Brandjam

Humanizing Brands Through Emotional Design

Marc Gobe

• Publisher: Allworth
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781581158137
• Topic: Design
• Subtopic: Graphic Design

Brandjam, the follow-up to the groundbreaking best-seller Emotional Branding, presents a powerful new concept from renowned designer and business guru Mark Gobe. The Brandjam concept is about innovation, intuition, and risk. Gobe explains how design is the "instrument" companies can use for jazzing up a brand—how design puts the face on the brand and creates an irresistible message that connects buyers to the product in a visceral way. Using jazz as his metaphor, he shows how the instinctive nature of the creative process leads to unusual solutions that make people gravitate toward a brand and make brands resonate with people by bringing more joy into their lives. It explores how design represents the personality of a company and provides its window to the world. Brandjam is an inspiration for brands and people as it reveals the transforming impact brands have on their audience. • Follow-up to Emotional Branding—50, 000 copies sold in nine languages • Insider's look at creating powerful, compelling brands and identities • Exciting new ideas for using design to drive consumers to embrace brandsAllworth Press, an imprint of Skyhorse Publishing, publishes a broad range of books on the visual and performing arts, with emphasis on the business of art. Our titles cover subjects such as graphic design, theater, branding, fine art, photography, interior design, writing, acting, film, how to start careers, business and legal forms, business practices, and more. While we don't aspire to publish a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are deeply committed to quality books that help creative professionals succeed and thrive. We often publish in areas overlooked by other publishers and welcome the author whose expertise can help our audience of readers.

PART 1:
FIVE CONSUMER INSIGHTS

Design Inspiration

Brands today must shift from communications and commodities to emotions and design. We must jazz up our standard, exhausted, and familiar offerings through inspired design. When American jazz swept across France, where I was raised, it inspired listeners’ cultural spirits and aspirations. It showed us a new way of thinking and acting that not only refused convention, but institutionalized innovation, improvisation, and imagination. It’s time branding embraced this same philosophy.

As a young designer, the goal of “jazzing up” an image, a product, a message, inspired my visions for branding. This book is my attempt to share this inspiration with you.

Remembering Jazz: A Young Frenchman’s Perspective

My father first heard jazz when he was an innkeeper and witness to the American soldiers’ liberation of Normandy during the Second World War. They were young, and feigning courage and certainty in an uncertain time, but their music was fresh, different, embracing, energetic, and fun. In a time when fascism—the ultimate expression of conformity and sameness—cast a long shadow across Europe, jazz promised an inspiring alternative. Looking back on these times, my father tells me, “I felt a new world was coming into being. The voice of a new generation was being expressed.” Although fear and loss haunted Americans and Frenchmen alike, jazz suggested a future that would be brighter and more hopeful. It expressed, and even inspired, self-confidence. “Americans were going to liberate us not only from the Germans but also from our past,” my father says today. “You don’t know how exhilarating it was emotionally for young people at the time.”

Arriving as the first harbinger of American popular culture that would sweep France in the postwar period and then the world, jazz transformed our perception of music. It was emotional and sensorial. Refuting the divisive European nationalism that had mired our continent in conflict, jazz connected people and cultures like no music before it. Blacks and whites, Europeans and Americans, the big band and the blues—the past, present, and future—none of these seemed immutable or nonnegotiable when there was a jazz LP playing. Before the war even ended jazz had won the hearts of young Germans, and then it went on to give youth across Europe a way to feel differently about who they were.

Jazz, Design, and the Brand

For many years now I have been arguing that sameness and commodity-status are the enemy of emotional branding. Our world and economies thrive on stimulation and change. To perform and feel at our best, our brains must be energized and renewed daily. When “the expected,” “the routine,” and “the standard” takes hold in the work, home, or marketplace, it clamps down on our aspirations.

The great threat of modern conformity played a major role in tearing Europe apart during the first half of the twentieth century. The German sociologist Max Weber recognized this, suggesting early on that the new phenomenon of bureaucratization threatened civilized life. It stultified the mind and isolated the individual. Franz Kafka, another brilliant German, dramatized bureaucracy’s threatening conformity and sameness in dozens of short stories that depict overbearing government, professional and societal expectations that sapped the individual’s will to live. In spite of these dire forecasts, fascism rose to power in the 1930s.

