Marketing’s Design Leagues 2010

June 30th, 2010

In many ways, design’s star is rising.

Its strategic relationship with business continues to improve and its profile in the media and among the public appears higher than ever. As mass-market advertising flounders, design is inching its way into business structures and boardroom psyches, with major companies now regularly talking about the power of ‘design-led thinking’.

Projects such as the launch of London 2012 mascots Wenlock and Mandeville have sparked debates about design in the national press. Even mainstream TV is interested: in recent months there have been several design-related shows, including the BBC’s The Genius of Design and High Street Dreams, an episode of which featured the input of design agencies Pearlfisher and Blue Marlin.

The very notion of ‘design thinking’ is itself a leap forward because it shifts conceptions of the discipline from something that produces solely a tangible output - a pack, for example - to something that is an approach, a structured thought process that can be applied to many and varied issues. Design groups are keen to promote this strategic clever thinking because it helps them move up the client food chain, earning meatier projects with bigger budgets and a higher value.

Mixed outlook

On paper, the future may look rosy, but in the real world things aren’t so easy. As this year’s league tables reveal, 2009 was tough, with fee income falling significantly for many. ‘There is no doubt that the past 12 months have been an extremely challenging and pretty bloody experience,’ says Andrew Eyles, group managing director of Blue Marlin.

Last year was characterised by the postponement of projects, as clients waited to see when, or whether, the economy would start to recover. Top agency Imagination was one of many to suffer a double-digit fall in fee income and, while agencies of all sizes have been squeezed, those toward the bottom of the table seem to have been hit hard.

Some of that pressure will remain in the year ahead and agencies working for the public sector are bracing themselves for severe spending cuts. The good news, however, is that many private businesses have ended their freeze on investment, allowing NPD and innovation to continue and putting more briefs into the market.

Guy Douglass, managing director of packaging design agency FLB, agrees that things can only get better. ‘(Last year) was really tricky. We only just made a profit, and business and cash flow were difficult,’ he says. ‘But this year is looking positive. There’s lots of work out there, both from existing clients and new business.’

Continued investment during a recession can help brands appear strong. Argos’ brand identity work with The Brand Union, for example, is intended to position the retailer as fit for the future. ‘Customers told us that they want a brand that feels relevant and is well equipped to stay relevant,’ says Siobhan Fitzpatrick, head of brand marketing for Argos.

Research found that customers had a desire to see Argos investing in itself. ‘It sent the right signals out at a time when companies like Woolworths were all closing,’ adds Brand Union UK chief executive Simon Bailey.

Retail spending has just about held up, too, which is good news for those working in FMCG packaging, branding and retail design. ‘The market is still robust enough for consumers to pay for a good quality service,’ says Michael Sheridan, chairman of luxury retail brand consultancy Sheridan & Co, which works with Absolut and World of Whiskies. ‘The value of the pound is also a big factor. Visitors are coming to the UK not just because it’s 50% cheaper than it was in 2008, but because we have a very good shopping experience.’

As Media Square design chairman David Worthington notes, those who stand still in FMCG die. ‘Big brand-owners are very clear on the need for constant innovation, preferring steady and continuous growth, rather than peaks and troughs. Irrespective of recessions, they tend to cut a more consistent path by remaining committed to a product development cycle,’ he says.

Bakery brand Warburtons is a good example of this relentless focus on product development. New business director Jason Uttley says this is what customers are looking for. The company entered the snack-foods sector in March with the launch of ChippidyDooDa pitta chips and SnackaDoodle wholegrain snacks. The brand extension was developed with Anthem Worldwide.

Beyond the shelf

Although FMCG work has remained steady, some of the rules are changing. In particular, brands and design agencies must now think beyond achieving shelf standout, argues Nick Dormon, managing director of Echo Brand Design.

‘Standout is now the baseline - if you don’t stand out, you don’t survive,’ he says. ‘At the same time, supply-chain savings and sustainability programmes have meant the loss of physical presence on shelf as packaging becomes smaller and more lightweight. So it’s about the whole experience. You pick up a product in store, feel it, read it, take it home and use it, put it on a shelf, see it, use it then eventually dispose of it. All these moments are an opportunity to engage with people.’

Norwegian mineral water brand Isklar circles this brand experience with a uniquely engineered bottle design, by Blue Marlin, creating differentiation on shelf but also reducing its use of materials. The brand-product ‘loop’ is then closed by the company’s sustainability efforts, which include full carbon-neutral certification, use of hydroelectric power for its bottling plant and investment in high-end recycling facilities. Each aspect is consistent with notions of purity and nature.

The implications of last year’s precipitous fall in business are still playing out. Although work has picked up, the sector remains fragmented and competitive. In a procurement-driven environment, business has become harder to win and sustain. Dick Powell, incoming D&AD chairman and director of Seymourpowell, believes these pressures are leading to more instances of free pitching and the continued erosion of margins. ‘They are trying to cut the fat out of the design agencies, but there is no fat there,’ he says.

His sentiment is echoed by Eyles, who adds: ‘We are all having to work a lot harder and give a lot more. Some groups have gone for volume and are churning stuff out just to keep the lights running, while other groups have got smaller, leaner and more specialist.’

The pressure is on, then, for agencies to reinvent their businesses. Some are looking to overseas markets for revenue, particularly in the fast-growing BRIC nations. Sheridan & Co, for example, is finding its clients buying strategic and creative ideas to use overseas. As an industry, maintaining revenues from emerging markets requires British design to retain its reputation as a global leader.

Overall, Eyles concludes that the design industry emerging from the recession could look very different from the one that went into it. ‘Design output has to be married to effective strategy and consultancy,’ he says. ‘Often we may not even do any design. It’s now all about the brand - a seamless service of look, feel, tone and qualities. Some clients welcome deep strategic work, others protect their right to control it, but I’m optimistic that design can sit at the heart of this, working from strategy and concept to 2D and 3D output. The squeeze on fees now will just make the industry leaner, more credible and more professional and then the value of its work will come back in.’

THE WHOLE EXPERIENCE

As advertisers increase their focus on dialogue with - and between - customers, they are recognising the significance of the whole experience that people have with their brands, from the moment they first see a pack, ad, piece of copy or web page, through to disposal of a product or their interaction with customer service if they have a problem.

The communications environment is rich, complex and rapidly shifting and brands need help to manage these numerous ‘touchpoints’. Ad agencies, design groups and even some digital groups are vying to lead this work. Yet, whoever oversees the process, collaboration between agencies is more necessary than ever.

‘The landscape has become more complex for clients with many different agencies working for them - advertising, branding, sponsorship, interaction, social media, digital and so on,’ says Simon Bailey, UK chief executive at The Brand Union. ‘To have a partner who has helped create the brand itself working to manage all these groups can be very useful for clients.’

The Brand Union adopted this role for Barclaycard, where branding output spanned corporate identity, advertising, direct marketing, digital media, internal engagement, environments, literature, packaging, point of sale, exhibitions and sponsorship. The list of contributing agencies (Bartle Bogle Hegarty, EHS Brann, Balloon Dog, Dare and Vital Marketing) demonstrates how collaboration and oversight are essential in maintaining consistency in a complex, multichannel environment.

This article was written for Marketing’s Design Agency Leagues 2010 publication, 30 June 2010.

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Not an option

June 29th, 2010

Big business is entering a new phase in its efforts to become more sustainable. Declamations from the likes of Nike, Puma and Marks & Spencer speak of sustainability being embedded in their cultures, operationally and philosophically.

In the words of a Nike announcement earlier this year, this phase ushers in ‘the next evolution of corporate responsibility strategy [moving] from a risk management, philanthropic and compliance model to a long-term strategy focused on innovation, collaboration, transparency and advocacy.’ In others words, it’s deeper and more serious.

At the same time, consumer-facing brands are flexing and moulding in order to wear the clothes of corporate social responsibility a little more naturally. Recent years have seen a clamour of eco-ethical communications thrown around and on top of familiar brands, decorating them in green, planet-friendly imagery. It felt, in many cases, a bit too convenient and reactive and admonishments of green-washing quickly followed.

‘I think a new theme is happening with corporate sustainability and brands,’ says Dorothy MacKenzie, director of branding consultancy Dragon Rouge. ‘We’re going from something set apart from the brand, or based around token activities, to something that’s embedded in it. The only way of embedding sustainability principles and actions and avoid green-washing is to take it right inside the company.’

