A Sign of the Times
June 11th, 2010 Comment 3
Clockwise from left: Studded tyres forbidden. Handicraft. Farm shop. Commercial area.
So, I was flicking through a magazine from the Swedish Transport Administration, as you do, and this little notice struck me. New traffic signs, and an image of 2010 all in one. Out of four signs: one brought on by environmental concerns, one telling you where you can shop stuff generally – and not less than two drawing on the craze for craft authenticity.
Interesting for future anthropologists as this collection of signs might prove to be for its subject matter, it’s also a piece of information design. And – a sign saying Farm shop showing a sign saying Farm shop? My first thought was obviously Is this the very best you can do, Swedish Transport Administration? But then I got a little more philosophical about it, and now I’m quite sure it’s not lazy, but a covert critique of modern society. At the Swedish Transport Administration, they’ve read their Bourdieu and their Baudrillard (frankly, with a degree in Cultural Studies, where do you expect to end up?), and they’ve been talking among themselves about how they think buying your food at farm shops is as much about cultural capital as better tasting, more sustainably produced cucumbers. “Really”, they said to each other, “it all evolves around the farm shop as a sign, a symbol, for the educated middle class – the actual act of shopping is subordinated. Let’s make a statement, or actually more like a piece of conceptual art, about this.” And that’s how the Sign of Signs was born.
Similarly, that’s why the craftsman doesn’t actually do any actual hands-on crafting, but is just meekly pointing to something which he has presumably done (or is it an anvil?). “With this gesture”, the STA people agreed, “the constructed nature of authenticity is exposed. This man’s saying to the spectator: ‘Here, look, I’m re-enacting your idea of how craft should be produced, I’m just your dream image of craft made into physical form, I’m the Schloss Neuschwanstein of Handicraft!’”
Poignant stuff.
A Rather Brilliant Blog About Brands In China
June 6th, 2010 Comment 3
A little reading tip: if you’re in branding/advertising and work on projects aimed at the Asian market (like I do sometimes), don’t miss the blog of Ray Ally, executive director at Landor Beijing. Entertaining and clever analysis on how brands are communicating, and should be communicating, in China.
The Strange Case of the Behaviour Changing Sunglasses
May 31st, 2010 Comment 4
A quick detour from my little deconstructing-the-idea-of-brand-authenticity series, to a somewhat related subject. I read something rather fascinating the other day. It’s got nothing to do with how brand authenticity is constructed, but rather how intimately people associate the idea of something that’s fake with immoral behaviour. And how much our thoughts, feelings and actions are determined by our environment. (Which is in itself is supporting the case against the concept of simple, straightforward authentic identity, but anyway.)
In “The Counterfeit Self: The Deceptive Costs of Faking It”, (Psychological Science 21(5) 712–720), Gino et al. tell us this: if you give someone a pair of sunglasses and tell them they’re fake Chloe, they will both cheat more in tests, and start judging other people’s behaviour as more deceptive, than if you tell them they’re wearing authentic brand ones. (Of course, they’re all the same, real Chloe glasses.) This is true even if you just randomly assign glasses to people, so it’s got nothing to do with the possibly shady personality of the counterfeit enthusiast.
The determining factor in this, they say, is that people’s own sense of authenticity in the sense of opposed-to-self-alienation is diminished by the (supposed) wearing of fake items. The “Fake Chloe” crowd agree more with statements such as “Right now, I don’t know how I really feel inside”, “Right now, I feel out of touch with the ‘real me’” and “Right now, I feel alienated from myself” than the “Real Chloe”-wearers. (Thankfully, I have no idea how it feels like to be “alienated from myself”. Is this because I’m so wonderfully authentic – well I don’t wear any counterfeit accessories, so I’m making it rather easy for myself – , or because I’ve always lived so completely detached from the Real Me that I wouldn’t know when it was missing? Like a dog with docked tail, happily wagging and wiggling away.)
This idea not something totally new, it rhymes very well with for example this: even the non-religious become more helpful after reading a story from the Bible. But it would be interesting to see if the same phenomenon occurred with brands people think are morally authentic vs inauthentic – would you cheat less after drinking Innocent juice? Or even just craft authentic – surrounded by the furniture made by small Danish ateliers now run by a third generation member of a family of skilled craftsmen etc etc you so desire from the pages of Monocle magazine, would you be a better person than in your current Ikea Hell (for it is Hell, let’s be honest)? Should you splash out, for the sake of Humanity in general?
And in that case, would this truthfulness/anti-self alienation effect actually be a reason for making brands that people deem to be authentic? Utopian in a quite roundabout way, but still. Anyway: don’t you just love people. Such weird creatures.
Meanwhile, in France …
May 23rd, 2010 Comment 0
… I’m trying to induce French riots in order to get my favourite Monoprix snack back on the shelves. Unfortunately, as of yet, no luck.
Brand Authenticity Pt II – Louis Vuitton Jumps On the Craft Bandwagon
May 10th, 2010 Comment 0
They’ve been around for a while now, those Desirée Dolron-shot ads for Louis Vuitton, showing the craftsmen and -women at their work. Vermeer-inspired, beautifully executed, and quite ludicrous.
