The National Cycling Academy

It’s only taken a few months for NCA to win over £600,000 worth of contracts. We now employ nearly twenty members of staff.

The next step is to increase the size of Team NCA.

Printed Space

Printed Space prints interior design products: wallpaper, blinds, canvas and now flooring. Owner/partner Kristian Holt developed Floorink, a new type of cushion flooring last year. Along with international flooring company Forbo, Kristian has created a unique product. “We can print any image our clients choose at any size (original file size allowing). SO instead of repeat patterns or tiles our flooring solution delivers one single image. This opens up a world of possibilities.”

I became involved with the company nearly two years ago. Together we’ve aggregated several websites, created and established a new identity, relaunched and devised a rolling system of initiatives that will introduce an almost unimaginable amount of design options to customers.

A key part of the site is the area where we work closely with artists, photographers and designers around the world.

We’re about to start a marketing and PR campaign.

The future, and the fossils

Branding as a practice is growing up. It’s becoming more technical, more scientific, more responsive and more responsible. Well it is with the brands we work for and those of their competitors. It’s getting bigger too—much bigger. It now spans the globe, even for our smallest and most niche market clients.

This is causing us to invest in more research, to engage in collecting and analyzing evidence based metrics, increasing our technical knowledge and working harder than ever before at thinking smart thoughts. But where is all of this growing up leading to?

A more democratic and sustainable future?

Yes, we think so. Simply because those who abuse the public trust are being brought to task more effectively by the millions of witnesses to their indiscretions and because it’s impacting on their bottom line. This relatively new two way communication is impacting on business practice for the better and we should all keep working away at it. We’re seeing companies respond by taking internal communications and brand awareness amongst colleagues, managers and stakeholders, much more seriously. This awareness of self and how their customers (you, I and them) are perceived. Is this the death knell for old school advertising and marketing?

Certainly the ‘word of mouth on steroids’ analogy used to describe social networking can be proven. There are plenty of case studies to draw on. Marketing and advertising still bites and delivers. Channel diversity is offering more opportunities for us to really target sectors but, by being more thinly spread is creating it’s own brand management challenges. Which brings us neatly to the changing craft of brand management and quality control.

Implementation is progressively more demanding. The growing diversity of channels impacts on brand management. Consistency of colour palettes and font use soaks up time and resources for the more conscientious client/agency partnership. We are predicting more convergence from design tools, software interpolation and hardware standards. These aren’t new issues to the design community but with growing demands on agency resources there is evidence of more urgency in the global dialogue about shared colour standards and font use. We see this extending in to the distribution and management of brand materials too. Crude tools designed to share material across social networking channels point towards sophisticated distribution engines married to (end-user) interface networks in the future—perhaps a dashboard for drag and drop content management across a brand’s channel network. In other words a totally integrated content management system including font distribution and colour management. If they’re the only changes your facing you’re getting off lightly. Well, not exactly, branding by definition communicates change and there are big changes on the way.

Obviously we keep a weather eye on external influences: globalization, localization, political intervention, natural resource depletion, sustainability, social responsibility (religious and cultural) for example. Our most enlightened clients work hard at future thinking too. Many publish white papers that share this knowledge. In many cases our clients are actually way ahead of their customers and waiting for them to catch up can be frustrating. We have seen some movement towards early adoption techniques where a switched on client will encourage portions of their customer base to adopt new ideas in an almost below brand, clandestine way. Usually this is through social networking or micro sites. Take-up builds to a tipping point and the client can then go above line. We always use this as an answer to the question, “Should agencies ever challenge clients if they disagree with their strategies”. The answer has to be yes, but offer alternatives, and if necessary run the alternatives in parallel to the client’s strategy. We see more of this parallel brand reasoning in future brand strategy. However in the natural course of business it is our duty to deliver realistic solutions in the here and now and, at most, strategically in the near future.

Branding has become closely associated with the free market economy probably because the biggest brands seem omnipresent, almost controlling. When actually branding is used across the social and political landscape, even the anti-branding organizations work under brands. With the mess the free market made of policing themselves responsibly we are seeing increased political intervention and a general move by the business community itself to respond positively to society’s hightened expectations of corporate accountability.

Anti-branding would more accurately be described as Anti brands which exert a great deal of social influence are unelected and unaccountable – but that’s not quite so sexy. Branding per se isn’t their target.