Until recently, only pioneer ethical brands really adhered to root and branch sustainable business practice, but it is moving into the mainstream. As MacKenzie notes, once a business as large as Walmart begins to rethink its supply chain, it’s pretty hard to ignore. Partly this is a result of public expectation and the ideological pressure of the day, but mostly it’s about ensuring that a business can thrive, remain profitable and exist in the future.

‘There’s a triangulation of issues within a business for any potential initiative: Do consumers like it more? Is it greener? Is it cheaper? If the answer to all three is yes then you’ll get a green light,’ says Silas Amos, creative director at packaging consultancy Jones Knowles Ritchie. And as MacKenzie adds, it’s no good if you run out of raw materials or if they become too expensive, so care for the environment ultimately makes business sense as well as moral sense. Marks & Spencer, for example, claims its wide-ranging Plan A programme has become ‘cost-positive’, saving £50m in efficiencies during 2009/10.

Designers have an important role to play too. Shell’s work with packaging group Blue Marlin increased manufacturing efficiencies and reduced pack formats to cut plastic use by 9 per cent, equivalent to taking 45 million one-litre bottles out of the system annually. Coca-Cola’s colour management work with Anthem Worldwide rationalised colours globally to reduce printing materials and costs. And Puma’s two-year collaboration with designer Yves Béhar created a fully recycled and ‘boxless’ shoe packaging system that slashes paper consumption by 65 per cent and carbon emissions by 10,000 tons annually.

Seeking efficiencies is just everyday good business practice, but the value it now offers in terms of public relations gives renewed impetus to finding better ways of doing things. And consumer brands need to embody this ethos in a believable, genuine and natural way, not just repainted with an ethical overlay. ‘Whatever you’re saying on sustainability it has to be in the brand’s language, coming from the mouth of the brand,’ argues Jonathan Davies, director of packaging consultancy Butterfly Cannon.

MacKenzie believes that corporate shifts are being woven into brand activity ‘much more naturally and less self-consciously’ than previously, resulting in more creative, coherent branding. ‘An awful lot of communication around this area has been quite dull; one of the benefits of bringing sustainability right into the brand is that you can get better communication and design.’

Unilever, for example, is using sustainability as a driver for company-wide innovation and growth, but this filters down to products individually. So a tongue in cheek campaign for its US men’s toiletries range Axe promotes the ecological virtues of ‘shower pooling’ in a way that is part and parcel of the brand (depicting one man sharing a shower with lots of women, naturally).

So from a branding and business point of view sustainability can be viewed as an opportunity. But from an environmental point of view such changes are arguably just tweaks to the system of mass consumption, not a fundamental shift in the way we live. Global manufacturing businesses and markets will not change comprehensively overnight. ‘Many things are structured in a way that will change over time, but it will be a very long time,’ notes MacKenzie.

Puma’s chief marketing officer Antonio Bertone admits that the company’s global supply chain could not be radically altered for sustainability concerns. ‘The supply chain is the lifeblood of the company and you can’t disrupt that process or it would take years to get to implementation and the cost would go back to the consumer. So our new packaging still had to behave like a shoebox,’ he says.

And there’s the rub. Change is happening, but it will happen slowly. Even Shells acknowledges that by 2050 global CO2 emissions must fall by at least 50 per cent, yet energy demand is expected to double. For all the good intentions, could it be too little, too late?

This article was written for Design Week’s Sustainable Design Supplement, June 2010.

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Planet packaging

April 26th, 2010

What does sustainability mean to you? In recent years the term’s currency has increased significantly, with a growing list of ideas, principles and initiatives being pulled together under its umbrella.

Sustainability is about carbon, energy, materials, resources, processes and ecology; but it is also to do with ethics, contracts, responsibility, fairness and localness.

Yet, alongside all these aspects, it is also about marketing and design, because businesses want to talk about sustainability and people want to see it in practice.

One of the most public battlegrounds over claims of unsustainable processes centres on waste and, specifically, on product packaging. UK households throw away almost 6m tonnes of packaging in their waste every year, according to WRAP, an organisation that campaigns for waste reduction and efficient use of sustainable resources.

Packaging provides direct communication between producer and consumer: it is through packaging initiatives and on-pack graphics that brands look to demonstrate their sustainability credentials. This has led to a profusion of messages: carbon-footprint data, recyclability, eco-friendly materials (or, at least, materials that appear so), size and weight reductions, refill pouches, green branding and then, for some, subsequent allegations of ‘greenwashing’.

Designers and marketers talk a good fight when it comes to saving the planet, but whether this noise means anything to consumers is another matter. The findings of a survey by the Industry Council for Packaging and the Environment suggest consumers are ambivalent about packaging. ‘They are aware that some packaging is wasteful… [but] they are also aware that packaging plays an important role in advertising, informing, enhancing and protecting. While wanting to reduce waste, consumers are at the same time attracted by luxurious packaging and often choose packaged goods over loose items,’ states the report.

What people say they want and what they do may not always tally. With its Eco Refill pouch, coffee brand Kenco impressively states that its packaging weight is reduced by 97%, but do people want an eco-pouch? ‘Sustainability is a hot topic for consumers, but for most it’s not one on which they base their final choice,’ says Silas Amos, creative director of packaging design group Jones Knowles Ritchie (JKR). ‘I hope Kenco does very well, but I fear that consumers may be apathetic toward it.’

These contradictions may stem partly from a lack of certainty on questions of sustainability. ‘Like so many messages on sustainability and the environment - not just in packaging, but everywhere - clarity has not really come through yet,’ says Laura Haynes, chairman of branding agency Appetite, and founder of Zero: Low Carbon Communications. ‘But consumers come in all shapes and sizes, from those who are very aware and informed to those who are unaware, or even apathetic.’

Several brands have been tarnished by accusations of ‘greenwashing’ over the past couple of years. In fact, changes made to the Committee of Advertising Practice codes, with more set to come into force in September, aim to reduce exaggerated environmental claims. Although enforced by the Advertising Standards Authority, the effects of these rules are likely to filter down to packaging design, too. So are consumers sceptical of brands’ efforts?

‘Everybody’s thinking about how they can be nicer - it helps in terms of costs and production and gives you a marketing feelgood factor, but you have to do it in a way that’s honest,’ says Antonio Bertone, chief marketing officer for sportswear brand Puma, which has just announced a major sustainable packaging initiative.

A lot of what passes for environmentally conscious initiatives, and is presented as such on packs, is, in reality, simply good design and manufacturing practice. Clients and designers have always strived for efficiency, elegance and cost savings on materials and energy. JKR’s work with organic skincare business Spiezia, for example, saved the client 12% in packaging costs and the structural design reduced breakages to almost zero, according to the brand’s managing director, Amanda Barlow.

In a similar case, design group Identica suggested that adjusting the ’shoulder’ angle of the bottles used for Pernod Ricard’s digestif Ramazzotti could reduce the energy and materials used in production, without changing its distinctive shape. According to Identica chief executive Franco Bonadio, this saved the client 20% in raw materials costs. Working with JKR, Stella Artois and Young’s ale have also ‘lightweighted’ their bottles.

Yet according to WRAP, research from Container Lite - a major study into lightweight glass packaging - found that shoppers struggle to detect a 5%-10% difference in glass container weight, even when they are aware of it; in uncued tests, weight differences of up to 40% in empty containers and 20% in full containers went unnoticed. In any case, the research notes that consumers very rarely compare product weights in the supermarket.

So, if companies want to use sustainability as a form of brand differentiation in stores, their initiatives often have to be elucidated on pack, which can lead to a clamour of ‘me-too’ messages.

‘When do you put a green message on a pack and when don’t you?’ asks Bonadio. ‘First it can be a point of difference, but there comes a point when everybody is doing it and people expect it anyway. At the moment, we are going through a transition point.’

This transition has created a hubbub of activity. Brands are changing materials and graphic design language, using third-party certifications such as Fairtrade, Soil Association, Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) and Carbon Trust, and generally grappling with a complex and multifarious set of issues, processes and messages.

Increasingly, consumers expect to see sustainability efforts from the brands they buy, but even then, the consumer position appears to be mixed and sometimes contradictory.

‘People are not going to applaud you for (your efforts in) sustainability because they are slightly aghast that you haven’t been doing it all along,’ says Amos. ‘The best packaging and brands are those that don’t decide that CSR is a ghetto and they communicate it all in a more stylish way. Stella Artois’s recent “Recyclage de Luxe” campaign, for example, was much more fun and stylish than worthy, while Ecover is the old days - it’s all CSR and no style, and it has been leapfrogged.’