Put aside the sexual connotations of these ads. Even though you don’t have to be that much of a semiotician to find “The young woman and the tiny folds”, illustrated with a girl working on a red handbag – a handbag! A vaginal symbol if there has even been one, according to Freud – with, well, tiny folds, rather obvious. Anyway.
The brand strategy here is quite transparent. Jumping on the luxury-should-be-about-craftsmanship bandwagon, Louis Vuitton tries to associate its brand with old-fashioned, artisan production. The result is, however, a bit like an upscale version of the claim of “using recipes we create at the kitchen table” on the frozen microwave lunch I had today. Why? Is it because, as Business Week points out, most Louis Vuitton products aren’t handmade? Not necessarily. Not that many people have the privilege of visiting a Louis Vuitton factory, and anyway, authenticity isn’t the same as truth.
In “The organizational construction of authenticity: An examination of contemporary food and dining in the U.S.” (don’t you just love academic titles?), authors Glenn Carroll and Dennis Ray Wheaton divide authenticity into four types; moral authenticity (Whole Foods), idiosyncratic authenticity (Dogfish Head brewery), type authenticity (that Italian restaurant where the owner’s mother sits at a table, and is overweight) and craft authenticity. Rather self-explanatory, craft authenticity is authenticity based on the artistry and mastery of the people making the product, and a refusal of industrial mass production. In everything from food to furniture to luxury bags, craft authenticity has been an extremely influential concept over the last years. In fact nowadays I feel rather embarrassed serving guests any food stuff about which I cannot tell a story involving several generations of artisan producers, techniques abandoned by the rest of the food industry before the 1950s, a mythic element of the secret-sauce kind, and a ridiculously long production time.
Projecting any kind of authenticity requires three things, according to Carroll and Wheaton: a visibly projected identity claim, credibility of the claim, and an identity that’s perceived as reflecting the meaning of authenticity in question. It’s obviously the second ingredient that’s the weak link here. The marketing claim is hard to verify, and it’s not particularly consistent with the brand’s general image.
If there is one luxury brand that has totally done away with every connection to Old World quality, instead choosing an aggressive brand exposure strategy that has got it associated with your little sister’s most annoying friends, well, it’s Louis Vuitton. In fact, a typical Louis Vuitton quote goes like this: “Showing off her Louis Vuitton collection (she had the sunglasses, belt, wallet, and garment bag!), Heidi Montag looked cute in a sleeveless beige top and light khaki trousers …” (from celebrity-gossip.net). The demureness of the 17th century-esque seamstress does not rhyme with the brashness of the stereotypical consumer.
The point of Carroll and Wheaton’s article is that authenticity is projected more credibly when it is organisationally constructed. A feature of the organisation – highly visible, costly to change and implicitly permanent, should radiate the symbolic meaning of authenticity that the company wants to project. But modern production is a pre-requisite for keeping Louis Vuitton’s operating margins well above the industry average. Would making a more reality-based campaign on the small part of the company’s production that’s actually made in an artisan way (custom-made products made in an atelier in Paris) do? Perhaps. Or maybe Louis Vuitton should simply rethink their strategy.
What Can Branding Learn From Service Design? (And Vice Versa)
March 30th, 2010 Comment 0
Brand consultancies come in all shapes and sizes, not to mention actual work output – from the very conceptual, intangible work of agencies that are basically management consultants with a brand focus, there’s a long way to the hands-on graphic design-based approach of others. But the basic approach of many of these agencies is that a brand is an intangible asset, that can be shaped and controlled with the help of the tangible means of communication: visual identity, advertising, and lately, social media. More extensive brand models place ”the product” as an integral part of the brand, as opposed to the brand being something that adds to it. Still, traditional brand building focus has been on communicating and persuading. I would argue, that as branding practice has evolved to include an ever larger perspective – much brand theory today is more concerned with organisational culture and abstract value propositions than with the humble design work once associated with it – it would be wise to include the repertoire of service design in its tool box.
Why service design? Basically, service design is all about creating great user experiences. This is quite different than the creation of a product, which is something that still needs the magic of human interaction to be meaningful (a great user experience can very well include the interaction with a product, but that’s another matter). The experience is what moves people, what they seek and what they remember. And the experience is a powerful thing: a strong, positive experience can create a lasting bond to the entity that provided it. Contrary to much market communication, it has value in itself to the user, it does not need to be associated with a marketable product/service in an artificial way. Instead, the service experience is the embodiment of the brand. Additionally, with its insistence on building value for the user, service design seems like the more modern way of building brands in a world where the mass marketing concepts of target groups of consumers being served story telling and randomly attached values seem increasingly out of touch with reality.
But is it that simple, really? No. Focusing on the design of services can mean a too narrow conceptualisation of how people see value and how they make sense of the world. In its most basic form, service design can seem almost obsessed by just simplifying daily life with a nifty service. But if too single-mindedly concerned with the sheer practicalities of a good service, there is a danger of forgetting the emotional aspect of human life. There’s a danger of falling into a service variety of the frankly quite naïve “cut the marketing bullshit, make a good product” rhetoric I ranted about a while ago (here).