The taxing effects of modernity also inspired a range of progressive, creative alternatives, such as surrealism and Dadaism. But it was America’s response that captured me and proved most influential in Europe: American jazz embodied the most inspiring alternative to stultifying tradition and conformity. Spend an afternoon watching the films of the French New Wave, where jazz is always on the side of the rebel, youth, and the carefree, and you’ll see what I mean.

To jazz up is to embrace an emotional language that sensually connects and emotionally inspires. Design ideas; let your ideas come to fruition through design. Allow the design language to change people’s everyday reality—ever in danger of reverting to conformity—and renew their love for your brand. But don’t just take my word for it, look at the best commerce has to offer: Apple, BMW, Dove, Motorola, Starbucks, Fiji water, Absolut, Abercrombie and Fitch, Victoria’s Secret, OXO. Each has reveled in a success grounded in cutting-edge, jazzy design that tells consumers this is something different, and raised the level of brand expectations.

Jet Blue, Target, Callaway Drivers, the Mini Cooper, and Dell, likewise, have dared the public to experience their innovative design language and solutions. Each takes a strong, reliable product tailored around today’s market and consumers and clothes it in a visual and linguistic design language that acts as the bold ambassador of their new offerings. These brands have not only reframed their product offerings, but have also recognized that a unique visual identity is central to their agenda.

Designing the Future

Design-driven companies revolutionize their industries, trailblazing the way for others to change the way they do business. Yet their great design is not sui generis and does not fall from the sky. Every design-driven company must cultivate its own culture while also drawing from the outside for that special edge, that unique look. Design leadership and design hybridization are one and the same (much as the most idiosyncratic and impressive jazz impresarios created their own voice by drawing on the rich culture and traditions of their jazz forbearers and peers). W Hotels took cues from the leading boutique hotels. Virgin’s design vision has not only been integral to instantiating its own powerful corporate and client culture, but has also repurposed the visions of its competitors.

In creating a new vision for electronics, Apple opened up a new market in technology for all its competitors in the future. MP3 players and related devices (minidisk players, DAT recorders, etc.) have been on the market for years. Though often superior to their competition, frankly, consumers didn’t understand what they were and why they were useful. It wasn’t until Apple redesigned the MP3 player as a fashion accessory that the technologies really got consumers’ attention. By re-branding the MP3 player with Apple design, Apple opened up an entire market segment for this new technology. Yet they also limited their competition’s ability to encroach on their market share because, at the end of the day, it’s not yet clear that consumers really want MP3 players. It’s the iPod they want. A device that merely plays digital music is a poor second best.

The Days of Reckoning

There’s a shakedown going on among brands today. There are those equipped to compete with the new demands of consumers, using design, culture, and emotion to be, ultimately, incomparable with their competitors. Falling behind and beneath these are the brands who still think they’re selling tangible commodities to rational consumers. These same brands think that product attributes come prior to, and independent of, design. And even the best brands can fall from the top when they forget that they must continue to adapt to their consumers’ changing needs.

There are many reasons for the impending and ongoing design revolution: An improved economic climate, and, most importantly, a societal change that has evolved away from modernist theories to postmodernist ways of thinking that privilege the well-being of the individual. Customers are in charge. They want and have choices. They demand to explore new products. They seek innovation, personalization, and performance. Much of the business world has been caught off guard by this massive social and aspirational shift. The self-inflicted brand-wound of sameness and commodity products languishing in supermarkets, at strip malls, and department stores fails to meet the new expectations of the emerging, and most valuable, consumers (the more discerning the consumer, the fatter the profit margin). Where is the experience? Where is the sensory pleasure? It has fled retail and gone missing at the mall. No wonder consumers are so anxious to snatch up the little bits they find in an Apple iPod or a Starbucks mocha latte. These products are better than nothing, but they are not enough.

You might start to wonder whether the sea of sameness is the result of research processes that are missing the mark.

This situation opens the door for innovators and innovative business ready to build their success through finesse and craftsmanship. The brandscape is ripe for the visionary leaders ready to meet people’s higher emotional expectations and contribute to their visions. Brands must be ready to offer up the raw creative materials and emotional artifacts that allow consumers to make their own connections and articulate their own visions of the future. The floor has dropped beneath the functional, processed brands, and it’s time for brands to deliver at higher, more ethereal levels of aspiration.