Graphically speaking, there is an onus on designers and clients to formulate a clear and considered hierarchy of messages, says Mark Frost, creative director of packaging group BrandMe. ‘There doesn’t always have to be a big flash on the front. You’ve got to get a balance of what should be on pack, while remaining transparent with your messages. There are so many messages we are trying to communicate now that it’s a very difficult task,’ he adds.

Yet these are important messages that still need to be delivered, despite the challenges and possible confusion. ‘I think you should communicate what you’re doing,’ says Haynes. ‘First, it raises the conversation, which in essence is important. Second, it creates greater understanding of the right things to be done. Third, over time, companies may well be required to talk about what they do as a kind of checklist of initiatives.’

As Frost puts it: ‘Lots of things are not perfect, but it’s better than doing nothing.’

This article was written for Marketing, 21 April 2010.

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Second life

September 9th, 2009

Online social media are where it’s at. Brands know this, corporations know this and of course, so do many museums.

Bundled under the rather opaque term “web 2.0″, a host of online sites and services - coupled with wider access to faster internet connections - has profoundly influenced the way that many people communicate.
Previously unrelated individuals can speak to one another, while larger numbers of people come together to form “web communities”.

At its best, this activity spawns new networks of knowledge - sharing, thinking and inspiration; at worst, it serves up a white noise of banalities. And like all organisations that deal with the public, museums have to navigate a way through this terrain, harnessing its strengths and watching for its pitfalls.

With each new social media phenomenon there is a bubble of hype: first it was Facebook and now it is Twitter. Among the hype it is not always easy to ascertain whether these things are genuinely useful; in the case of Twitter in particular, first appearances are generally discouraging, although further exploration yields riches.

The benefits of such services to museums, and how they might approach using them, are even less clear and a lot of head-scratching and question-posing is currently underway.

This Working Knowledge discusses some of the opportunities and challenges presented by online social media, looking at projects from leading institutions around the world. But before heading into the thick of it, it is worth trying to pin down what web 2.0 actually means.

Really, it is a catch-all term relating to a “generation” of online services that are built around interaction, social networking, sharing and interoperability.

Another, simpler way of looking at it is offered by consultants Lord Cultural Resources, which describes social media sites - such as Flickr, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter - as an extension of “the sharing of experiences once the sole purview of word-of-mouth communication”.

SPREAD THE WORD, VIRTUALLY

As a virtual word of mouth, it is the sharing of ideas, knowledge and experience that underpins web 2.0 services and user behaviour. This behaviour is typically predicated on relaxed openness, dialogue and a collegiate style of collaboration.

While many museum workers may share these attributes, very often the institutions themselves operate more like corporations, as Bridget McKenzie, director of cultural consultancy Flow Associates, explains.

“In the UK, we’ve followed the US model of shifting to museums as corporations and we’ve learned the rules of PR from the business world,” she says.

“I think this PR mode sits uncomfortably with the collegiate style of critical and independent thinking that characterises most cultural sector workers and increasingly grates against the conversational and open modes of social media.”

As a rule, the US is leading the way in working through these questions, with the Brooklyn Museum and Indianapolis Museum of Art both notably advanced. On the whole, museums and galleries that have really embraced web 2.0 are still few and far between, yet many say they want in.

“Over the last six months, one of the biggest things I’ve found is that people say they want to do web 2.0, but when it comes to matching the digital output that’s necessary with the shape of the museum institution inside, there is a mismatch,” says UK-based consultant Jon Pratty.

And we are right at the peak of the hype, says Mike Ellis, former head of web for the National Museum of Science and Industry and now a solutions architect at IT group Eduserv.

“Once upon a time the development of social tools had our fellow institutions looking on with horror. After a while it became entirely de rigueur. Round about now, it has become unfashionable to launch anything without some kind of social element. [This] is more about doing technology for the hell of it rather than looking at how users might really want to interact with our content.”

With this as a word of warning, the following articles discuss the practical, as well as strategic, challenges thrown down by museums’ use of social media. The apparent simplicity of many services and projects is appealing, but it masks a number of complex issues within.

The structure and culture of most museums, for example, is rarely prepared to handle a multiplicity of voices, both incoming and outgoing. Managing web 2.0 content throws up many implications for branding, content generation and authorship, tone of voice, timeliness, marketing, interpretation and more.

The Brooklyn Museum, considered by many to be exemplary in its online community work, is still something of an exception, says Pratty (see link below).

“Everyone wants to be like the Brooklyn Museum, but most UK museums aren’t like that. They don’t allow open voices or allow people to speak and author [content]. We have a hierarchical structure and the exemplars [in web 2.0] are not shaped like this, so museums have to change. This is a big thing to be tackled and it is less to do with technology and more to do with who and what the organisation is.”

MULTIPLE VOICES

One key aspect is the erosion of a centralised, single voice of authority, as traditionally presented and policed by a museum’s press and marketing department. Museums need to adjust to the idea of having multiple voices, says Mia Ridge, head of web development for the Science Museum, London.

“The monolithic museum voice is challenged by social media. It has always been the way that a museum has many voices: curators would do seminars, education teams would do something in school, and marketing people would be sending messages out to lots of different places,” Ridge says.

“But technology makes it much more obvious because you can just search through it all on the web. So if I’m semi-officially writing about work at the Science Museum on my own blog, what does that mean? My [technical] writing doesn’t really clash with the museum [voice], but what if explainers or curators are blogging? That might clash with the official lines. We’re exploring this at the moment.”

In fact, even the most progressive institutions are still exploring these issues, so hard-and-fast answers are scarce. But there are already some great examples of innovative projects out there, including the use of Flickr in competition events, both on- and off-site; blogs that offer staff the chance to share their experiences and knowledge; and exhibitions and online collections that are “co-curated” by the public.

As ever, different museums will need different responses to these challenges, based on their own particular objectives. “[Practical responses] have to be crafted for each situation, using the right channels and communities of interest,” says Bridget McKenzie.

“With social media, I think those generic rules you see everywhere are problematic. Organisations need to accept they need to invest in advice and training staff in these new PR skills.”

Jon Pratty echoes this: “Museums are seeking or searching for digital publishing skills, and they really need to. Publishing and content skills are absolutely needed.”

Or, as US-based museum and web 2.0 consultant Nina Simon puts it: “Do we have to be on Facebook and Twitter and every other damn social site? No - you have to determine what fits your goals and resources. And then just do that.”

This Working Knowledge is loosely organised around the types of activity that museums already do before the emergence of web 2.0 communications.

Some argue that the distinction between departmental functions is eroded by these new communications channels and that a full structural and cultural reappraisal is needed to embrace changes in visitor relationships, curatorship and interpretation.

This may be the case, but in the end much outward activity will fall into familiar categories: projecting what the museum does; building audiences; developing and marketing exhibitions and events; and researching and interpreting the history of objects.

The web can now play a role in all of these areas, even if it is just one channel among many. Web 2.0, for want of a better term, is more than a fad - and it is here to stay.

This article was written for the Working Knowledge section of Museum Practice, Autumn 2009.

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Participatory design for museums

August 10th, 2009

A young woman is strolling down the street in a medium-sized British town. Rounding a corner she is confronted with an altercation between a white man and an Asian store-owner. It is not clear what has caused the confrontation, but the aggression has a palpable racial element. As the shouting and gesticulating heightens, the observer takes out her phone and grabs a couple of photographs, as well as a short, ten-second video, all the while making sure she is out of sight.

Later, as she comes into the city centre, the woman decides to pop in to the local museum to see what’s on and to pass half an hour before a meeting. As it turns out, the museum has just opened a temporary exhibition looking at the history of race relations in the city, offering oral histories, photographs and cultural objects imported to the town by its Asian immigrants. She notices that one section of the exhibition is soliciting visitor input, encouraging people to share their own stories, experiences and images. These contributions will be collected on a special microsite, built to accompany the exhibition, elements of which form part of a constantly updated digital display inside the museum.

Recalling the incident she witnessed in the street, the woman decides to upload the pictures to the museum’s Flickr group, set up especially for the exhibition, where she is able to geotag the exact location of the event using Google maps, as well as the time and date it took place. One of the pictures – a decisive photographic moment – captured the white man’s grimacing face, his first finger rigidly poking towards the anxious looking Asian shopkeeper. Shorn of context, the image could of course have any number of meanings; but the photographer is able to provide a firsthand account of the racist abuse she overheard and which she duly records in the image’s caption.

