JKR

The Muppets are back in the cinemas in February. Cravendale are offering these sticker kits with which to ‘makeover’ their packs. I love them, and so will my kids, if I give them a turn to play.

Ordering the sticker kit online (the only way to get them I believe) felt a bit convoluted. It’s a shame they are not somehow mounted on the packs – part of being a kid is the joy of that ‘instant little toy’ in or on the box. I guess you might remember happily eating your way to the bottom of a box of cereal just to retrieve the plastic soldier. Still, this is the digital age and it’s good ‘name awareness’ for Cravendale. And when you consider the number of tie-ins that look so ‘this will do’ in retrospect (as per below), I think it would be churlish to carp too much like the old geezers in the opera box from the show in question.

On a related topic, and really just because I wanted to share the images, here are some fantastic art prints from Disney for a fantastic gig that never was. I think they call this kind of stuff ‘knowing’…

The Archers might be a radio institution, but it is always sure to keep things contemporary. Currently, the fictional farming family has got a rebranding plot line. I can’t claim to be a regular listener, but from what I can glean, the family farm was selling its produce under the ‘Bridge Farm Organics’ name. Then the farm was struck by E. coli, putting the business in jeopardy. So young entrepreneurial Tom Archer has persuaded the family to repackage the product. Now they are Ambridge Organics, named after the village the show is set in.

It’s not often repackaging is the topic of a major soap, so I thought we might consider it here. Tom was cock a hoop with his new design, and more so with its results. A quick web search showed the new name threw up no reference to E. coli “until page six”. The Organics’ branding was bold and looked “like it had nothing to hide”. Orders were back on with made up shop Underwood’s, and he had secured a meeting with the previously uninterested Octagon Foods. Facing the future with confidence, Tom notes “We can’t afford to look back”. What could possibly go wrong?

Well, Tom has made errors of judgement before. As The Archers’ site notes of this self-styled meat product entrepreneur – “He’s made some disastrous decisions over the years, one of the more memorable ones being to get romantically involved with ruthless supermarket buyer Tamsin. She dumped both him and his sausages with indecent haste, causing the loss of his dignity and almost his business.”
And by the sound of their name, Octagon Foods are probably a bunch of bastards. I’d watch your back with them Tom. But let’s consider this seriously, and think how we might advise Tom were he to be a client in the real world. After all, farmers are famously having a tough time in business, and The Archers reflects their real life challenges.

It strikes me that Tom’s situation is really not that dissimilar in principle to BP’s when they were filling the bay of Mexico with oil. You are what you are, and have done what you have done. You cannot simply rebrand yourself out of trouble. That mention on page six of the web is a smoking gun, and it’s going to get you. The truth will out and this will make the rebrand a failure. In fact, it will reignite an issue that would otherwise have blown over. And worse, to the forgivable misfortune of E. coli we can now level a charge of shifty disingenuousness at Ambridge Organics. So all trust will be gone and Tom really will have blown it. Authenticity is a priceless asset, and I would have advised Tom to concentrate on preserving what he had, rather than squandering both it, the goodwill and trust he has built up and his presumably meager funds on a cosmetic exercise.

Design can only achieve so much. It certainly can’t make bad news go away, and a new lick of paint won’t change the building underneath. In the real world, Heston Blumenthal’s norovirus outbreak at the Fat Duck was handled the only way these things can be. With a frank and sincere apology, and a graceful offer of culinary compensation to the victims. And then he crossed his fingers, gritted his teeth and hoped for the best. Renaming the restaurant the Porky Pig was not on the menu. I hope I am wrong, but I fear Ambridge’s local paper will soon be making trouble for Tom, and Octagon Foods will be poised to capitalise on his misfortune.

