Today I went to the printers to see this year’s Shine Award poster coming to life. Jia Ying Gnoh’s beautiful creation will soon be winging its way to a design course near you, after a few secret finishing touches!

Newspapers are multi-faceted things, addressing the needs of many different groups of readers. But that makes the need for a coherent thread, a single unifying idea or characteristic, -a set of brand values if you like, more not less important.

It’s a point that Guardian newspapers might care to consider when they assess the effectiveness –or otherwise of this week’s last-throw-of-the-dice redesign of The Observer.

It is in part brilliant, in part dire and on the whole, totally confusing. I suspect that my confusion as a reader reflects the lack of certainty at Guardian newspapers over exactly what the paper should be doing.

The overhaul has been thorough, starting with the paper’s most basic ‘architecture’ - its rag bag of supplements and sections. Three of the excellent monthly magazines have been spiked and the paper has been reduced to four sections: news, sport, an expanded Review section and the magazine.

So far so good. It feels more focussed and somehow more confident.

But then you wade into the news section (which now includes business and personal finance). Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. In design terms, the front page is a pig’s ear with at least five different zones. It has three promotions and trailers at the top, all of which render the masthead, traditionally regarded as the font of a paper’s identity, strangely invisible.

Editorially the news section is running fewer, longer, stories. That makes perfect sense for a Sunday paper. In-depth reporting and weighty analysis seem a sensible way to compete with the second by second news coverage available everywhere else these days.

It underlines the Observer’s positioning as a ‘serious’ newspaper. But it presents design problems. The new word-heavy, picture and graphic light pages look strangely old fashioned. I cant work out whether it is merely appealing to older readers. Or is it performing some sort of retro schtick for younger readers?

They could possibly get away with it, if they really got behind it. But like an actor who squeaks his lines, the redesign fails to project those thoughts with single minded confidence. As a consequence it ‘dies’ on page.

The new colour coded navigation at the top of the pages is great. But the mish-mash of me-too typefaces on every page scream of a product that has lost its identity and its way. Many of the spreads look like they come from different papers and throughout they resolutely refuse to take any advantage whatsoever of the fantastic graphic potential of the Berliner format. Compared to its daily stable-mate The Guardian, it looks feeble, dull and uncertain. The Guardian owns equities that make it unique - and is proud of them. The headline typeface for one is unmistakable.

But then you come to the review section or The New Review. It’s completely different and completely brilliant. Unlike the news section it begs you to engage with it. Exciting innovative, buzzy, it looks like a monthly magazine that has been newsified. They’ve been bold and strident with imagery. This is confidence- a real contrast to the news section.

Every spread is packed full of energy. Brilliant features on a Cuban boy in the US and the wife of Swedish crime writer Stieg Larsson look substantial and important. There’s a fantastic double page picture of the murder of black activist Malcom X 45 years ago, a magnificent portrait of singer Rufus Wainwright and lively diary section at the front.

So it’s a tale of two sections, which seem to be produced by different teams, aimed at different readers and trying to do completely different things. Compare it with the confident single mindedness of The Guardian’s design and it’s clear, I fear, that The Observer is not long for this world.

Ultra competitive Gatwick

What can a duty-free shopping mall tell us about the role of brands on-line? Last week I found out. A few dead minutes at an airport turned into an object lesson in the ways that brands work and the benefits they bring to both brand owners and consumers.

I was waiting at Gatwick for a flight to Rome when I realised that I needed an adapter for my phone charger. A couple of years ago they were giving them away free, so I reckoned now I would have to pay between two and three pounds.

I happened to be standing outside Dixon’s, right next to the travel goods carousel .Hurrah, the basic UK-to-European single adapter was on sale. But much to my annoyance the price was about £6.50 - more than twice the price I had in mind.

Boo. It felt like a rip-off. So with time on my hands I thought I’d scour duty-free for something cheaper.

I wandered around for a while hoping that perhaps WH Smith or Boots could help me. They couldn’t and after a few minutes I found myself standing outside another branch of Dixon’s (just fifty yards away from the first). There was the same travel goods carousel with the same adapter for £6.50.

Then I noticed a luggage shop next door. Perhaps they would have one? I didn’t recognise its name and cant recall it now. But their travel goods carousel was also in the front of the shop –in fact it was about five feet away from the Dixon’s display. Stone me, they did indeed sell adapters. And amazingly they were charging just three pounds –less half the Dixon’s price.

But why on earth would anyone ever pay that, when they could get a very similar product for half the price by simply extending their arm to next door’s carousel?

My plane was still delayed so I decided to watch how people dealt with this rare example of direct price competition. In the course of the next few minutes, five people approached the Dixon’s carousel. Not one approached the unnamed luggage shop. They didn’t even seem to see it. They all seemed interested in adapters but not one noticed the neighbouring carousel which was just an arms reach away.