Jazzing Up: For the Brand, But Not Limited to It

The power of jazzing up is that ultimately its truth transcends the brand. It is about lifestyle, about a more universal way of looking at the world we live in, the fact that any familiar and standard idea, product, or image can be transformed into mythos. Not just any mythos, though: What made jazz particularly mythic and powerful was its ability to collect the strands of American multiculturalism, individualism, and traditional expressions, and forge from them a uniquely inspiring expression. Born out of American popular culture, this process is particularly suited to branding, but in no way limited to it.

Consider American boxing: Cassius Clay was a talented boxer among many, striving to survive and thrive within a cutthroat world of brutes. In Cassius’s time, boxing was based on raw force and destruction. The likes of Sonny Liston, Joe Frazier, and Larry Holmes inspired interest the way a car wreck inspires rubber-necking. You look, you can’t help but notice, but frankly you don’t like what you see.

Then came Ali. Muhammad Ali, the greatest boxer of all time, changed the whole game. He took the world of brute violence, absorbed its rules, but also rose above them. He took this world of cruel beatings—what you might consider raw commodities measured by punches, muscles, and knockouts—and redesigned its meaning with purpose and inspiration. With stunning interviews, cocky declarations, and catchy phrases, he took the commodity “boxing” and replaced it with a jazzed-up and added-value brand: Ali. Audiences went to the ring or turned on the TV not to see “boxing” but to watch Ali. The world gravitated toward this persona that resonated with the emotions of freedom, spirit, determination, and faith. These were values that America had fought long and hard for, and Ali embodied them in the most idiosyncratic ways. Before Ali, who could have ever imagined America with a Muslim national hero? A “big, black brute” in the eyes of racist detractors, Ali bravely articulated values, ethics, and commitment for a nation at war with the world and with itself. Ali was not fighting boxing matches; he was fighting for justice. To do this he shifted his message to one that expressed his new vision and reframed his language to express his mission: freedom to choose your name and identity, freedom to believe in your own religion, freedom to reject war, freedom to help your fellow man wherever he is in the world, freedom to make yourself heard with all your heart.

Clay won matches with muscles and fists; Ali won hearts with a jazzed-up message, and it’s the latter that we remember today, the latter that transcended commodity and became a brand in its own time.

What Can Design Do for You?

At a time when constant changes in consumer behavior and aspirations impact perceptions of brands, design rises above the clutter, delivering a clear and consistent message. Brands that adapt the right design, tailored to the culture of their corporation and consumer, can thrive amidst the forces fracturing the consumer base and multiply consumer expectations.

The following chapters will delve into the most influential currents in branding today from a design perspective.

INSIGHT 1

Postmodern Dreams

It is impossible to avoid a comparison between the separate influences of modernism and postmodernism on individual expression in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The architect Philip Johnson, in Paola Antonelli’s book, Objects of Design, provides a good assessment of modernism: “Today industrial design is functionally motivated and follows the same principles as modern architecture: machinelike simplicity, smoothness of surface, avoidance of ornament.”¹

The modern movement reflected the dynamism of the industrial age and the efficiency of the factory world. It also was inspired by the dogmatic philosophies of the popular elitist intellectual school of the beginning of the twentieth century, which celebrated technology and science above pleasure and visions of a more controlled world over those of a democratic, evolutionary society. In 1984, Arthur Drexler, the famed curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, spoke of the pieces selected to be in the museum: “An object is chosen for its quality because it is thought to achieve, or have originated, those formal ideas of beauty that have become the major stylistic concepts of our time.”² This statement is about purity; it does not reflect the notion of seduction, pleasure, or sensory experience.

This rigorous modernist approach does not get everyone’s support. The New York Times, for instance, published an article titled “Where MOMA Has Lost Its Edge” by Nicolai Ouroussoff³ explaining that good taste is not always enough when you are trying to reconnect with the mainstream. He said, “The age of dogmas and manifestos is gone.” Modernism also excludes the fashion industry or ephemeral installation work, which include people’s experiences in the creative process. For instance, The Gates, the remarkable work installed in Central Park by the artists Christo and Jeanne Claude, brought thousands of people together in the winter in a singular location, weaving their way along the same paths.

The Gates, by Christo and Jeanne Claude.

From a branding perspective, dogmatic modernist theories have prevaile...