This is the power of traditional branding: with its symbolism and metaphors, it talks to the powerful emotional, expressive part of the human brain. The part that dreams, imagines, plays. The part that makes the experience of getting a coffee in a small coffee shop in a tiny Italian village a memorable experience of excellence, even though the same coffee served in a high street chain would taste unremarkable. It seems to me that the real power of service design as a way to build brands lies where its user value focus is combined with a creative way of thinking about what a good user experience is. A way that accounts for both our longing for being told the myth of the Hero’s journey, and for being able to buy our train tickets with the help of an iPhone app.
Brand Authenticity Pt I
March 9th, 2010 Comment 0
A couple of my most interesting assignments during the last years have been developing brands within food and wine. As a result, I’ve spent quite some time observing brand strategies in this field. It does not take too long, though, to identify varying kinds of authenticity as the big, macro trend almost all food and drink brands have taken into account in some way.
Authenticity, of course, is considered a general holy grail for 21st century brands. No wonder, as we live in a culture that’s more or less obsessed with authenticity; almost anything under constant threat of being labelled fake. (Authenticity is a concept with a polemic sort of built into it; it’s never as visible as when it’s questioned).
It’s also, a term that is often either taken very literally as a “real” business (un)strategy in a genuine backlash against, well, inauthenticity, or discussed in an almost outraged fashion as a cunning way to trick people into paying a premium. Either making a fan portrait of Innocent Drinks, or “calling their bluff” by pointing to them being partly owned by The Coca Cola Company. For someone involved in branding, though, I’d say it’s important to have a more thorough understanding of authenticity. Seeing how this concept so heavily influences the way people make sense of their world, knowing how it’s created and how it’s maintained (hint: it’s rarely a one-person-holding-strings kind of job) is crucial.
In short, social scientists tell us these about authenticity as it pertains to brands:
Authenticity has many meanings. For example, authentic can be interpreted as being moral (“being true to your values”), or historically accurate, or true to a type (like a music genre).
Authenticity is socially constructed. It does not tell you anything about metaphysical realness, but about how it’s perceived. A brand, a product, a place is interpreted as authentic and treated as such: that’s when the value is created. (That does not mean that it’s arbitrary, though!)
Authenticity is not stable, but always changing – what was perceived as terribly inauthentic can become authentic with time. And what was once authentic can suddenly have to meet other demands on authenticity, the bar has been raised, by other brands or by other factors.
Authenticity is not universal, but individual – what is authentic for someone is not to another. Judging authenticity is very connected with being a member of some kind of social context; being working class, or being a goth for that matter. More specifically, the concept of authenticity changes with the amount of cultural capital a person has.
There is some great literature on authenticity, of course. For example, Michael Beverland has written about authenticity in premium wines, and Glenn Carroll and Dennis Wheaton about restaurants – I’ll get around to both of them in later posts, which will explore different kinds of authenticity, and how it’s is crafted and cared for.
Chess Thinking
March 7th, 2010 Comment 0
At the opening of Stockholm art venue Bonniers Konsthall’s Projections show, I sat in and listened to an artist talk with Dutch video artist Guido van der Werve. He’s quite brilliant by the way, even though it’s impossible to find decent evidence of it on-line. Both solemn Romanticism and sly humour at the same time, and with a healthy Chopin obsession, too.
Anyway, as he was talking about his latest film, in which he and chess Grandmaster Leonid Yudasin play a chessboard reworked into a piano, he mentioned this: the game of chess is too complicated for a Grandmaster to learn all strategies and possible outcomes with his logical, rational mind. Instead, what they do is that they train their aesthetic sensibility, they look for what feels and looks “right” to them. This part of the brain copes with those complex and quite mathematical chess problems much better than the rational part, in the Grandmasters’ experience. Rather interesting, wouldn’t you say?
A Good Brand is the Ultimate AR Technology*
March 2nd, 2010 Comment 1
Why does “augmented” in Augmented Reality have to equal “filled with more information about the object”? Information is great, but it’s not the only route to elevating your mundane existence, now is it. Actually, If I get to choose a little more widely, I don’t particularly want the reality that surrounds me to contain more information. (And bear in mind that I’m the person in my circle of friends who is by far the most passionate about learning and sharing knowledge. Actually, to the point where I’ve bored many a dinner party with reports on whether the restaurant we’re at uses the tissue brand I’ve worked for, in their restrooms. I should stop doing that. You can tell by the embossing pattern on the hand towel, by the way.) I’m quite happy in that department. I’ve got this:
Screenshots from this video.
What I would like from objects around me, instead of them telling me absolutely everything about themselves at any instant, is for them to be a bit more exciting, interesting, fun even, on a more emotional level. Why not make me feel good about myself, or make me dream little. Well, that’s what good brands do.
Also, right now, I’d like my head to stop hurting. And in fact …
*Or Love.