I idly watched as two people bought over-priced adaptors. Then out of boredom more than anything, I decided to turn brand-vandal and started telling people that the same product was on sale for half the price, just feet away.

Two looked at me suspiciously. Only after reassurance (from me) did they take the two paces next door. The last shopper simply gave me a look of irritation and paid the full Dixon’s price.

Again why? After some thought it became clear.  After discounting the possibility that they thought I was an interfering madman I realised I had caught a rare glimpse of the power of a brand at work.

First it blinded consumers to the other choices open to them. Literally. People could not see the next door luggage shop even though they were virtually in it. Then it made them deaf to the merits of other suppliers. They were ‘sticky’, hard to budge and resistant to even the most powerful rational argument (ie move five feet and save threee pounds). It seemed to force consumers to adopt a more emotional reaction. It caused three of them to pay a one hundred per cent price premium for an unexceptional product that was available just inches away

A shopping mall is of course very similar to the online world. There too lots of rival businesses compete for customers who can easily pop elsewhere if they like -at zero cost to themselves. A strong brand reduces the likelyhood that they will shop around, it makes them less amenable to the siren call of the competition and as economists like to say, it reduces their price elasticity.

Viewed in one way you could say that brands turn off or bye-pass people’s critical faculties. It’s an incredibly useful thing for a business -unless of course they want to slug it out in the brutal world of rational attriubutes like price.

Somehow seeing it with my eyes was infinitely more powerful than reading it in a marketing text book.

bye bye ladies

When Unilever’s Persil launched its ‘dirt is good campaign’ a couple of years ago, P&G’s Ariel responded with a campaign based on the thought that ‘clean is better’.

That episode sums up one of the biggest dilemmas facing any brand manager: Sell the product and you’re in danger of competing for your customers’ business on a purely transactional or functional basis. Sell benefits or the social role of the brand and you are always vulnerable to rivals like Ariel coming along with a better product.

So it was fascinating to read in this week’s Marketing magazine, that Unilever’s Dove is shifting from a communication platform based on ‘real beauty’ to a more science-based, product efficacy story.

Gone are the real women in their white underwear. Instead we’ll get the image of a flower and raindrops “intended to represent the product’s three moisturising ingredients,” according to the report. Advertising will explain how the product helps to hold moisture at the surface of the skin.

Yep, it’s a real shame to see the chubby ladies go, but you can see why the Dove brand people have done it. They are integrating product claims into their communication and working hard to establish product superiority. And they are doing this because they understand that the product/benefit choice is in truth a false dilemma. The best brands don’t sell the product or the emotional and social benefits, they sell both.

The precise balance varies from category to category. Who is doing especially well in the household cleaning category at the moment? Reckit Benckieser with Cillit Bang and Finish, both of which employ what you might call ‘ultra’ product-efficacy strategy. On the other hand Unilever’s big commercial success in recent years has been Lynx deodorants for men who aren’t quite grown up yet. It’s a brand about pure emotion

But if anything ever goes wrong for Cillit Bang, it is vulnerable. If it is ever found to be toxic or rot your dish clothes they have no deeper relationship, no fund of consumer goodwill if you like, to see it through the bad times.

Fifteen years ago Persil introduced a super-effective formula called Persil Power. It was deadly effective. So effective in fact that it didn’t just get rid of stains, it ate the fabric on which the stains appeared. It was a disaster. If Persil didn’t already have powerful consumer equity based on ownership of ‘motherhood’, it is quite possible that it wouldn’t be around today.

The best brands today stand for something. They have a story or a social function as well as product functionality. It’s about knowing and understanding what your brand is about and always speaking in your own tone of voice. But it has to be underpinned by a strong product. If you understand what your brand is really about, it should be able not only to get across its product message, but to really own it.

The news that the Mayor of London has appointed Wally Ollins’ brand consultancy Saffron to create a visual identity for London at a cost of £500,000, has prompted the same predictable press reaction we get every time a design project is reported: “What half a million pounds for a logo?”

Yes that’s right. Cash-strapped City Hall with its legions of procurement professionals has paid some bloke in thick glasses half a mill for a bit of colouring in.

The implication is of course that Saffron (and by extension the entire design industry) are thieves and con men who will happily part their gullible clients from a small fortune. In return they get doodles a four year old might not be proud of.

I’m not sure if it’s wilful ignorance on the part of the media or just that our industry hasn’t explained itself better, but I feel the overpowering need to set the record straight.

I haven’t worked on the London branding project, so I don’t know the precise costs. But lets look more closely at what City Hall might get for its half million.