With this contribution the exhibition has become live and dynamic. The museum has taken a difficult subject, with historical and social dimensions, examined it and opened it to the public for further and ongoing discussion and interpretation. Although focused around the physical exhibition itself, much of this public participation is made possible using online services which are constructed along the social media principles of interconnection, sharing and collaboration – an approach to web-based services encapsulated in the term web 2.0.

But more than this, in planning for the exhibition the museum staff decided to engage people outside the organisation to work through the design process itself. This participatory design sought input from a small number of community groups, local businesses and residents. One of the outcomes of this ‘outside’ contribution was the decision that the microsite, while hosted and branded by the museum, would be maintained and moderated by two volunteers. One of these volunteers works for a community outreach programme which organises events promoting integration and positive interaction between different sections of the community. The experiences and learning derived from these events continues to be fed into the microsite in the form of a blog.

And so on. This fictional scenario, presenting a museum operating on the tricky frontiers of social debate, begins to illustrate some of the possibilities of incorporating participation – by design – into the processes of creating exhibitions, as well as the way those exhibitions engage the public. Of course, engagement and collaboration may well form the backbone of many existing museum programmes without the term participatory design (or indeed design for participation) ever being mentioned. But a conscious decision to build participation into the design process itself and/or into the way users will interact with exhibitions once they are installed is an approach which may yield benefits for the institution and visitors alike.

Nina Simon of US consultancy Museum 2.0 explains: ‘Participatory design can help museums deliver on the oft-repeated but rarely demonstrated desire for museums to become essential civic spaces, social environments that encourage the democratic process.’

Participation can be as complicated or as simple as deemed necessary, depending on resources, experience and objectives. Engaging and organising people (the public, experts from areas outside the museum, community groups and so on) to take part in a truly collaborative design process is certainly an undertaking, as is inviting visitor contributions and dialogue with the exhibitions themselves. But at its simplest level, participation might be encouraged by asking visitors to caption or comment on objects by sticking Post-It notes around exhibition displays. An example cited by Simon is The Post-It Project, conducted at Sweden’s Västernorrlands Läns Museum a few years ago, ‘in which visitors were solicited to write down comments – about anything in the museum – and post them wherever they wanted.’ As she suggests, the value and goal here are perhaps too vague to be genuinely useful, but the ‘open-endedness also makes this kind of project a great starting point for a museum to explore the inclusion of visitor content. Start-up costs and development time are minimal, and the project can be aborted at any time.’

But for many museums, the catalyst for building visitor contributions into their activities has been the proliferation and mass uptake of online social media services – sites such as Flickr, Facebook and, more recently, Twitter. Flickr in particular is well known, easy to use and allows museums to garner relevant photographic material from the public, not just locally, but anywhere in the world. An event-based extension of this might be to organise a scavenger hunt, as the London Transport Museum has done, sending teams of people into the city to locate and photograph various London Transport related objects. All the pictures were uploaded to Flickr, allowing a vote for the best image to be thrown open to the public and in turn utilising Flickr’s social network aspects to build awareness of the museum’s brand amongst online ‘communities’.

Similarly, the Victoria & Albert Museum’s World Beach Project, devised by artist Sue Lawty, asks people worldwide to create sculptures and images on beaches using gathered stones, recording the process and finished art in up to three photographs. Rather than using Flickr, the images are uploaded to the museum’s dedicated web page and embedded Google world map. Again, the project is conceived specifically to create participation, engaging visitors and non-visitors alike in content generation, while marketing the V&A online at the same time.

These last two examples are competition and art project respectively, so arguably outside a museum’s core public-facing activities, which are delivered via exhibitions, collections and interpretation. But participation can seed exhibitions too. The Minnesota History Society’s MN150 exhibition and book invited public submissions of the key people, places or things that have shaped the state’s history. This engagement was partly conducted online, but the bulk of submissions came from community outreach, demonstrating that participatory design need not be technology-led – it is mostly about approach and intent. The result was an exhibition populated with content gathered directly through public input, albeit curated by the museum.

A nice example of design for participation is the National Maritime Museum’s Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition, set up this year so that entries are submitted via Flickr, where they are held in the public domain, while a partnership with Astrometry.net allows each image is ‘astrotagged’ so that they can all be combined and compared in a growing photographic chart of the night sky. The collaborative nature of this project – along with the content created by the public – is its strength. And again, it builds awareness of the museum’s activities farther and wider than could have been achieved otherwise. It is competition, exhibition, research and marketing all in one, but would not be possible without public input, professional collaboration and web-based services.

Yet another example is Brooklyn Museum’s Click! exhibition, an investigation of the ‘wisdom of crowds’ in which artists’ photographic responses to the theme of the ‘changing faces of Brooklyn’ were assessed by the public online. At the final exhibition, held in the museum last summer, the artworks were installed according to their relative ranking from this public jury process.

Participatory design, then, can take many flavours. Naturally, not everything will be appropriate for every institution, exhibition or subject theme.

Traditionally, museums have delivered knowledge and learning in one direction: from institution to the public. Although it adds another dimension, participation need not supplant this model. Of course, it is valid to ask whether participation – and by extension participatory design – is actually necessary or beneficial at all. Perhaps one way to answer that is to consider changing expectations. As cultural sector consultant and Flow Associates director Bridget McKenzie notes, a recent flurry of events centred on participatory culture seem to indicate that ‘the public expects to participate’.

This article was written for the MuseumNext conference, taking place 22-23 October 2009.

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Marketing league tables 2009: the view from design

July 9th, 2009

In the wider world, beyond consumer products and services, one of the most remarkable events of the past 12 months was the successful election campaign and inauguration of Barack Obama as president of the US.

It was remarkable not only historically and politically, but also in terms of marketing, for Obama’s campaign communications and branding have been hailed in design circles and beyond as consistently slick and well-executed.

Street artist Shepard Fairey’s screen-printed ‘Hope’ poster swiftly became its defining image (and an iconic piece of graphic design in itself), but the Obama brand was much more than just a poster. The campaign also embodied a shift in sentiment, important not only to politics, but also in how brands talk to consumers - toward trust, honesty and authenticity.

With malfeasance seemingly rife among politicians and bankers playing fast and loose with other people’s money, public trust has become the scarcest of commodities when it comes to big business.

The design industry is subject to the effect of this in several ways. Design is often the only direct touchpoint between brands and consumers, making an understanding of the mood and sentiment of the day crucial for consultancies advising their clients. At the same time, when companies cut marketing budgets and put projects on hold, agency margins are squeezed.

There is no denying it has been a tough year so far, but the picture for design agencies appears to be mixed: some agency heads are describing conditions as ‘the worst they have been for a long time’, while others are enjoying record business wins as clients shop around for the right partner.

According to Doug James, director at brand consultancy Honey, design agencies need more business acumen to remain profitable and successful. ‘It’s about setting a business up, knowing all the metrics and which ones to watch - the key performance indicators. You need to know where it is you make money,’ he says.

Sara Fielding, senior consultant at consulting firm Results International, agrees that this is a primary concern. ‘There has to be greater clarity and understanding of finances, especially net profitability, not just for the business as a whole, but by client and by service offering,’ she says. ‘Only with these systems in place can they really see where the money is being made and be able to argue factually and convincingly for fairer fees.’

In a recession, the pressure on business metrics is unparalleled, but there are  opportunities as well as challenges in the market, according to Iain Johnston, chief executive of marketing services group Loewy. ‘There are a few things happening on the client side and on the agency side that are coming together,’ he says. ‘There’s more focus on value for money and effectiveness - on exactly what you are trying to achieve. Things you can’t show a return on are the first to go, but there does seem to be a flow of work coming through.’

Not surprisingly, clients demanding greater effectiveness and value are becom-ing the norm. Skincare brand Nude has an ongoing partnership with design agency Pearlfisher and the two are collaborating to become more efficient.

‘A more challenging economic climate can often encourage innovation; it forces us to look at what we’re doing and how effective and efficient it really is,’ says Annmarie Harris, marketing manager at Nude. ‘Design spend, like everything, needs to be well-managed and monitored for efficacy. For brands in fast-moving industries like the beauty industry, to stop spending would run the risk of quickly becoming outdated or worse, irrelevant. However, well-utilised, innovative design can achieve fantastic awareness and be very cost-effective. My advice would be to keep spending, but do it cleverly,’ she adds.

