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For a shorter illustrated version of this Larry Miller article, see Eyewire.com. |
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Buzzwords in the 60s: |
creativity, unique-selling proposition (USP), and corporate identity (CI). Ad agency Doyle Dane Bernbach stood for creativity, a camp into which I inserted myself, and an agency where I worked as a fledgling art director. Creativity at DDB gave us the Volkswagen Beetle campaign and tradition–smashing headlines like "Lemon" and "Think small." For Avis, DDB gave us the mind–bending candor of, "We’re only number two. So we try harder." Ted Bates Inc., and its chief, Rosser Reeves, stood foursquare behind Reeves’ baby, USP. USP and Bates gave us hammers pounding our heads out of which shot lightning bolts; stomachs with acid bubbles; and, if I remember right, pre-feminist slices-of-life with housewives swabbing toilets. (Could ya puke!) Both approaches worked. Creativity and USP were mutually scornful and felt mutually exclusive. Creativity demanded you find out what was unique about products and services you were marketing, then present it with panache. USP also focused on product uniqueness, but writers or account guys at those shops often handed copy and scribbles to "layout men" (more like comp renderers than art directors) resulting in the same insipid, insulting, anti-creative hammers and lightning bolts. Lippincott & Margulies, where I worked on the Chrysler corporate identity program, reached the pinnacle of the CI ladder. (Now L&M is referred to as a "branding firm.") The growing CI genre supported many such firms. CI was a kind of graphic voodoo, with a trademark— usually geometric; a typeface—usually Helvetica Medium, no matter who the client was; and a color— usually red or blue; systematically tacked on everywhere as prescribed by restrictive rules found in an anal graphics manual. CI usually affected auto showrooms, store signage, and corporate communications. It was and usually still is tactically isolated from "mundane" media like ads, TV, and collateral, except for applying the logo itself. |
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Buzzword in the 70s: |
Positioning, the brainchild of Al Ries and Jack Trout. Their former agency art director partner Tony Cappiello helped with visualization of the concept. Positioning dealt with controlling the space that a product or service or company or brand would hold in a person’s mind, versus the position held by a competitor’s product or service or company or brand. ("Let’s see now, Bounty is thicker, okay, but, err, umm, the one with the lumberjack is cheaper. So...uhh?") Positioning made sense then. Positioning makes sense now. |
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No buzzwords in the mid-80s to about 1998, |
the era of mind and body gurus like Deepak Chopra and Stephen Covey and Bernie Siegel and Anthony Robbins and Tom Peters (see below)—and Gary Null whose health program I follow as I write, drinking his Green Stuff. The desktop publishing revolution, bottom-up marketing, and guerrilla marketing were all thrown into the mix for leavening. |
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The buzzword has become: |
Branding. There are books on branding (22 Immutable Laws of Branding by Al and Laura Ries; Creating Brand Loyalty by Richard Czerniawski and Michael Maloney), articles about branding, seminars on branding (got a year 2000 mailing on this from Tom Peters), everyone jawing about branding—while forgetting USP and creativity and positioning and bottom-up marketing. No one speaks about a product, but about a brand. No one speaks about a service, but about a brand. No one speaks about a company, but about a brand. And these guys are sharp. Suits. MBAs. Futuristic vocabulary. Frequent–flyer miles. |
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Then they do one thing wrong and ruin it all. |
What they do right is assess the market for the brand and its competition, find the point of differentiation in a sea of parity products, write strategies and mission statements. Then they inform their creative "vendors" (oh how I hate that demeaning word!) about it, so all are focused on the same goal, using the same style they apply to print, TV, interactive and online media, collateral and promotion. |
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Then they do one thing wrong and ruin it all. Again. |
Before getting into what they do wrong, let me tell you who did it right, for decades, before branding became a buzzword. |
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CBS. |
First, under the creative leadership of William Golden who created the CBS Eye. Then, for about 40 years, under the direction of Lou Dorfsman, for whom I once worked. (Lou’s now semi-retired, comfortable, but, so I hear, still cleans leaves out of his own gutters. I pray his stepladder is sturdier than mine.) |