From my own experience working on the rebranding of the Museum of London, I know that a major issue facing anyone involved with branding London is its extraordinary diversity. That’s what the London 2012 brand was about, that’s what our Museum of London work is about. And that’s what City Hall’s brand London will be about.

That makes the initial research stage particularly expensive. Saffron will have to gather the opinions and attitudes of a huge number of stakeholders to find out what London means to them. They’ll have to consult politicians, business people, Londoners of all races, classes and hues, opinion formers, foreigners and tourists -to name but a few.

Some they can talk to in focus groups. They cost around £3,000 each. They might need a dozen of those. Other views have to be solicited in one on one in-depth conversations. They cost up to £200 a conversation. They’ll need at least thirty of these, possibly many many more. On top of that add in executive time for arranging the research and analysing results and you’ll probably arrive at a figure not unadjacent to £150,000. And that’s before a ‘crayon’ has been wielded in anger.

Now its time for the creative work. But it wont be enough for the Saffron team to simply get their pencils out and sketch a visual identity. That’s only a tiny part of a rebranding. There are colour palettes to develop, photography, illustration, new type faces, tone of voice guidelines and the problem of how to express the brand digitally. - Not to mention a huge quantity of applications which all have to be worked through.

These could take weeks and weeks of time. Much of the work will be done by juniors costing a thousand pounds a day. But it will also need the close attention of very senior designers and creative directors and they can easily cost £2,000 a day.

Now you may think that sounds a ludicrous charge. But we are a profession, like any other, -only with fewer barriers to entry. Clients pay for knowledge, depth of experience and innate creativity, not just craft skills. And if they think its too expensive they can easily look for cheaper suppliers. But they wont find them because that is the going rate in a fiercely competitive market.

So, a big complex project like rebranding London could easily cost £200,000 for the creative work alone.

And then there is implementation. Its clear that a brand like this will live way beyond the identity that Saffron creates. It’ll be used by a huge number of different people –boroughs, quangoes, travel companies, tourist attractions and so on. So a another large chunk of time will be spent on creating what we call ‘master guidlines’. You may wonder why a brand needs a book of rules. But think of it as a hymn sheet for all interested parties to sing from. With revisions and rewrites that might take another fifty or sixty man days –again at at £1,500 to £2,000 a day. That could easily cost another hundred thousand pounds.

So there you have your half million. It has been spent on a project involving not one artist, but perhaps twenty or thirty strategists, researchers, implementers, writers, designers, project managers and photographers putting in hundreds of man-days of work.

That values a brand identity by the costs of its inputs. But perhaps the labour theory of value is too Marxist for you. In that case look at the value that having a strong London brand will create. It gives Londoners a sense of pride and ownership, it expresses why London is different and unique, it gets everybody on message, it sings to the world the virtues of our town.

Half a million pounds may sound like a lot of money. It is a lot of money. But I believe it is actually good value. And I know that those who govern London agree –otherwise they wouldn’t have commissioned the work.

]]> http://www.cpb.co.uk/blog/2010/02/setting-the-record-straight-on-londons-12m-logo-2/feed/ http://www.cpb.co.uk/blog/2010/02/if-it-aint-broke-dont-fix-it/ http://www.cpb.co.uk/blog/2010/02/if-it-aint-broke-dont-fix-it/#comments Fri, 05 Feb 2010 12:35:19 +0000 Katie Monk http://www.cpb.co.uk/blog/?p=1508 Ok so I get that we are living in a digital, web 2.0 world where our lives (supposedly) are getting easier as we have more technology to ‘help’ us.  However with all these gadgets taking over our lives i’m almost certain there will come a time when we wont even have to think for ourselves any more, computers will control our brains.

Its already happening to boardgames, have a look at what Hasbro have done to my favourite childhood game, Monopoly.

“Gone are the £400 property bargains, the silver playing pieces  -  and the opportunity to sneak a note out of the banker’s box”

Yesterday to mark its 75th anniversary, Monopoly unveiled their 21st Century version called Monopoly Revolution.  In a move that mirrors whats going on in our own society the nostalgic boardgame now uses electronic banking instead of paper money and the board itself has also changed from a traditional square to a circular board with sound effects! The new version completely removes the need for players to use mental arithmetic and think for themselves, its what I said at the beginning…. technology is taking over our lives!

In another move, property prices have also shot up to reflect modern prices.  No longer a bargin at £200, Kings Cross Station now costs £2million and not surprisingly Mayfair has not escaped the price hike either, it can now be purchased for tidy sum of £4million!

An estimated one billion people have played Monopoly since its launch.  Designed by Charles Darrow in 1935 it has gone virtually unchanged, so why take the decision to mess around with it now?

In my opinion Monopoly is a classic & iconic piece of nostalgia that didn’t need updating.

