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The branding work we did for Shrewsbury with &SMITH last year has won a D&AD award. Shrewsbury is the only branding scheme nominated for a D&AD pencil in its category (just nudging ahead of London 2012′s Olympic branding, no less).
Read all about Shrewsbury here - then go there.
We’ve noticed something. Behind a lot of brands with good writing, there’s a founder who penned the words themselves. Someone who had a clear idea of what they wanted to do, knew who they wanted to be and how they wanted to sound. It goes to show that good writing and clear thinking are one and the same.
‘How should our brand write for Facebook, Twitter and [insert the next big thing here]?’ That’s a question nervous brand managers ask us a lot at the moment.
To their slight dismay, we don’t hand over a template, a guideline or a guaranteed-to-get-you-more-retweets-than-that-photo-of-Barack-and-Michelle trade secret. Because social media is different to other writing. You’re talking to people, so it’s even more important to sound like a real person when you write.
It’s probably no surprise that the best brands’ Twitter accounts often just have one person writing their updates. And they don’t just understand the brand they’re writing for, they put their own personality into the words too:
To find out your author name, simply take your first and last names, write a book, get it published and read the name on the cover.
— WaterstonesOxfordSt (@WstonesOxfordSt) October 9, 2012
This is a hard lesson for old-school branding folk to get their heads around because it’s almost impossible to replicate or neatly slot into a template.
But that’s not all. We’ve noticed that the more brands go off on tangents or say things that don’t necessarily sound ‘on-brand’, the more people warm to them.
It’s easy to blame bad writing on cautious clients or the scars of two-thousand-and-one track changes. But much of the blame has to lie with copywriters themselves. Too many of them have knocked out sloppy words for far too long.
We want it to stop. So we’ve written, not rules exactly, but provocations. What if we rip up the lazy clichés and hold people who write words for a living (including us) to account? So writers can’t hide a weak idea behind stylistic tricks or coast when they think a client won’t notice, or the deadline is tight.
Let’s stop the rot and get out of this rut.
Switch to manual.
Butter, not margarine. Figs straight from the field, dried in the sunshine and filled by hand one at a time. A cake that takes 36 hours to make. ‘Snowflake’ meringues, wrapped in wax paper, by hand. The yeast master who look after the natural yeast, 365 days a year, when everyone else goes home…
So many brands bang on about how oh-so-authentic they are. We’ve been giving Carluccio’s the words to prove it.
We’re talking at Nice to Meet You at Dalston Roof Park on the 12th of September, along with Marion Deuchars. We went to Nice To Meet You in June. It’s a good night. For £30 you get a gig, some dinner, some talks from people (Ben Hammersley was at the one we went to) and a chance to meet people in between (the clue’s in the name).
Here’s the brand we created for Shrewsbury with design agency & Smith. The Original One-Off: a brand that showcases all the one-offs in Shrewsbury, a one-of-a-kind town that can’t be copied.
Brand strategy has puffed itself up to be so important it’s put on a pedestal, and it’s high time we knocked it off. Let’s drop the diagrams and faux-strategy once and for all, says Rob in Design Week.
We’ve all been there. Brand presentations that take about three-and-a-half days to go through. The first part often goes over that particular agency’s or client’s take on branding. In this bit, they’ll tell you that it isn’t about slapping a logo on everything. It’s much, much more than that. They’ll probably have a SillyGrandioseLabel® for what they do, which sums up what branding is, just with a ™ on the end. 500 insights, activation plans, and all manner of shapes (triangles, keys, doughnuts, onions) later… you get a ‘proposition’ that’s ‘not for external use’ and is so broad you could recycle it for any other brand. If a good product, service or idea comes off the back of these soupy strategies, it’s a miracle. Or the strategy’s post-rationalised to fit it.
It goes on, and so could I, but I’ll spare you. The question to ask is whether it’s too late to do something about it…
Exotic ingredients from all over the world but made in London… we’ve summed up Molton Brown’s brand for them:
