies produced primarily were not things, they said, but images of their brands. Their real work lay not in manufacturing but in marketing. This formula, needless to say, has proved enormously profitable, and its success has companies competing in a race toward weightlessness: whoever owns the least, has the fewest employees on the payroll and produces the most powerful images, as opposed to products, wins the race.

Pg 5

Since many of today’s best-known manufacturers no longer produce products and advertise them, but rather buy products and “brand” them, these companies are forever on the prowl for creative new ways to build and strengthen their brand images.

COMPETITIVE BRANDING

Pg 6

What made early branding efforts different from more straightforward salesmanship was that the market was not being flooded with uniform mass-produced products that were virtually indistinguishable from one another.

The first task of branding was to bestow proper names on generic goods such as sugar, flour, soap and cereal, which had previously been scooped out of barrels by local shopkeepers.

ITS A CULTURE

Pg 30

It is not to sponsor culture but to be the culture. And why shouldn’t it be? If brands are not products but ideas, attitudes, values and experiences, why can’t they be culture too?