Branding secrets

Step three: creating the brand expressions

Once you’ve agreed a brand strategy with the client, the next stage is to create its brand expression to tell the story of the brand. As Knapp explains, it’s about a lot more than just creating a cute design: the colours, style, visual language, copywriting – every element – that you use in your clients’ branding has to reflect both the brand truth and the way that you approach the client’s current or prospective audience: you wouldn’t normally use street slang to talk to high class, educated customers, for example, or vice versa.

One of the other, most important, elements to consider is how your choice of colours, language and branding will play out across different cultures or countries around the globe. After all, what might be appropriate in the UK, for example, might not be acceptable elsewhere.

The creative expression of the brand also has to extend across the whole gamut of a user’s senses: from the quality of the materials used by the brand – plastic, leather, wood, steel and so on – to the way staff are expected to treat the brand’s customers. When Landor helped British airline BMI create a brand for its new transatlantic service, this approach even extended to the kind of music that would be played when customers boarded the plane and what kind of food should be served.

In BMI’s case, that meant ‘Young Americans’ by David Bowie – a British man singing about America – with a menu of typically British fare like bacon butties and Marmite. “That’s what we aim for,” says Knapp. “The experiential component of the brand where all your senses are engaged in making sure everything adds up to the right perception. Because if you were onboard and suddenly heard Kraftwerk, for example, you might have a very different impression. If you’d read the in-flight magazine and it came over in a very stuffy, pompous tone, this would be a dislocation of the perception and the experience that you’re trying to create. So engaging as many of the human senses as you can through all of the experiences is what you try to do to make it a truly immersive brand experience.”

Step four: putting the brand into practice

The true test of any brand or rebranding exercise, of course, is how well – or badly – your strategy and its creative expression are handled ‘out there’, where your ideals bump up against reality. The best strategy in the world won’t work if the public face of the company – your clients’ employees – don’t believe in it or fail to implement it properly. “We’re talking truly about branding. It’s all about what the company stands for, how it behaves, how it develop its products and how the service is played through,” explains Knapp.

“You could fly on three different airlines – Lufthansa, British Airways and Virgin – and the experience would be very different on each one because all those staff know what it is to represent those brands, and those brands are all very different. That’s because they have been helped to understand it and feel proud to represent them. If they don’t, then the links in the chain start to fracture. But if you can make it a complete experience, then that really creates a compelling brand proposition.”

Step five: branding is an ongoing process

For many of Landor’s biggest clients, creating or refining a brand isn’t a one-off problem that needs to be solved: it’s part of an ongoing, constantly evolving process. Brands need to continuously attract and remind customers of the products or services they offer, and adapt to market conditions. As Landor believes, branding is also about making changes to existing offers for a client’s customers or creating new incentives to engage them – its work on the British Airways’ Executive Club being a case in point.

“If you don’t keep the relevance,” says Knapp, “the brand starts to get dry and dusty and people overlook it, so the brand needs to be very well managed internally by the client to still make it attractive to the customers. If not, at that point you find you start to lag badly. But a brand should never been seen as finished. It’s always an ongoing project.”