According to Jackie Roberts, senior brand manager for tampon brand Lil-lets, measuring the effectiveness of design investment is crucial. ‘All activity should pay for itself by driving sales,’ she says. ‘While it is difficult to establish the effectiveness of a pack redesign in isolation, it plays an important role in optimising the results of the broader communications activity.’

Loewy-owned product design group Seymourpowell has worked with Lil-lets on the development of a new applicator product. ‘We have invested heavily in the current market conditions to establish this as a better alternative to the market leader in the category. Ultimately, success is measured through sales, but we have measures in place to track individual elements of our integrated communications plan,’ says Roberts.

That efficacy and value for money are being demanded at all stages is due in large part to the rise of measurable digital channels. The continued decline in spend on (and the impact of) traditional advertising appears to be benefiting design generally and in particular digital and packaging, where the ROI is greater.

While digital is becoming more important in brand communications, this does not mean businesses should turn solely to digital specialists to work on brand development, warns Nicolas Mamier, European vice-president of branding group Elmwood.

‘Digital is an increasingly important route for communication and therefore features high on the list of requirements from any agency, but I do not believe that means companies should default to using digital specialists to manage their brand,’ he says. ‘Clients are looking for original brand thinking that makes use of the opportunities offered by digital channels, tools and platforms, not just digital thinking.’

The shift away from traditional advertising also has implications for a client’s strategic needs, says Jon Davies, managing director of packaging design group Holmes & Marchant.

‘Above the line doesn’t hit as many consumers as it used to, which means the high costs do not see enough ROI,’ he adds. ‘But ad agencies have long been the strategic partner for brands, investing heavily in planning support for their clients, paid for by the high fees. Recession reduces fees available and pushes clients to ensure they get ROI. So this old ad agency model is no longer sustainable and clients are looking elsewhere for strategic partners with more relevant products; namely, design and digital. The more grown-up agencies have invested in planning to support this shift.’

By introducing planning to design agencies, their thinking is not confined to creating standout packaging, for example, but ensures that there is a full marketing and communications strategy underpinning and supporting the design work, claims Davies.

The whole story

Bob Blandford, design creative director at integrated marketing agency Haygarth, believes we will see more of this. ‘There will be even more focus this year on brand planning, strategy and positioning. [It is] key not only to design work, but in informing and directing the wider communications strategy.’ In an echo of Obama’s holistic design and marketing campaign, the strategy may well include a ’story’ that can be promoted through channels such as PR activity, social media and advertising.

One of the most prevalent of these ’stories’ to hit the FMCG packaging world recently is nostalgia. The apparent reassurance to consumers of bygone days and enduring brands has driven a boom in ‘heritage’ design.

‘There has been a growing number of successful marketing initiatives that hark back to, or celebrate, the past,’ says Barry Seal, managing director of branding group Anthem Worldwide. ‘[Examples include] the relaunch of Wispa, Milky Bar Kid advertising and Marks & Spencer and Selfridges’ anniversary celebrations. This is a powerful and effective way to reconnect to the past and bring back the feeling of the “good old days”.’

Another recent branding theme has been that of the ‘local’. Amid a backlash against globalisation and as consumers focus more on their immediate communities, brands are talking up their local ties or knowledge. However, this is not the same as having a strategy, warns Jim Prior, chief executive of branding group The Partners.

‘I don’t think brands should go down the knee-jerk local response, where they say “Look how we’re in touch with the people of Bangalore”, or wherever,’ he says. ‘This is just a reaction and it rings hollow. It’s the time to be assertive and confident about your brand globally, but be aware that the world isn’t a homogenous place.’

The same can be said of nostalgia branding. Brands with heritage by the  truckload, such as Hovis, can capitalise on it. Jones Knowles Ritchie’s pack designs for the bread brand neatly marry its long history with contemporary colourways and clean typography. Nonetheless, it has to be based on something real and authentic, not simply a tactical reaction. ‘That heritage seems an opportune add-on to a brand could be seen as an indictment of the short-termism of the brand manager rather than a celebration of their ability to catch the wave,’ says Smith & Milton director Howard Milton.

Again, it comes back to the attributes of openness and trust. ‘Consumers are seeking honesty and co-operation and design’s role is to communicate this effectively,’ says James. This is changing the way in which brand language is formulated, according to Terry Tyrrell, worldwide chairman of The Brand Union. ‘Amid this landscape of broken promises and brands, people are sceptical and suspicious. Today’s consumer seeks transparency and authenticity, respects candid answers and expects quality,’ he adds.

This leads to another trend in branding programmes: the real need for change to be internal, as well as external. ‘More clients understand that the way to drive their brand forward is as much about internal alignment as external activities. It’s about understanding and buy-in at all levels of the company,’ says Prior. The Partners has been working with global financial consultancy Deloitte on the firm’s brand positioning of ‘leadership and staying ahead’. According to Deloitte UK head of brand Pia DeVitre, the project focuses on the ‘tangible actions’ of the company and its staff. She believes that working on branding is more important than ever in the current market. ‘This recession has made us focus on the things that really matter,’ adds DeVitre. ‘Brand really matters and we still have budgets to support key components of the brand strategy.’

Broader outlook

Such strategic consultancy includes much more than tangible design work. It is those agencies that under-stand their client’s business issues - and are savvy about providing consultancy outside core design work - that are faring well. ‘Clients need something more than just shelf stand-out and pretty design. This could mean consultancy on distribution methods, cost-savings, materials, innovation and so on - whatever helps their business,’ says Davies.

Materials are a key factor in another major trend affecting brands and design - the ongoing drive toward more sustainable processes. Sustainability is now a key factor in most structural design briefs, whether for ethical or PR reasons, or simply to save money by reducing costs. Design can help brands find more sustainable and efficient ways to deliver their products and services. ‘It’s about being smarter,’ says Harris. ‘With Pearlfisher’s guidance and expertise, Nude is in the process of reworking some packaging to better suit our sustainable goals, without destroying our margins.’

According to Johnston, large-scale FMCG brand-owners are ‘taking a major lead on sustainability’, the fruits of which are likely to be seen in the next 12 to 18 months. ‘The focus is on minimisation in general, from packaging and recycling to supply chains and distribution,’ he says. ‘These projects aren’t going on hold because of the recession and they will make a big splash when they are announced.’ However, he declines to name the comp-anies he is referring to.

There is still some way to go before most companies embed sustainable processes into the way they think and operate. Anthem Worldwide’s parent company, Schawk, recently surveyed major US FMCG and retail companies and found that 83% are being affected by packaging sustainability, but only 28% had a comprehensive plan in this area. The survey also revealed that more than 60% of clients look to design and pre-media vendors for up-to-date information on sustainability. ‘Clearly, more needs to be done in terms of shaping both thinking and best practice, so the design industry has a key role to play in educating the marketplace,’ says Seal.

Sustainability is, perhaps, an overarching issue for most brands now, but all clients have different requirements and problems. Some may be solved by traditional market-ing techniques, others by restructuring a business’ processes or even its culture. Design can tackle all of these because

first and foremost the discipline is about problem-solving, and whatever happens to the various marketing channels, businesses will always have problems to solve.

‘One of the great attractions and anomalies of the design sector is that it’s all sorts of different things,’ says Prior. ‘But designers tend to be problem-solvers. The great consultancies think neutrally about what the solution might be. If there’s one unifying theme across design, I think that maybe this is it.’

This article was written for Marketing, 1 July 2009.

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Same again?

June 4th, 2009

It’s hard to imagine just how many tests, adjustments, tweaks and overhauls consumer electronics might undergo before they end up in our hands and homes. Every button, function and finish will be considered and reconsidered, just as shape, size and form may go through numerous iterations. Mass-produced consumer products in particular are objects of huge investment and getting it right before the factory line rolls is imperative. In fact, research and development stages are arguably more critical to a product’s success than the persuasive marketing and advertising that will follow: if people don’t like it, or don’t like using it, they ain’t gonna buy it.

Part and parcel of this process is prototyping. From rough, colourless scale models through to facsimiles of the final article, prototypes aid designers, clients and consumers in ensuring everything is on track. Mark Delaney, director of design at Nokia’s mass-market division Connect, says that prototyping is ‘absolutely core’ to the way that the company’s phone handsets are developed. ‘Designs come out of your head and on to the sketch sheet, move rapidly to CAD - which is “real” and responds to the internal components you’re working with - and then straight after that we’re looking at a wax model in 3D. Literally from day one, models will be appearing,’ he says.

