JKR

Following Unilevers’ low key corporate branding of ads for their various products, last week The Times reported that P&G are to follow suit. They will be running TV advertisements highlighting their environmental credentials and suchlike. Irwin Lee, P&G’s corporate head told The Times “now is a good time to do corporate branding because people are more interested in where brands come from, who is behind them and if the company is an upstanding one.”

A handful of unconnected thoughts:

1. If P&G want to present a more soulful face, then it’s a shame their corporate identity (above) is somewhat bland compared to their idiosyncratic original logo (below). Lots of conspiracy rubbish has been put about that the man in the moon logo carried satanic symbolism. The truth is supposedly more prosaic – that the 13 stars represent the thirteen colonies. Either way, the current logo lacks the charm or warmth of the rival Unilever one. Shame the urban myth is toxic enough to prevent the bearded mans return.

2. Symbols are great while everything is tickety-boo. When things go wrong however, the design can become an albatross ‘round the neck – just ask BP. By more closely associating the individual brands they own with the corporate identity, P&G risk the potential of one rotten apple spoiling the barrel. If, say, a shampoo turned out to be harmful to scalps, would you trust other brands within the stable as much? When one is at the forefront of pharmaceutical innovation, this is surely a constant issue. P&G has in the past been associated with Toxic Shock Syndrome in relation to their tampon brand Rely.

3. Personally, I think “house of” branding works well across pharmaceutical and personal care brands, because it builds an aggregate impression of expertise. But when food brands let us know they all come from the same big organisation, I feel it shines a little too much light on the magic. Pringles feel somehow less authentically ‘foodie’ when one starts thinking they come from the same people who make soaps and washing powder.

4. In addition to P&G and Unilever, Arla and Reckitt Benckiser are also starting to add a corporate signature to their branded communication. Every decent micro trend needs a name, and I would suggest ‘Acme-isation’, in homage to the ubiquitous “we make everything” company from which Wile E. Coyote bought the various tools with which he planned to do harm to Road Runner…

Weighing the pig more isn’t making it any fatter
It’s a curious paradox that as business grows more confident about the value of design, it’s becoming less confident in exercising judgement about it – to the extent that few organisations will today implement even cosmetic design changes without extensive pre-testing.

The prevailing culture of accountability and management by measurement suggest this trend is set to continue. While it has undoubtedly brought some benefits with it, creating a great body of work for design to be benchmarked against and rewarding the elevated status of design with its own studies, rather than a few minutes discussion at the wrap-up of an advertising focus group, it certainly hasn’t been making design better.

With the recession, many marketing budgets are being pruned, so design testing isn’t receiving incremental investment, but frequently being funded by the reallocation of money away from the insight gathering that might otherwise inspire more transformational design. Put bluntly, the current trend in research is at best making design safer, not better.

The research world shouldn’t regard the situation with complacency, however. The legacy of high profile failures of ‘extensively researched’ re-designs, such as Tropicana in the US and Mr Kipling cakes in the UK and a thus-far more quietly expressed disquiet about disappointing paybacks from positively tested design revisions herald an urgent reassessment of the role of research in design and how to improve it.

Paradoxically, this recession isn’t the time for market research to play it safe, it isn’t the time to be doing the wrong type of research a bit righter, it’s the time to invent techniques that exploit newly available technology and insights into human psychology to help organisations to design better.

(more…)