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Lou’s achievement is beyond superlatives. |
CBS was a political potboiler, it seemed to me, with domains fiefdoms departments divisions bureaucracy. The average creative hotshot would have been bamboozled intimidated flummoxed turned into a hapless blob beset with all the bureaucratic nonsense that would prohibit doing great work. |
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But Lou, |
with his strong personality, immense talent, taste, chutzpah, jokes, and Bronx street sense, with the potent support of CBS founder Bill Paley and President Frank Stanton, managed to do truly great creative work decade after decade. — Great creative work that held together to make a powerful statement about CBS. To create and enhance that one, single brand. And most of it done without a CI manual spelling out how to do this and where to place that and what color the other must be. When "Black Rock," the masterpiece CBS building designed by Eero Saarinen was built at Fifty-second Street and Sixth Avenue, Lou did create some rules, but of limited scope — mostly for corporate stationery, building signage, and for the artwork hung in halls and offices. (Lou’s own office, naturally, was a discombobulated artist’s atelier that violated every rule he imposed on others. Don’t ask.) When TV came into its own and radio was "in deep shit" compared to TV, the young hotshot Lou was put in charge of the new radio division’s advertising. He says he was a nervous kid who began reading trade magazines instead of design magazines. Lunches with art director friends turned into lunches with researchers and programmers. He was no longer looking first at layouts, but for strategic concepts. He became an ad man. To save radio. And he did. Later on I headlined a trade ad for CBS Radio, C B S S A Y S B U Y N B C ! Lou gives most of the credit I’ve been giving him to Frank Stanton, whom he calls "the real de Medici." The CBS president had taste and ideas. Stanton would invite Lou to lunch in his private dining room—and everyone knew, which gave Lou stature. If Lou needed to see Stanton, it was often, "Come on up now." Word got out — I’d guess Lou saw to it that it did. How many CEOs grant spontaneous audience to their brand-makers? — Why not? Is there anything more important than the impression they create that millions see? |
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(1) talent—
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Lou paid bupkis, nothing, yet the best people beat a path to his door (I was one of them long before Daddy Desktop) for the chance to do award-winning work. Great staffers like Bill Wurtzel, who became a successful agency creative director; or Ted Andresakes; or Peter Bradford; or Rick Levine who became a DDB art director and then a TV commercials director; writer David Herzbrun. Great illustrators like John Alcorn. A great production honcho, Herman Aronson, and his predecessor, Ed Side who, Lou says, was there at 5 A.M. maintaining quality control. And the world’s other greatest graphic designer, Herb Lubalin, sometimes pitching in freelance as a consultant. |
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(2) Lou Dorfsman himself—
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a creative matador and first-class SOB (who calls himself a benevolent dictator) with powerful headlines and concepts he would push you and push you to make into something fabulous. And push you. And, |
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(3) Lou’s sensibility—
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which united everything in a way that can’t be defined or codified by any sort of rigid, so-called "corporate graphic standards manual." His artistic sensibility, business sensibility, corporate horse-sense. And remember, much of it done cheap, done fast, done on deadline, often between noon and 7 PM, enroute to the New York Times City Edition, before computers, when every stage of the creative process had foot and bike messengers traipsing New York back and forth with manuscripts and type and photostats. In the book, Dorfsman & CBS (Rizzoli and American Showcase, and out of print but try Harvest Booksearch 800 563-1222), Dorfsman himself says: "You want authority? You have to know what you’re talking about. You have to be willing to sit in meetings for hours on end. You have to care about research and budgets. You have to fight for your ideas with cogent arguments. You have to earn the confidence of the people in top management." Two days ago [in year 2000], Lou, 82, still kicking ass, added, "We were branding CBS without knowing there was such a word." He said, "You can’t do great work without a great client!" Then this great designer put design in its place: "Client client client, concept concept concept, some design of course. To me, those are the key things." |
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So what do today’s branding geniuses got wrong? |