Prototypes for Nokia’s recent 6303 handset, for example, include an initial and basic form proposal 3D ‘print’, moving on to an aluminium
model that demonstrates the weight and material feel of the product. ‘Grey’ models then experiment with visual details and proportional differences created by the arrangement of internal components and finally a full appearance model is produced as part of a larger colour and materials study.

Similarly, when motion-capture hardware company Vicon wanted to refresh its image in the professional marketplace, design consultancy PDD used prototypes to develop a cleaner minimal aesthetic for its T-Series cameras. ‘They wanted to rebrand the products alongside the company and the visual aspects of the cameras were part of this,’ says PDD senior design consultant Oliver Stokes. Initial foam prototypes showed the camera’s form and scale, while sprayed foam models explored split-lines and colours.

As well as helping designers to judge things like scale, form and tolerances, prototypes are also regularly used in consumer testing, as LG Electronics head of design Europe Luke Miles explains. ‘Initiating dialogue with consumers is a useful way to gain feedback on general concepts and enables designers to make adjustments in the early stages,’ he says. ‘Initial “white” models can be printed with an extremely quick turnaround and are used to help analyse proportion and ergonomics, while milled models at the second stage [provide] more detail, specifically the build culture and its effect on the prototype’s external appearance. These models are often tested with consumers to get a clearer analysis on form, colour and materiality.’

There are many different ways to produce a prototype model, so it is crucial that the right approach is chosen, says Mark Hester, senior consultant in design development at PDD. ‘It’s very important to tie in research with design and prototyping, so we work with our research department to find out what kinds of prototype are best for different situations. For example, if you’re consumer-validating the finish of a material, it can be distracting if the form and size are not quite right. In consumer electronics especially, the limitations of a prototype or model shouldn’t be allowed to affect the outcome of research,’ he says.

According to Stokes, using prototypes to test ideas with consumers can increase the chances of market success and cut costs by weeding out poor designs at the early stages. However, consumer electronics design is often concerned with breaking new territory, and innovation through novel forms, materials and interfaces is something we’ve come to expect. Yet consumer testing is not known for generating mould-breaking ideas; quite the contrary. What, then, is the danger of death by focus group?

‘With new products and features you can often get quite negative responses from testers, simply because they are new,’ says Delaney. ‘We really have to unpick why people are saying “no” to something in prototype and we’ll do this in quite a lot of detail, looking at their world view, tastes, background and so on.’

If you want to shake up the market, standard consumer tests should be avoided. Patrick Hunt, director at product design group Therefore, believes that so-called ‘disruptive’ products - much sought after by consumer electronics brands - call for a new approach to consumer testing altogether. ‘Generally, our clients do much less concept testing directly with customers today than, say, five years ago. Top-tier brands have their own product vision and a desire to get new products to market quickly and it’s long been known among designers that consumer research can mean driving forward while looking in the rear view. The type of research where developers test prototypes on consumers behind a oneway mirror is declining in technology-driven products [because] paradigm-breaking products do not survive this process.’

This article was written for Design Week’s Prototyping & Modelling Supplement, 2009.

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Banks rely on design to regain trust

April 21st, 2009

Last month, a spoof edition of the Financial Times, set in the year 2020, was handed out to commuters at railway stations in London, to coincide with the G20 protests. It featured satirical stories deni­grating the world’s political and financial systems, as well as similarly sardonic ads.

The latter included one carrying the Royal Bank of Scotland logo and the following text: ‘What would you do with a trillion pounds of public money? Bail out your mates and mop up the mess you all made? Or squander the lot on pipe dreams like renewable energy?’

This scornful attack represents the sharp end of a wider swathe of discontent­ment with the UK’s high-street banks following the emergence of toxic debts, reckless lending and mismanagement.

With their reputations in tatters, banks are having to fight to convince consumers of their trustworthiness, their dependability and solidity. So it is that in a world of decentralised, contact centre-driven customer service, the high-street branch and face-to-face communication have again become the focus of many banks’ invest­ments in branding and design.

Over the past few years, banks have been attempting to operate more like retailers. This has resulted in some genuin­ely innova­tive environments, such as the branch format for Italy’s CheBanca!, designed by Crea International.

CheBanca!’s ‘Natural Tech’ design looks more like a set from 2001: A Space Odyssey than a high-street bank branch. According to Crea International managing partner Massimo Fabbro, the light and minimal design brings together ‘innovation and reassurance’, placing the customer at the centre of the experience.

Barclays, too, is in the process of rolling out a fresh design concept, created by interiors consultancy Aukett Tytherleigh, ¬ across its 1700 branches. ‘Branches are important to our custom­ers,’ says Erin Biertzer, UK retail banking director at Barclays. ‘We have made a long-term commitment to refurbishing our network.’

The bank’s flagship branch, nestled under the neon lights of Piccadilly Circus in London, is undeniably striking. Touted as the first ‘brand concept’ branch in the UK, it features a host of technology and high-end design touches (see case study, above).

However, having been conceived before the crisis hit the financial sector, how comfortably do such design-led interiors sit now that the recession has taken hold?

‘When times were good and money was easy to borrow, everyone wanted retail cues,’ explains Sam D’Lacey, director at design agency Hart D’Lacey, which has worked with RBS, NatWest and Arab Bank.

‘These banks tried to link their branches with other leisure activities, such as coffee shops, to drive footfall. But retail is very disposable, so people started to see money as disposable too. However, we’ve gone back to reliability. The flippancy and the humour are gone,’ he adds.

As part of this shift toward the ‘retailing’ of personal finance, services and advice have become ‘products’. In some cases, these have been physically embodied in the form of a box that could be taken to the counter for purchase.

‘Customers want to talk to people and get reassurance, so some of these things that seemed progressive at the time now seem inappropriate,’ says D’Lacey. ‘The redesigned Barclays branches, for example, have a queue rail - which is beautiful and sculptural, but does it really instil confidence?’

Howard Milton, founder of branding agency Smith & Milton, puts it more strongly. ‘The “Eureka” moment, when banks decided to strive to become retailers, was where they lost their perspective and, ultimately, our trust,’ he says. ‘When your core product is cash, serious consideration should be given to how you handle it. Banks man­oeuvred our thinking away from this custom. The cash­less society has been suborned into losing touch with the value of money.’ ¬

The result of years of easy credit and bad debt has been much discussed, but bank design and branding must begin to reflect the climate and rebuild consumer trust. Experts are divided on whether the retail format branch remains the right option.

However, Roderick Logan, financial-services analyst for Datamonitor, believes it is. ‘Banks can use the less formal environment that a “store” provides to make the consumer feel more at ease. They can also win back customer trust by showing concern and offering advice,’ he says.

‘There is plenty of room for innovation in the banking sphere. Communicating with consumers in the language of retail may make some of the more complicated financial products easier to understand.’

Logan also notes that retailers themselves are competing in the personal finance market. Tesco, for example, is looking to establish a retail banking environment through its store network.

‘The traditional banks will have to maintain some degree of innovation to stave off this threat,’ he adds. ‘More flexible opening times offer greater convenience to customers and innovative branch features, like those at the Barclays Piccadilly branch, can entice inquisitive customers.’

With innovation comes technology, already a huge enabler of convenience in transactions and financial services research.

For First Direct, which operates only online, technology and digital design are especially important. The bank has been working with design agency Splendid on a Micro­soft Surface table for display at the Grand Designs Live exhibition at London Excel from 25 April to 4 May. The device has a touch screen that allows consumers to interact with its mortgage products.

‘The brand stands for innovation, so we have to be design-led in what we do,’ says First Direct head of brand Lisa Wood. ‘We don’t physically have a product, so you can’t try before you buy. However, it is creating an interactive way to draw people into talking about these mortga­ges.’

She adds: ‘We will use Surface at the exhibition to show how our offset mortgages could link to home-improvement projects. You can have up to six people using the table simultaneously and, because we don’t have branches, this is a great way to have personal interaction.’

This interaction, along with the trust­worthy advice and personal reassurance that appear to have been lacking lately in banks’ relationships with their consumers, is what many in the industry are lauding as the necessary next step.

‘The big banks don’t communicate on a personal level,’ says Nick Ramshaw, mana­ging director of design group Elm­wood Leeds. ‘My local Lloyds TSB branch has no private room, for example. They need to think about the customer’s point of view.’

