Branding

Branding is often misunderstood. It took a knock with Naomi Klein’s No logo,² and it’s been the butt of anti-globalisation protests. Lifestyle brands sell cheap products at inflated prices to people who want to belong to their tribe.

But brands have a worthy history. They were originally about product quality and safety, and Victorian brands used the maker’s signature as a sign of their personal oversight (Cadbury and Boots still have this). Then they moved on to differentiation, selling a lifestyle and even customer bonding through shared values (think of Body Shop in its heyday).

But at its heart, branding helps match suppliers and customers. Through its image and promotion, the brand effectively declares what kind of customer it’s aimed at, and customers can choose which one they’re comfortable with. So a bank can be posh (Coutts), mainstream (Barclays), cool (Monzo), innovative (Revolut) or regional (Bank of Scotland). The brand then has to follow through and behave as the customer now expects.

This is where the connection with information design lies. Good information design is a form of brand behaviour.

Like all human behaviour it needs to be considerate, polite and fair. And it can be these things in any brand clothing you like – the visual identity, the tone of voice, and the imagery can reflect the social positioning of the brand.

Branding expert Terry Tyrrell talks of brand as reputation:

Brand is not fluffy, it’s not a nice to have, it’s your reputation, it’s built like a house, brick by bit over time and as Henry Ford famously said "You can’t build a reputation on what you are going to do".

Reputation is why we can hope that brands eventually care about public pressure to behave better, and to deliver fairly.

1. Terry Tyrrell. I found this quote on his LinkedIn profile. He was chair of the branding agency Enterprise IG which acquired the design agency I founded.

2. Naomi Klein (1999) No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies, Picador.