They don’t got no Lou Dorfsman. They do got account people looking things over. They may — as BellSouth says it has — have reduced their many ad agencies and creative vendors to just a few. That’s fine as far as it goes. But so what. They don’t got no talented and canny single pair of executive art director eyes looking over everything from its formative stages, to its development, to its paper selection (Lou treated paper as crucial), to prepress, printing and binding and uploading —to create that ineffable and indefinable sense of relationship between all the pieces, all the media, all the selling and image messages — |
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This mélange can’t possibly yield that single, powerful, coherent brand statement they all say they want. |
I mean. Take BellSouth. Who are they these days? Or American Express? (What is that blue thing anyway?) Or MCI WorldCom? (Is it Worldcom without the MCI or WorldCom with an intercap C?) I mean. Take car commercials. Do the cars tie in their TV with print with showroom or Web site? And car ads on radio — yikes! — another life-form. Dealer branding?— forget it. Maybe J. Mays, the new-ish Ford design matador, will fix all of that. I expect so. By the way, their 2001 entry, the Ford Focus Techno looks terrific on TV (and may exist to compete with the Chrysler PT Cruiser). I mean. Take beer commercials. Do the beers even think of tying in their multimillion–dollar commercials with their ubiquitous bottle or package labels or with shelf-talkers or print ads? (Of course, packaging designers are in a different league from ad people — just ask them. So how can package design enhance brand continuity?) I don’t know one beer from another unless it’s a dark ale. Will you, Dear Reader, please name some brand names and e-mail us about who you see doing great branding across the board; or who has blown it? Companies do need a design matador. Or a design despot. Or a design doctor. We’re introducing Daddy Desktop Design Doctor for that crucial function. And seeking two committed clients. |
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To achieve branding effectiveness: |
If you’re a designer, set your standards, meet them, raise them, fight for them with the verbal vocabulary of management. Read business magazines as well as creative pubs. If you’re a CEO or higher, the ball is in your court. Get thee a Lou Dorfsman (CBS) or Paul Rand (IBM) or John Massey (Container Corporation) or J. Mays (Ford). And be hands–on. Communication management is more important than financial management. (It’s not? Blowing the brand means minimizing the finances you manage.) At CBS, Paley and Stanton knew what to do. At IBM, Tom Watson knew. At Container Corporation of America, Walter Paepcke knew. At Apple, Steve Jobs knows. Do you know? Daddy Desktop rule: whether it’s an ad or a Web site or a package or a brochure or a business card or sign in a ballpark or statement stuffer or t i n y matchbook or gigantic side of an aircraft, as long as it’s for the same brand, it’s the same job. You also must protect the brand equity. Tom Peters, an exemplary brand name in itself, may be ill-served by the mailing I mention above. It says "full-day event in 20 selected cities." The full day is just 5.25 hours. And only near the bottom of page 3 do they make it perfectly clear that Tom is not in person, but "live via satellite." The cover does feature a single date but I assumed, based on prior experience, that this was my local date. Well, maybe I’m a dope, I got tons of mail that day, zipped through them and for a while thought Tom would be here, live in person. The cover also uses branding merely as a hook, "Brand Everything," then drops the subject. Huh?!? Nor do the type and layout permit me to believe an experienced pro designed the thing. None of this, in my mind, adds to Tom’s credibility, so maybe Tom should also be one of those CEOs who looks at just about everything going out under his name to protect the integrity of the brand — his own name. |
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Bottom line |
Branding is not about voluminous marketing plans. Branding is about effective communication. So if your top creative guy asks, "Ya got five minutes?," go with her or his burst of enthusiasm and say, "Come on up now. I’m waiting." Or desist prating about branding. |
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Dedicated to |
Vance Jonson, friend and great designer and thinker and in many ways, teacher, September 1928–July 2000. Vance passed as Larry Miller was finishing this article. I would’ve liked his comments which would have sharpened (and shortened) this article. He often edited my stuff, pulling out the chaff, suggesting different sequences. As I did for him. You should look up his work. It is intellectual and marketing oriented, graphically and photographically and typographically and verbally beautiful. — Good luck, Susan. |