There are other threats, too: the rise of community lending schemes such as Zopa has put even greater pressure on the big banks to deliver the goods. ‘In order to remain relevant and compete with these new breeds, the incumbents must adapt or die,’ warns Terry Tyrrell, worldwide chair­man of design agency The Brand Union.

It seems there is a fine line to tread in adapting to the current climate, while remaining competitive in a busy market­place. Bank brands need to be seen as innovative while simultaneously empha­sising tradi­tional values and a service-led mentality.

All this has to be communicated through staff training, strategic branding and branch design, not simply through advertising - the quick fix route to shifting perceptions. As Richard Newland, global head of retail design for HSBC, concludes: ‘Branches are our most valuable source of advertising and they have to live up to that. But balancing confidence and reassurance is difficult. If it were easy, everyone would be doing it.’

This article was written for Marketing, 21 April 2009.

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Brand and deliver

December 3rd, 2008

Nothing’s been the same since Tate Modern. It opened at the turn of the millennium with a piece of visual branding that redefined how a gallery might communicate with its visitors.

The design work by branding giant Wolff Olins, packaged Tate as a consumer product, a leisure activity to be chosen like a new car might be chosen, its marque imbued with a certain promise of quality, experience and - importantly for an art gallery - approachability.

The logo did not just represent the new gallery of modern art on London’s Bankside, but tied the whole family of Tate venues - St Ives, Liverpool and the renamed Tate Britain - together in a unified, consistent offer.

In the eight years since Tate Modern’s opening, the museum sector’s understanding and application of consumer branding has come a long way. Museums, particularly the larger ones, see the value of a strong identity, not only to attract visitors, but also to engage stakeholders, sponsors, partners and staff.

Smaller museums, along with consumers generally, have gradually become more aware of the impact of brand personality too, although there is some way to go, says James Alexander, chief executive of museum design group Event Communications.

“Do all museums really get it? No, I don’t think they do - especially the smaller ones. They may say they need a new logo, which sums it up really: the logo is the end of the process, not the start.”

Know thyself

When well executed, branding touches every part of an organisation, focusing minds and resources on who you are and where you want to be. But with tight budgets and multiple stakeholders to please, capturing the essence of a museum is not simple.

“It’s also difficult if staff spend most of their time worrying about next year’s discretionary budgets, audience segments and so on. These are frontline issues for them and it’s hard to think beyond that,” says Alexander.

A full rebrand will take about six months to a year and can cost up to £50,000, although smaller organisations might be able to do it quicker and for less than half that amount of money. Despite the cost and effort, it’s worth it. A clear, well-managed identity - not just a logo, but the whole identity of an organisation - can help secure commercial partnerships, attract new visitors and even save money.

But achieving that kind of clarity can be tricky, especially given the trend towards branding multiple venues under a single group identity. This autumn has seen the launch of the brand for Newcastle’s forthcoming Great North Museum created by Agenda Design Associates.

The £26m project brings together collections from the Hancock Museum, Newcastle University’s Museum of Antiquities, the Shefton Museum and the Hatton Gallery. And the Museum of London (MOL) group has just unified its three operations - MOL, the Museum of London Docklands and Museum of London Archaeology - under a brand identity created by Coley Porter Bell.

Many groups - including Tate, Museums Sheffield, National Museums Scotland, National Museum Wales and now the Great North Museum - have opted for an overt parent brand, with individual institutions sitting as sub-brands in the visual identity scheme.

The new MOL branding takes a similar approach, with each service identified by a different colour, all drawn from a multicoloured primary marque inspired by the changing size and shape of the capital over time.

Presence power

“For the Museum of London, we had some major work to do in terms of unpicking what we and other people thought we stood for, since we had evolved into a group which includes MoLAS (Museum of London Archaeology Service) and Museum in Docklands,” says the head of press and marketing Jo Fells.

“We looked at a range of models for how this could be made into a more coherent whole, illustrating the size and scope of the museum’s expertise and ensuring that every time we announce an important archaeological find, the Museum of London is clearly mentioned, for example.”

Fells’s comment touches on the value and power of strong group branding. If visitors view the parent group positively - as, say, a creator of exciting, intelligent and educational exhibitions - then other venues in the group will benefit from that association.

“When we open an exhibition at Museum of London Docklands, we want potential visitors to understand that it will share the quality of academic and production values they know from the Museum of London,” Fells explains.

Individual versus group identity

This power to cross-promote venues efficiently is a good argument in favour of group-wide branding; it’s efficient, clear and brings cost benefits.

“It’s about economies of scale,” says Jane Wentworth, principal consultant of branding consultancy Jane Wentworth Associates, which has worked with the Victoria and Albert Museum, National Museums Scotland and the Natural History Museum.

“You’re promoting one identity and experience to customers. While multinational companies might have big enough budgets to manage lots of individual brands, museums can’t afford to.”

But bringing venues together in this way can be problematic. An umbrella brand may run the risk of eclipsing, or at worst obliterating, the distinct personality of individual museums, especially where institutions are disparate in nature.

Tyne & Wear Museums (TWM) rebranded its group identity in 2005, but purposely left individual sites with their own styles (although the Great North Museum now subsumes some previously distinct museums). The TWM identity is instead used as a kind of quality marque to endorse the different services.

Jim Richardson, director of Newcastle branding group Sumo, regularly works with TWM’s Robson Brown-created visual identity and finds its approach works well. “It’s a strong but simple parent brand that sits in the corner of each leaflet, poster and so on, while each of their 12 venues has an individual identity.

This really ticks two boxes: it lets the organisation cross-market through the TWM brand, which also acts as a marque of quality, and allows each individual venue the room to market themselves on their own merits.”

Domineering brands

Perhaps a worse-case scenario for group branding is the creation of a parent brand that doesn’t really mean anything to anyone. Richardson believes that monolithic branding can be taken too far.

“There has been a trend for implementing this kind of parent brand for a group of museums, often at the expense of the individual museums’ personalities,” says Richardson.

“It’s important to leave room for museums to show what makes them special and not be too heavy handed with the brand. I think the National Museum Wales and National Museums Scotland parent brands overpower the individual venues and become quite bland.”

What group branding does allow is a consistency of style and tone that is usually easier for visitors and museum partners to understand. The Imperial War Museum (IWM), which has five sites, is consolidating its branding under the existing Minale Tattersfield-designed logo to strengthen its marketing.

“We’re pushing that logo to the forefront and the sub-brands are being pushed back,” says IWM head of corporate marketing Lindsay Ball. IWM’s corporate plan says this will “increase brand visibility and awareness and underpin the development of commercial opportunities”.

Despite the benefits of rebranding, it can meet with resistance. Some people view branding as unjustifiably costly, time-consuming and even meddlesome. The University of Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum is undergoing a £61m transformation and has grappled for some time with how the brand identity will promote the redeveloped museum.

“It took us a long time to decide when to kick off the branding project because I think the time had to be right,” says Ashmolean deputy director Edith Prak, who has worked with Jane Wentworth Associates intermittently for a number of years.

“We were concerned that people would use the branding process to express their anxiety about all the other changes that were happening; there is naturally a lot of worry in an organisation that is going through this much change.”

Of course, it is change and dynamism that keep organisations alive. And branding is a means of determining firstly how you want to change and secondly how to communicate those changes to others.

As Prak says: “Once staff could see the prize at the end - a whole new Ashmolean Museum - there was wholehearted enthusiasm for the project. I would really recommend the branding process to everyone who is ready to do it.”

This article was written for Museums Journal, December 2008.

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Out with the old… in with the new

December 3rd, 2008

To sceptics rebranding can seem like a worthless exercise. The idea of reducing an organisation’s complex activities to a single glossy logo could be viewed as costly and irrelevant, and the branding process itself a distraction from more important matters.
The notion of someone coming in to tell you what your museum stands for and how it should present itself to the world can render even the most open-minded staff wary.

But every museum or heritage organisation has a brand, whether it likes it or not. Managing that brand effectively is undeniably a worthwhile investment that can translate into more visitors, new partnerships and increased funding opportunities.

People’s perceptions of a museum can be influenced by all sorts of things: direct experience, a friend’s opinion, expectations raised by marketing material, or a report in the media.

What is perhaps less obvious is how branding and design can help to direct and support these “messages” to help create a positive, clear picture of what the museum has to offer its visitors and partners. But how do you go about defining and promoting your brand? What is the process like, how much might it cost, and what are the benefits?

While big museums might draft in branding experts every few years, for smaller museums the idea of working with a consultant to rebrand the organisation might be quite daunting. To some staff it may seem an unnecessary expense, gobbling up money that may otherwise have found its way to their projects and the collection.

Branding consultants may be seen as meddlers, charging the earth for a pretty logo. But that should not be the case: undertaking a rebrand should be a valuable opportunity to work through what a museum stands for, how it operates and who it is for.

It need not break the bank - and may not even result in a new logo. But there are a few things to think about going into a branding exercise, however much money you have to spend and whatever size your museum or organisation.

Get everyone involved

A good branding process puts an organisation’s people and activities at its heart, with designers acting as consultants and facilitators, not flouncing egomaniacs. It is first about understanding what is important, special and valuable about a museum, and second about looking at ways to best communicate those attributes to the outside world.

Consistency is especially important. Many smaller institutions may find that their marketing communications develop ad hoc, with a bit of in-house design work here, a bit by a freelance there, and maybe the odd bigger job by a local design company.

The results of working like this are usually disconnected and lack the kind of coherent personality and style that visitors can understand and remember.

Investing in a definitive branding process, on the other hand, will help hone the museum’s style and result in a set of design guidelines from which all future communications can be drawn up.

So how do you go about choosing a consultant or designer? Perhaps the most important thing to remember is that the logo comes last: it is the process of determining your museum’s objectives and character that is most important.

For this reason, it is not a good idea to appoint someone who arrives offering a range of possible logos, however great the financial temptation.

What you are after is a consultant that wants to work with your staff so that the final result is effectively co-designed, with input from as many people in the museum as possible. Inevitably, this will take longer and cost more, but the results should then be strong enough to stand the museum in good stead for perhaps a decade.

“Twice recently we’ve pitched our full development process, showing our portfolio as credentials, but there have been other groups that have turned up with a set of graphic ideas and said to the client ‘pick one’,” says Jim Sutherland, director at Hat-Trick Design, which has worked with National Museums Scotland and the Natural History Museum, London.

“If you just pick a design like that it undermines the idea of involving everybody. Also, if a museum gets something effectively for free then they haven’t invested anything of themselves in it, so it’s going to be much harder for them to understand it and promote it.”

Jim Richardson, a director of the branding consultancy Sumo, who created the new visual identities for Brighton & Hove Museums and Shetland Museum & Archives, agrees: “While it is easy to be seduced by pretty pictures, it is important to communicate to the designers where your organisation is and where it is heading. This is normally done in a written brief and through discussions with the designers. Having a well thought-out brief will save you time and money.”

In the same way that a brand is not just a logo, a branding process is not just graphic design. It is about staff - from the director and trustees to the front-of-house - talking about what the museum means to them, what its collections hold and represent, what visitors say, what it stands for and how it might be improved.

Involving people in this way should also help reduce any scepticism about the branding process itself. The Imperial War Museum (IWM) in London is currently working on a masterplan under its 2020 programme and has started by consulting staff.

“It hasn’t been a case of the directors saying, ‘This is what we want it to be.’ Instead we’ve been asking staff ‘Why do you come to work?’, ‘What kind of museum should this be?’,” says Lindsay Ball, head of corporate marketing at the IWM.

To do this, it is worth having one member of staff act as a facilitator for the workshops and strategic thinking that your branding consultants will carry out. People need to be able to feel comfortable giving their own views, without worrying that comments will be piped straight back to managers.

“A branding project is only as good as the people running it,” says Jane Wentworth of Jane Wentworth Associates. “Without support and buy-in from the top, as a consultant you’re on a hiding to nothing.”

People working in the shop, galleries and at reception also have to be consulted as they are the representatives of the brand, says Wentworth.

“People always accept that things could be better, so you ask them what could make it better, what kind of organisation do you want. But people are often so cowed because they are not generally listened to, so they think there’s no point offering their views.”

It may be tempting to undertake some of this “brand personality” research in-house. According to Wentworth, this should be resisted if possible.

“It’s really important to get someone from the outside to do this. Clients sometimes ask if they can save money by doing the interviews themselves, but you can’t. It’s like trying to psychoanalyse yourself; it doesn’t work.”

Carrying out some basic market research yourself first may be sensible, however. “The first step is to research the perception of your organisation,” says Jim Richardson.

“This doesn’t need to cost a lot of money - you can do it yourself by speaking to visitors about why they are visiting, whether they would recommend a visit to friends and family, and how they would describe the museum to other people. Also, involve people from across your organisation so they can see the benefits of the process first hand.”

If you have in-house designers or work regularly with a freelance, it is vital that they are involved from the beginning, too, as they will be the people handling the design guidelines once the branding process is finished.

“The next step is to compare this perception with how you would like to be seen,” says Richardson. “In order to change the perception of your museum, you may need to change exhibition displays, outreach programmes, advertising messages, price of entry, and many other things.”

Call in the experts

Although it may be possible to arrive at some of these conclusions through self-assessment, bringing in external consultants at some point is essential.

They will provide the kind of perspective on where you are and how you are viewed that is hard to attain from the inside, showing you where your communications are confusing, contradictory or counter-productive.

As well as working with staff, they can also talk to people outside the organisation, such as potential partners, about their perceptions of the museum.

Tyne & Wear Museums decided in 2005 to carry out an assessment of how a new “parent brand” might relate to the 12 museums and galleries it runs. Staff worked with design agency Robson Brown. “We did a lot of consultation with staff, across the district councils, and with visitors,” says Sheryl McGregor, the communications manager of Tyne & Wear Museums.

Gathering all this research together and marrying it with visions of where the museum wants to be is the real value of the branding process.

From here, designers will begin to work up graphic elements of your visual identity, such as colour palettes, typefaces, logos, photography, and the tone of voice, which when combined, will become the public face of the museum. With strong research and clear objectives, you should not have to go round the houses at this stage.

No logo?

It may be that a new logo is unnecessary. The Victoria & Albert Museum in London has undertaken a lot of brand strategy and communications work with Jane Wentworth Associates over recent years without altering its established Alan Fletcher-designed logotype.

A great deal of rebranding can be realised by changing the way the museum is organised and operates. On the other hand, it may be decided that a whole new name and logo will help to reinvent the venue.

Whatever you choose, it should tally with your initial objectives, whether that is improving public awareness and understanding, securing sponsorship deals or putting together a stronger funding bid. Most likely, a strong brand identity can achieve all of these.

According to Sheryl McGregor, creating a distinct brand identity for Tyne & Wear Museums to run alongside its separate museum identities has given the service a public face. “We didn’t really have [that] before, so this has really helped, especially with cross-marketing our different venues,” she says.

For museums that sit as part of a larger family or network, full control over brand and visual identity may or may not lie with the individual venues. Some museum groups take a fairly monolithic approach to branding, where each venue sits as a sub-brand of the parent identity.

For example, all the Tate venues use the same graphic styles, with colour-coding to set them apart. By contrast, at Tyne & Wear Museums each venue retains its own brand and visual identity, with the group logo as a smaller element on communications, acting more like a seal of quality.

Understanding how your venue fits into the bigger picture and broader marketing strategy is therefore essential to ensure that everything supports everything else. This is especially true when a museum is part of a local authority or university, with its own brand identity.

So how much does all this cost and how long will it take? There is no definitive answer to this and, keeping in mind the things discussed above, it is worth shopping around two or three design and branding groups and getting them to present a credentials pitch. From there choose the ones you like and begin to talk about your requirements and budget.

That said, according to Wentworth, very loosely speaking a full rebranding project with research will take around six months to a year and cost around £40,000 to £50,000. A small organisation might be able to do it for around £20,000 in four to five months.

That said, Tyne & Wear Museums’ budget was £10,000. As with most things, it is worth investing as much as you can, then work with your designers to get the most out of that budget.

Once complete, an effective brand identity should run for a good number of years, remaining fresh and flexible enough to meet changing demands. Also, a good design consultancy will stay in touch and offer advice on any issues that emerge as the visual identity is implemented and extended.

Maintaining a strong brand means keeping public perceptions of your museum or gallery on message. And if you have successfully communicated your brand’s attributes to all staff, these perceptions will be reinforced each time people visit or come across your marketing material.

Having an effective brand makes it much easier to attract commercial partners and sponsors too, says Wentworth. “If you haven’t got [your brand identity] together, you haven’t got anything to demonstrate how you talk to partners and visitors. With it, you’re looking at more visitors, more sponsorship, more revenue.”

When you measure the cost of rebranding against these benefits over ten years, it can be money well spent.

This article was written for Museum Practice, Winter 2008.

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