“There is talk about the pollution of the mental environment,” Lasn says. “People are concerned about the diet our brains are fed. It is fueled by the growth in mental dysfunction. People feel it is to do with branding and the onslaught of the estimated 3,000 marketing messages they receive each day. People are fed up with being mentally abused and mind-fucked. This movement is a potential threat of magnitude-people have not yet recognized the potential backlash to come.

“I believe that in five to 10 years this movement could be as big as the physical environment movement,” he concludes.

If you dismiss that as the ravings of radical hype, consider that the culture jammers are using the very same tactics as the corporate marketers (though much more ethically, they claim). The newly launched Blackspot sneaker, therefore, is an “anti-logo” sneaker, made in a family-run factory in Portugal. The black shoes come with a hand painted white spot. “Activists are tired of just whining, they are looking for effective ways to really stand out,” says Lasn. “So we launched an anti-logo. We intend to create a cool that is more powerful and cut into the market share of Nike. We hope the Blackspot anti-brand will catch on.”

With every pair of Blackspot sneakers you get a share certificate that outlines the Blackspot vision: “If we can make this work, then we will have set a precedent that can be used to transform other industries. Just imagine: a Blackspot music label that is truly independent; a chain of Blackspot restaurants that kicks McDonald’s ass by serving only locally-produced food; a network of individually-owned bio-diesel outlets that cuts deeply into Big Oil’s market share. The possibilities are limited only by the desire for change. There is no copyright on the Blackspot anti-logo. Take it and use it.”

Kalle Lasn, editor of Adbusters and cofounder of the Adbusters Media Foundation from www.brandchannel.com

What does the future look like?

Diversity is creating an aesthetic chaos where trends flow together like currents in a fast flowing river. No longer can art directors jump on the latest look, there isn’t one, there are many. Also, we’re all critics now. Our blogs, Twitterings, Facebook comments and so on… enable us to share our insight (or lack of it) in formerly unprecedented ways. We are at liberty to influence trend leaders with alternative ideas and, here’s the difference, build constituencies around our ideas. This aesthetic flux will profoundly impact on corporate identity design and brand development. How will brands respond to core markets demonstrating aesthetic divergence from the brand vision? Will brands follow or, as now, remain resolutely static? Will brands be liberated from one aesthetic palette? Can a single brand adapt within a ‘season’ to its fractured sectors? Does it need to? Is this an opportunity to move with sectors in the way we currently adapt brands for different language groups and cultures? You see, when we turn to issues of aesthetics then the future of brand development looks more fluid too.

Obviously we’re not alone in recognizing this, Moving Brands (London) say: “Fixed identities are dead. Our approach produces identity systems that are as dynamic and relevant as the business, service or product they represent.” What does this mean in practice? Go to Cool Hunter Platinum to find out www.thecoolhunter.co.uk/platinum. For this company, embedded in innovation and change, their business policy statements read like a manifesto for future branding. They talk about ushering brands in to the ‘cool new age’ this age is ‘niche’ it is stands out from the old noise the millions of its readers are so familiar with. They lead with: “A new world where extraordinary is the new ordinary”. Perhaps we can be a little cynical that this is all simply more hype and yet there is a profound authenticity in their voice. These are trend leaders in a generation that is rejecting the unelected, top down, corporate schisms. They are choosing a local-global, socially responsible, change for the common good philosophy that will find credence amongst societies abused by decades of corporate greed. This is smart revolution, a revolution that starts with hearts and minds and results in democratic decision making, manifested in a better built environment and a sustainable culture—a celebration of opportunity and progress rather than destruction, anger, greed and oppression.

Branding is being reclaimed by clever, intelligent, responsible people who bring form and function to great new ideas. Ideas that are born out of an open, on-going dialogue with those around them. The rest can be found in fossils.

Bradley Wiggins Logo

While Bradley Wiggins was away in France doing what he does best I was working on his logo. We had talked at length about what he wanted and I’d spent several happy meetings with Cath drinking coffee and discussing aesthetics.
We both love the modernist vibe but wanted to keep away from nostalgia. The mark has multiple elements which bolt together like a track bike. The vertical bars look great floating free but when dealing with complex backgrounds or images the wheel symbols can be drafted in to add a punch.

I received a text from first Brad and then Cath when his Time Trial bike arrived looking ‘The dog’s nads’ and sporting the logo. I’ll get pictures of the bike at the World’s in October when it gets its first outing.

Bradley Wiggins' Twitter background

Brad’s Twitter almost moved as fast he did, sky rocketing from 0-30,000 in two days.