As my Mum & Dad used to say to me - if it aint broke don’t fix it!

For years we’ve popping up our bread half way through the toast cycle to check its just the way we like it, peering over the top to make sure the edges haven’t burnt, narrowly missing singeing our eyebrows off.

Obtaining that perfect piece of toast hasn’t been an as easy task especially when you have such high standards.  Just read the requirements from some of the CPB toast addicts and you’ll know what i’m talking about…..

“Caught just before it starts to darken, white and pale caramel coloured”

“crispy golden on the outside, fluffy inside with burned bits round the edge”

“I am very particular about my toast.  I prefer hand cut bread, evenly done with a nice golden brown colour.  It mustn’t be too overdone and if it’s too lightly done it’s too soft”

“Golden brown evenly toasted all over . To ensure its evenly brown I frequently peer into the toaster to check how its coming along”

If only we could see whats going on inside I hear you cry!!

Well take a look at this………

Its the new ‘Vision’ toaster from Magimix, a double insulated transparent toaster that gives a panoramic view of each slice as it cooks.

The super sensory toaster initially launched at five John Lewis stores in the UK this month, and is expected to be rolled out across other stores nationwide later this year.

What a simple solution to our toast troubles

You will recall, of course, that Nadežda Konstantinovna Krupskaya was the wife of revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin. They married in 1898. When she died in 1939 the workforce petitioned Sovnarcom, the Council of People’s commissars, and asked if it would be possible to immortalise her by naming the factory after her.

The project which includes updating the brand logo, involves developing new pack designs for Troika chocolate and crushed nuts bar, Petersburg Nights chocolate bar range, and Summer Gardens boxed assortment.

The brief also extends to revamping the identity of the Pekar (‘Baker’) brand, a range of cakes and wafers recently acquired by Krupskaya. Pekar was established in 1913 before the Russian Revolution of 1917, but it survived the purges, Nazi occupation and the Cold War, to become one of the most popular cake and wafer ranges in Northwest Russia.

Coley Porter Bell’s first task for Krupskaya has been to modernise the packaging of the Troika range. The Krupskaya Griffin logo (the symbol of St Petersburg) has been updated and made more prominent. But it still retains the legend “Factory named after the wife of Lenin”.

The colours of the packaging have also been made stronger and darker, while a more modern representation of the troika (three horses) has been used.

“This is a case of evolution rather than revolutionary change,” said Coley Porter Bell CEO Vicky Bullen. “Packaging redesign always involves striking a delicate balance between keeping the elements that make the brand popular in the first place while making big enough changes for consumers to notice that it has been modernised.”

Explained Krupskaya marketing director Alexey Ostapachenko; “Recently Krupskaya has come under competitive pressure from Western rivals, such as Nestle and Mars, as well as renewed competition from indigenous rivals, such as the Moscow based Red October confectionery brand. Our redesign is aimed at making Kruspskaya better able to cope with these threats, particularly at point of purchase.”

The Russian confectionery market splits into 3 main groups: traditional Russian brands such as Krupskaya, new Russian brands and international brands. Recently both Krupskaya and Pekar have come under pressure on two commercial fronts. Firstly from Western competitors such as Nestle and Mars but also from resurgent local brands such as well as Moscow based United Konditors.

Traditional Russian Brands come mostly from regional factories established in Czarist Russia. Krupskaya’s rivals include:

*Red October (named after the Russian Revolution): Their Alenka brand is very well recognised, using typical soviet imagery of a little Russian girl.

*Babaevskiy: Uses solid, heavy, masculine imagery like big buildings and military men. Colours like brown, dark red and gold give a heavy, serious feel. This style of design is considered to be representative of Moscow.

*Korkunof a very successful new Russian brand. Consumers think of it as ‘modern’, largely because it only launched 10 years ago. Its design is still dark in colour and features traditional painting, embellishment and fonts – albeit used in a slightly more sophisticated way than the old Russian brands.

During the war against the fascists (sic) Leningrad was besieged for 900 days. The Krupskaya factory was reduced to making ersatz chocolate from any ingredients available, and only for front line troops. As the bread ration at the time was only 250 grams per day for working citizens -125g for their dependants, even that kind of chocolate was regarded as a real treat. As a result Krupskaya was recorded in the City Honour Book & became strongly identified as a ‘local hero’ brand in the region.

Said CPB CEO Vicky Bullen: “It is fascinating to think that at the height of his power, just two years away from a cataclysmic war, Soviets were inadvertently creating an indulgence brand.”

“Both Krupskaya and Pekar have survived the test of time to become deeply embedded in the psyches of Russian consumers. Our task is to modernise the brands and packaging without throwing away the equity these brands have built up over the decades.”