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Today's brand guardians
Bryt Group Managing Director Eddie Stableford believes that the increasingly complex world of brand management means the specialist role of brand consultants is critical and expanding fast.
As advertising developed into a mass-market communication medium in the early 50s, advertising agencies adopted the mantle of brand guardians.
The responsibility for every aspect of a brands expression was placed in the hands of those who were entertaining and engaging the public with previously unforeseen marketing creativity.
Advances in technology were being exploited as quickly as they were developed, but mass-market advertising remained an elite medium only affordable by the world’s largest corporations.
This saw agencies focusing on new techniques to develop powerful brands without a reliance on press and television advertising and by the end of the decade, the industry underwent a change with the birth of a new kind of consultancy, Wundermans with the invention of direct marketing.
American Express were one of the early exploiters of this new marketing medium who recognised the strength of this one-to-one communication.
Then in London in 1970, Michael Peters founded a design company of the same name, a move that was to radically change the brand creation theatre.
The business grew to become an international design conglomerate, with sales of $40 million through nine worldwide offices, radically expanding the concept of brand expression and triggering the establishment of the design industry we know today.
With services ranging from new concept and brand-name development to engineering and packaging design, the design of catalogues, retail design and product promotions, marketing had an exciting, new and broad canvas to change and shape consumer purchasing behaviour.
By the mid 70s advances in colour print technology meant that the medium had become both fast and cost-effective and as a consequence there was an explosion in the number of media titles offering previously unseen targeting from mass market to niche audiences. This time also saw a massive proliferation in printed media and direct mail came of age.
Television which had seen little change other than the introduction of BBC 2, saw the arrival of Channels 4 and 5 in the mid 80s followed by satellite and cable television. Then a new communication medium emerged that would change the advertising arena forever, the internet.
The ever-increasing pace of social change and the divergence and fragmentation of audiences saw new advertising channels emerge in the guises of ambient media, experiential marketing and a plethora of web based communication channels.
At the same time, the rapidly developing mobile phone sector was quick to identify the potential to use this new technology to deliver content rich advertising messages to its users and global communications technology entered a phase of previously unforeseen advancement.
The increasing diversity of communication channels and the changing face of one-to-one communication meant that brand owners could no longer entrust the responsibility of brand guardianship to their advertising agency and as a consequence a new generation of design company was born – the brand consultant.
With brand compliance needs rapidly developing into a broader remit covering the creation and implementation of a unique and differentiated brand equity, consistency of brand expression, tone of voice, positioning, associations, sponsorships and every aspect of their brand communication programme, the concept of holistic brand management became established.
Today, corporate identity management has fully developed into brand identity management with businesses recognising the need for 360° consistency in their brand communication across a broad raft of marketing collateral in multiple territories.
Corporate identity manuals have expanded to become brand management manuals covering every aspect of a brands expression and thus the onus placed on brand asset management is greater than ever before.
With every product sector saturated with competing offers and products, brands must create and maintain a uniquely differentiating proposition delivered through consistent brand management.
Brand management today is as much about the language style of call centre operators as it is about the brand identity itself and brand asset management systems can play a pivotal role in simplifying the management of collateral across an ever-growing marketing platform.
In this sense, electronic media pose the biggest challenges due to their immediacy and diversity of technologies, platforms and user interfaces.
For example a non-WAP enabled web site will render a web page and brand identity very differently on a mobile phone in comparison to the same page viewed on a computer. A web page viewed on a lap top computer may appear differently to the same page viewed on a desk-top machine.
Digital print will often render colours differently to conventional print, particularly where a brand identity has been designed to print as a special colour.
A brand consultancy will consider all these aspects when a new brand is created.
For existing brands it is important to consider what action can be taken to ensure consistency of brand expression moving forward and as part of this activity it is vital to future-proof the brand by considering how its usage will develop over time.
For brand asset management systems to be effective, it is essential that definitive brand guidelines are produced at the outset, covering all potential uses of the brand including marketing mediums and geographical territories.
And as part of this activity a brand consultancy will also undertake trade-mark and strapline searches to ensure that there are no existing brand marks in use which may conflict with the proposed brand.
The challenge moving forward will be to expand the delivery of customised, one-to-one communications whilst ensuring consistency of brand expression as communication channels continue to diverge.
Entrusting brand guardianship to a brand consultants will ensure that a companies most valuable asset will be professionally and appropriately managed and that every aspect of its brand expression will increase rather than devalue its equity.
(Article originally printed in Brand Management January/February 2008.)
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