JKR

Chancing across some vintage advertisements for Olivetti Valentine typewriters this week was a joyful moment. Designed by Ettorre Sottsass, the tomato red Valentine was the iMac of its day, bringing design flair to a product conventionally functional and grey. The posters are classics of their kind, still cropping up regularly in design museums, art galleries and best of lists. With such a beautiful product, they could afford to be soft sell, but evoked a wonderfully eccentric spirit in keeping with a thought leader brand.

It’s hard to think of any premium-tech communication around today that has such distinctive spirit. Have we all just become a bit worthy and joyless in the way we market premium products? In our austere times, perhaps the onus is on branding to cheer us all up a bit more, rather than defaulting to soulless “designer” visual clichés – elegantly photographed products on gloss mirrored surfaces etc. etc. Consider the generic look and feel of the ads below – the opportunity is ripe for a more idiosyncratic approach that breaks the mould.