What would we have done in design terms for him? Well, us city folk like a bit of poncey farmers’ market ‘real food’. I would have suggested a nice design under the old name and charged a healthy premium down at Borough Market. This would have been honest, but the distance from Ambridge to London would have ensured those shopping would be unaware of past troubles with the brand. And using the new design with the old name to herald a fresh start after a tough time would in any case draw a line under the whole E. coli thing. Design can signal a fresh start, but it can’t erase the past. Changing their name has paradoxically kept the past toxic for Tom and Ambridge Organics, I believe.

There is a general suspicion in life that ‘the creative industries’ are populated by charlatans who are only too keen to fleece the client with some silken words, produce flash in the pan work, then move on to the next victim. Private Eye’s Ad Nauseum regularly offers up evidence to support this view, and we have all seen those cartoons of black polo neck wearing show-boaters heaping marketing gobbledygook upon poor unsuspecting clients. Tom Fishburne shows we can even laugh at this image ourselves. I have pinched some New Yorker cartoons for this post to illustrate the ‘type’ in question. Generally, branding seems to be perceived as a dark art that is more smoke and mirrors than something of true substance.

The reported (potential) fate of Orange and T-Mobile (in The Times newspaper on Tuesday) can only add fuel to the fire. As both brands are now owned by Everything Everywhere, having them compete is a self-defeating strategy. And having one wing of the company adopting the branding of the other appears to be untenable. So both will probably go, to be replaced by something literally brand new. ‘EE’ anyone? No? Just the Yorkshiremen?

So almost twenty years of branding turn out to be relatively disposable. According to The Times, Fallon’s 2008 ‘I Am’ campaign for Orange alone cost £90million. Personally, I don’t even remember it and in terms of cost and creative, it’s just a drop in the ocean of all the work produced. Perhaps of longer term value was the Wolf Olins coined line – ‘The future’s bright, the future’s Orange’. This was used to introduce the brand’s identity (which daringly for the time made no reference to what the company did). It seeped into everyday language and was perhaps the most memorable thing the brand ever said.

So anyway, hundreds of million pounds of investment into work from folk like me later, it turns out the brands are likely to be sacrificed for the better good, and replaced by something freshly minted. In a way this is exciting – death allowing for rebirth. But it’s also quite bracing. Did none of that time and talent ever amount to creating something of lasting value? Are the sensibilities of the two brands’ staff, both presumably hesitant about taking the other’s name in a marriage of convenience, really of more importance than the equities being killed off? If so, it’s one in the eye for all those pundits who opine on the invisible but massively important ‘brand value’ which advertising and design supposedly adds to share prices. Were all those involved true to the ‘ad nauseum’ caricature, spinning a meaningless line to ensure healthy billing?

Coming from someone who works in this field it won’t surprise you to hear that I think not. Some good work was done on both brands. Arguably some really great work was done for Orange. If market mergers and business strategy have chucked it in the bin perhaps it’s more a reflection of the fickle role, fickle fate market forces and new owners play in the worth of the brand than in the actual value of the work that was done. It takes some ego, arguably, to believe the last twenty years created nothing of lasting relevance from these two multinational brands.

There are other ways one might play out this particular hand. The two brands are not necessarily like for like competitors. They are as different as they are similar. If you were Coke and could buy one other brand, might it not be Pepsi? Then you can fight with similar products on two distinct fronts. By converging Orange and T-Mobile into one thing in the middle, arguably you are left with a less nimble and dimensional beast with which to fight the competition. It will be big and bland. Having two decent brands to play with would be considered by many to be a bit of a gift.

But that Everything Everywhere beg to differ offers a refreshing cold shower to anyone who thinks our collective creative input is the thing really driving the business.

As we are on the topic, I thought I might share a favourite anecdote from the early days of mobile branding. We worked on the launch of Mercury One2One, which became One2One, which became T-Mobile. Soon after the launch in 1993 I asked the client how things were going. “Awful” came the reply. The tariffs on which profit depended were all aimed at the envisaged businessman market (in the early posters, women were shown to need a phone if their car broke down at night. Otherwise it was salaryman on the go in every scenario). The tariff was costly calls in business hours, but free calls at night, with the presumption being that few businessmen wanted to make social calls. Trouble was the phones all got bought by teenagers, who then creamed the free calls and left their phones switched off during business hours. The client continued “there’s no money in teenagers – if that’s our market, we’re doomed”. Ahh, the benefit of hindsight…

How many toasters do you go through before you buy a Dualit? In a disposable world, it represents something reassuringly durable. The industrial look, the lever-load mechanism and the whirring mechanical timer all give you the feeling that it is built to last.

This is the first lesson that Dualit teaches us: that a hefty and mechanical design can convince us on quality. As appliances go, the toaster is certainly at the more basic end of the spectrum, and Dualit celebrates that. Its uncomplicated but robust design is the basis upon which our trust is built.

Seeing the toasters working tirelessly in cafés only confirms our belief in the brand. The visible screws also make you think that, should it break, you could take it apart, tinker around a bit and get it going again.

Dualit also provides a textbook example of how to achieve the classic retro look. Curved shoulders, stainless steel and simple dials speak the design language of a different time – it would be completely at home in a 1950’s American roadside diner. The broader portfolio has built upon this style and, as a true design leader, Dualit has paved the way to make the retro-robust look commonplace in stylish kitchen gadgets.

Lastly, Dualit demonstrates that original design can support a significant price premium, even in the long term. It offers substance as a style statement, and we will willingly pay more when we know that other toasters will burn out, while a Dualit will keep ticking.

By James Joice, Client Director, jkr

Today’s title is a trick question. The bookshop chain has put a rebranded identity into reverse gear, returning to the more traditional Baskerville font, and noting that the reinstated capital letter is more in keeping with their stature. But they have dropped their possessive apostrophe. So, did you miss it? Their logic is that it gets in the way of online sales. I’m no expert but I have never struggled to find Waterstone’s online without typing in an apostrophe, suggesting changing the actual brand name was unnecessary. Adding ‘.com’ to their name seems to me both dated and a rather desperate bid to advertise their existence beyond the troubled high street.

But this post is about grammar, not digital strategy. Does it matter? Can it evolve? Are we dumbing down or moving with the times? Like a good few designers, I am terribly dyslexic. Many others who aren’t still can’t spell for tofey. I sometimes wonder if part of the reason we end up as designers is a consequence of this – that our visual abilities are developed as a muscle to compensate for a lack of ability in writing. Whatever, just because we cannot spell does not mean we do not care, as evidenced by the many heated comments in response to Waterstones missing apostrophe on the Creative Review blog. And it’s not just designers who are annoyed, The Daily Telegraph carried letters of indignation as well.

The argument is not cut and dried however. Opinion broadly falls into three camps. Traditionalists argue that it is simply wrong, that a book shop should know better, and keep up standards. Modernists argue that language changes all the time and apostrophes, which cannot be heard in conversation, are outdated in the digital text-speak era. Then the pedants note that as Tim Waterstone no longer owns the shop, it does not need the possessive apostrophe. McDonald’s and Sainsbury’s bother, while WH Smith gets by without the superfluous ‘s’.

What do you think? I feel the evolutionary argument is a bit weak. I was taught at college that Roman carvers used to chisel Vs instead of Us because a sharp angle was easier to do. But as they were ok with S and O, I’m not so sure this is true. Dropping good grammar to function better in search engines seems like a rather abrupt evolution, and somehow less forgivable than helping out stone carvers.

I offer two thoughts. Firstly, how nice to live in a world so civilised that we can be bothered to debate the niceties of the issue. Secondly, I think Waterstones have been guilty of design inconsistency regardless of the rights and wrongs. Either be progressive and drop the apostrophe. Or be traditional, return to the bookish serif W, and the gravitas of a capital letter. But don’t do the latter with the ‘bad’ grammar of the former. That just looks all over the place. Little things can mean a lot. Just sayin’.