Branding is often the key to making popular products. Basheera Khan investigates the design tricks behind creating and building up a brand.
Most companies understand the power of a good brand. But how do brands become good in the first place? As with so many fruits of human endeavour, it begins with a crucial spark of creativity - with the potential for success determined at the drawing board.
Good design is everything, particularly when it comes to a brand. Like the first impressions which we make upon other people through our physical appearance, before we even say a word, a brand communicates a stack of information to an audience before the brand owner even attempts to actively engage its interest. So it's understandably important to get brand design right from the outset of a new company or product launch; correcting misleading brand impressions after the fact can be a messy and potentially ruinously expensive affair.
If the key to a good brand is good design, it follows that the key to good design is a good design brief. But it can prove remarkably challenging for someone asking a designer to produce something that works on an almost subliminal level to describe what they want in concrete terms.
Gavin Cawood of Design Wales, the Welsh Assembly-funded body to promote the use of professional design in a spectrum of industries across Wales, says this can often be the hardest part of the process.
"It's about understanding where your target audience is, and what messages you want to put out. Once that's started there are then techniques to monitor brand awareness and what values people assign to that awareness will help you measure how successful it is or not."
Cawood says: "Companies struggle a lot with generating and understanding market intelligence, and understanding and communicating where they fit into the market. You can imagine, if it's an established business in particular, they probably feel they are the best person to know the ins and outs of that market and how they fit into it. But it's extremely rare for us to come across a client, even from fairly established larger businesses, who actually make design and brand part of their annual business planning process."
As an example, Cawood relates a branding research exercise based on the packaging of pies. "We had a client a couple of years ago who made pies for the catering industry and who wanted to get into retail, and we knew they hadn't done any prior research. So we went along to the Tesco across the road from here and bought every pie you could buy from the chiller cabinet, and it only cost about 30 quid.
"We went along to meet them and in their boardroom laid out the pies in the same way they were laid out in the chiller cabinet. The question to the client was where does your pie fit into that logic and what's the foundation for it fitting into that point? And it's all that definition which companies struggle with."
However, Welsh businesses needn't struggle. Wales is richly stocked in creative talent, with more than 600 design agencies handling all aspects of design, from branding and identity, to fashion and textiles, to packaging and manufacturing.
bwa design is one of a handful of Wales-based design agencies whose decision to specialise in a particular industry sector has meant that they attract high- profile clients from across the UK and abroad. The company, based in Hay-on-Wye, boasts the likes of Greenpeace (International and UK), the National Trust, Save the Children and The Commission for Rural Communities.
Catherine Barr, strategic director, says: "If something is well designed, people respond. Which for us is what's important, because our clients are mostly involved in issue-based activities, current affairs and campaigning activities. We're interested in creating solutions that inspire people to take positive action for social and environmental change. It's essentially about putting something across in a way that is relevant to the audience."
Design plays a vital role in rebranding exercises as well, something established businesses embark upon when it becomes apparent that the march of time has made their brand something of an anachronism in a modern market.
A strong brand, with clearly defined brand values and market positioning, is relatively easy to revitalise, and crucially in this age of multiple information channels, adapted to whatever medium suits the message.
Tim Albin, art director at Conwy-based design agency View Creative, says: "A good, coherent and communicative brand requires the dedication and complete commitment of the person commissioning it. Without this the brand will eventually fail in its purpose. The strongest, most versatile and considered brand implementations can be tailored to suit different needs apparently effortlessly."
A prime example of this flexibility in good branding design comes from one of the contenders in the US presidential elections. Barack Obama's campaign is underpinned by very slick brand management designed to illustrate Obama's everyman political positioning, with a different implementation of his campaign logo for each group of voters he is targeting. The primary campaign logo depicts a rising sun in a circle which forms the letter O in his name.
Armin Vit, a graphic designer based in New York, and founder of publishing and design company UnderConsideration, describes the campaign tailoring as "ridiculously well done". Vit says: "For each segment of people, the logo changes accordingly, tip-toeing a fine line between clichxe9 and clever and never crossing to the former's dark side. The iterations are quickly identifiable and feel genuinely concerned with connecting to the people they are talking to, without pandering. The executions are rather flawless and work perfectly on screen with the detailed gradients and subtle background illustrations."
To a great extent, the brand of Wales can work to the advantage of businesses whose products have a distinctly Welsh appeal. Cardigan-based clothing company Howies is a prime example. Founded by Clare and David Hieatt in the early 1990s as much as a hobby as anything else, the company has experienced steady growth, gaining increased popularity amongst skateboarders, surfers and BMX and mountain bikers. In 2007 it was acquired by Timberland.
Long before chief executives began blogging as a marketing and brand awareness activity, the Howies brand developed through the stories that the company told through its mail-order catalogue. Clare Hieatt says: "We wanted Howies to be a really truthful and honest brand. Our story has always been part of the brand's story; we moved from London to West Wales and we told the story of our lives through the catalogue and showed where we were living, where we were playing. There was a "work hard, canoe home' phrase, because our house was on the river and David would canoe to work sometimes and that was all based on an account of the truth," says Hieatt.
With the launch of its first store on London's Carnaby Street in 2007, Howies faced the challenge of translating their successful catalogue brand to a physical space. The store espouses all of the company's "green' brand values.
The Pembrokeshire-based designers who helped translate the brand were required to present only ideas which could be executed in an environmentally friendly way. Hieatt says: "It was a constraint in the brief, but it also has the effect of making people more creative as well."
"Wales is part of our brand, the landscape, being in Cardigan, that is so intrinsic to our brand, we wouldn't be Howies without that now," she adds.