JKR

I went down to London’s Design Museum this weekend to take a look at the Coke exhibition. It’s only little – one big glass box with the bottles through the ages and a few identity manuals. But it was doing a fabulous sales job. In the fifteen minutes I spent there, I must have heard the word ‘cool’  from 90% of the passing audience.

What struck me was the detail from the earliest examples that was put into the manuals. The title ‘Decoration and Design Standards’ sets out Coke’s stall – these are a lot more strident than ‘guidelines’. Here, no distinction is made between rigour for design and rigour for its application through advertising. I guess I am sensing in a ‘media neutral’ environment a certain laissez-faire approach to design standardisation – exacerbated by each communication discipline making a case for not being boxed in by pesky rules. But Coke shows that for truly great ‘media neutral’ communication the detail needs to be positively nailed down.

The document below makes it clear what the optimum angles are to display advertising, while other pages indicate the exact spacings for headlines and so forth. These days, it is received wisdom that very long brand guidelines are often left unread and shorter ones have more chance of being followed.  The success of Coke argues for a more strident approach.

More images after the jump…
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As a tennis player, Jean René Lacoste picked up his nickname ‘The Crocodile’ because he never let go of his prey. The Lacoste brand was possibly the first to put a garment’s logo on the outside of the clothes. Once upon a time that would have been ground breaking.

To their credit, this is about where the Lacoste brand stopped innovating. It’s admirable that the brand has never become jaded about returning again and again to some of their fundamental ‘brand truths’ – their advertising has drawn on their legacy (see above) and if one squints, all their above communication (even female fragrances dramatised by girls floating around or chasing balloons) can be traced back to a certain light-footed agility on court and I guess the lightweight fabric of the original shirts.

So here is their ‘new’ fragrance. It puts the embroidered logo on the bottle in the position it would occupy on the chest of their shirts. It has a tactile debossing on the sides that provides grip, but also references those originals shirts’ patina. And, in the duty free billboards, the packs are shown pushing through the shirt fabric (no generic hunky model required).

The fragrance comes in tennis white (called ‘Pure’), crocodile green and azure blue – the colours Lacoste typically leads with. In other words, the brand has done nothing clever with this ‘classic’ representation of themselves. And that’s the genius – the strength to celebrate what makes them great, rather than trowel on some new ‘contemporary’ interpretation. To paraphrase that really annoying Patek Philippe watch campaign, as brand managers and agencies we never actually own iconic brands – we just look after them for the next generation.

This behaviour of being a responsible custodian is easier said than done, as every brand manager and creative head wants to ‘make their mark’ and add their own voice to the brand they manage. It takes real balls, a real commitment to what is good for the brand, to add less, not more. Congratulations, Lacoste, for being authentic (predictable even), rather than clever. And I wonder, did they take inspiration from the relatively recent simplification of Coke’s packaging, which by getting back to basics has provided a springboard to contemporary expressions such as the aluminum bottle?

The sun is out, it’s Friday – have a great weekend…

Here is the new identity for Eurostar. If you have not seen it before, or had its rationale explained, take a moment to soak it up and form your opinion based on the work. They are taken from a rich piece on the Creative Review blog.

So what do you think? Is this to your eyes a whole new way of branding? Or just another computer generated metallic logo? Both positions have been argued for this design. The company responsible (Someone) caused a small controversy recently in Design Week arguing “Logos are a hangover from another time…[With a] brand like O2, its success lies in the richness and depth of its ‘brand world’, which features bubbles, colour, photography and typography…you could remove the logo and still know the brand.” In other words, we need to consider the whole visual brand ‘world’ on an identity project.

Well, thanks for that, but it’s an approach that has been generally followed and practiced in design and advertising for decades. “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss” as The Who song goes.  Perhaps the agency were only trying to explain their view, rather than set themselves up as the ‘new way’. They won’t be the first agency to find a general opinion translated into a manifesto when quoted. But it does set them up to produce work that breaks the mould. I’m not convinced this does.

In fairness to the work, any identity tends to launch with a logo, then over the following years the other identity elements unfurl. Typically, initial reaction tends to be all around the central mark and typically it’s a hostile reaction. The Eurostar identity launch seems to be running along these traditional lines (somewhat ironically given the ‘less logo’ philosophy). In time, we might see some amazing expressions of the design, which is intended to be sculptural and so can presumably be shown from infinite angles and perspectives. We should wait and see.

It’s very en vogue for design agencies to serve up old wine in new bottles. Taking enduring principles and process, adding a little twist or insight, giving it a silly name (‘mindscaping’ or whatever) and slapping a proprietorial TM on the end. While this might not improve the quality or effectiveness of the work, it does make it easier to pitch ones ‘offer’ to clients hungry to buy a silver bullet. Sooner or later, said clients will become somewhat cynical, one presumes.

For myself, having looked at the Eurostar work, this is my subjective opinion: I am full of admiration for the adventurous spirit in which it has been done. I’m a bit less impressed by the results, but a view on this is premature – give it time to be fully applied. And I am slightly baffled as to why thinking of an identity as more than a logo should be considered an iconoclastic new approach.

PepsiCo have made a significant move, planning to pilot the world’s first petroleum-free bottle in 2012.

Made of grass, pine bark and corn husks, the company has worked out how to give these the same molecular structure as a standard PET. This is a case of “I’ll see your innovation and raise you a bigger one” against Coca-Cola’s 30% plant-based bottle of 2009. PepsiCo suggest that in the future waste from their other products (eg potato peelings from Lay’s crisps, or orange peel from Tropicana juice) could become the raw ingredients of the new bottle.

A couple of observations. What makes this compelling is the 100% nature of the solution. In my experience, consumers are quite all or nothing when it comes to sustainability. They don’t particularly think in fractions of good vs bad, so lightweighting doesn’t really cut it for them. Similarly, I have worked on projects where only a percentage of the PET plastic is recycled (not 100% because the majority of supplies had been bought up). I have to say being able to claim ‘a hundred percent good’ easily trounces a claim along the lines of ‘partially made of better materials’. This is not to confuse spin with substance – clearly any improvement is for the better, But going all the way wins the day.

Secondly, PepsiCo are judiciously using the term ‘pilot scheme’ in their PR. In other words, while we would all hope it becomes their standard approach, they are not yet promising this. One could see this as disingenuous. I don’t – a project of this scale would never get off the ground in the first place if it was not a pilot scheme, and seen as such within the business. ‘Pilot scheme’ can be the magic words to get any problematic project moving.

So, in a week of generally bad news, particularly bad energy news, here’s something reasonably significant that we can all raise a glass of something fizzy to.

To pinch a line from Paul Arden’s book, common sense is not always that common.  So it is with common sense design. But here’s a great example. On a shop shelf the cereals above are all competing on a level playing field. But how do you store your cereals back at home?

Kellogg’s in-house design team were smart enough to observe their boxes were more than likely stored side on. So they moved all the dreary information that typically clutters cereal side panels, to allow space for another branded face. One presumes this makes the selection of their cereals (in favour of, for example, the Nestle boxes also shown) easier as one peers bleary eyed into the cupboard. And what gets chosen and eaten presumably gets bought again. Sweating the small stuff can actually be quite a big deal – good work.