Last week, I gave an example of brand collision: when two different products end up with the same or similar branding. At the very least, this is confusing for the consumer and has the potential to weaken both brands. In some cases, the collision can be downright embarrassing.

I talked briefly about how to avoid such an occurrence, but today I want to go a little further. It’s easy to spot overlapping taglines using Google, but those are really just the symptoms of a larger problem.

With a list of some 20+ businesses that all use similar slogans, it’s clear that not all of them can possibly be doing the same thing. They throw around the same buzzwords because they have nothing specific or extraordinary to say about themselves.

Brands collide not because everyone is trying to fit into the same spot, but because no one in the pileup has any idea where they are going.

In competitive markets, many look to design to make their company or product more noticeable. While it’s true that good design is important, its pursuit can often cause businesses to overlook the big picture. The way to emerge from the pack starts from within with a business, not its brand. If the message is vanilla it’s probably because the product, is too. Great brands grow from great businesses.

As a designer, I’d rather communicate your strengths than conjure some up for you. A great product starts by being better or substantively different from its competitors in some important area. That’s Business 101. I may be biting the hand that feeds me, but I don’t think better branding makes a poor or indistinguishable product “good”.

Success doesn’t begin with slick graphics or statistically improbable phases. If your product is not outstanding, how can your brand stand out?

This one is a little late to the table, but if you somehow missed both the original airing and the news aggregators out there that picked it up, it may yet be news to you.

A few weeks ago, the Republican party released an advertisement promoting their new slogan “the change you deserve”.

Roll the clip:

The logo test would have been instructive but we should also add to that, as commenter Mark Goren suggests, the Google test. A good brand shouldn’t work just as well alongside your competitor’s logo, nor should it link to anything embarrassing or otherwise counter-message online (like a powerful prescription antidepressant).

It’s one thing for taglines to be interchangeable, quite another when they set up an unfortunate and humorous juxtaposition that ends up on “the funny news”.

You get…nothing! Absolutely nothing!

As I mulled over the clip, I realized “the change you deserve” is a dreadful —if not asinine— tagline. It’s the branding equivalent of Fruit Stripe gum. It starts off nice and sweet, sounding pretty good the first time you hear it, but then the more you think about it, the meaning becomes less and less clear until it’s just pure marketing schlock in your ears.

Slogan: You deserve change.
Audience: Surely I do. But change to what exactly?
Slogan: Uh, the change you deserve.
Audience: And that is…?
Slogan: Not the change those other guys are talking about. Different change. You deserve our change.
Audience: From what I can tell, you’re not really offering much change.
Slogan: Exactly, that’s the change you deserve. (*rimshot*)

Noah Brier's BrandTags has been something of a runaway success. Since May 9, almost everyone, from Seth Godin to Jason Kottke, has written something about it.

BrandTags is "a collective experiment in brand perception. All tags are generated by people like you..." It is basically a way to gauge public perception of brands, which is a pretty neat idea, and provides some really interesting information (proving once again the incredible power of tagging) about the public perception of brands.

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I was over at a friend's house last night, doing design research (read: drinking bourbon and playing video games), and found myself momentarily distracted from my pleasant Kentucky-style buzz by the jaw-dropping visual assault Super Smash Bros. Brawl for the Nintendo Wii.

Nintendo draws on its deep stable of characters to create a tightly branded interactive experience.

O! Insidious Nostalgia

Super Smash Bros. Brawl is a branding tour de force. Level designers Kazuhire Irie, Takeshi Suzuki, and Kou Arai have situated the game as a living history of the Nintendo product line, adopting a wide range of design styles to recreate elements of Nintendo's extensive mythology in a way that allows the player to simultaneously:

1. indulge in the thrill of recognition
2. have an enormous amount of fun game-playing
3. be spoon-fed nostalgia for the commercial products of yesteryear, or else feel an immense need to play catch-up ("Why would they have a level from Earthbound? I never played that.") as part of a not-so-subtle upsell. All the original games are available for $4-5 directly from your Wii.

Visually meshing the old with the new, you can see the living history of 30 years of Nintendo.

These three things in combination provide an almost narcotic Gestalt effect that all branding and identity designers could learn something from. It's branded fun.

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In April of 2003, UPS released what has since become a very hotly debated brand update. Summarily, UPS retired Paul Rand's iconic 1961 package-and-shield logo and replaced it with "a two-tone, 3-D-look shield topped with a quasi-swoosh [and a wordmark] set in a customized version of [the common logo font] FF Dax..." (Source*)

* As evidence of how positively engaging this identity redesign was, the discussion on this article received its first comment April 7, 2003 and got its last one on November 9, 2007!

The great UPS logo debacle of 2003

The responses to this re-branding varied from declaiming FutureBrand, the New York-based designers of the new logo as glorified Paul Gaskills to flat-out declamation that "the new logo is better," and subsequently that, "you typography/graphic/illustrator bullies need to relax." (Ibid).

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About six months ago, Adobe launched its CS3 line of design software, the first revisions of its products since the company acquired their primary competitor, Macromedia. Inevitably, new versions mean new branding. (I mean, how else is someone going to know it’s new, right?) So what did they do that is worth blogging about?

Imagine Adobe’s task for CS3. They already have dozens of products, all centered around design. They merge with the next biggest guy in the game, which adds even more products. Macromedia’s brands have strong identities and associations of their own, and, at the time of the merger, these are more unified than Adobe’s. How does Adobe successfully assimilate these new brands?

This raises a valid question, what were Adobe’s brands, up to this point? I bet you have a hard time remembering. I don’t think they did a good job of developing or managing them. It’s difficult to remember because it wasn’t clear what their brands were supposed to represent. Moreover, each product’s brand or logo was so different from one another. It was difficult to get a sense of what was “Adobe” about them.

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I was on campus today taking care of some business and I had occasion to indulge myself with a Red Bull. While I stood there drinking, I started to think about which direction the label was facing. I could say I did this because I’m a designer and I’m always thinking of such things, but the truth is that I was concerned with how I looked holding that can in my hand—I’m narcissistic like that. I mean, this is an expensive soft drink; movie stars drink Red Bull. So can people tell that I’m drinking it? Do I look cool?

In this case, the answer was no. The label was facing me, so people were getting an eyeful of Nutrition Facts. I thought to myself, “what a wasted opportunity”. But as I began to think about it, the problem was more complex than I’d first thought. It's a narrow can. There's only enough room for a label on one side. So which is more important? Having the label face the customer so it builds association from the shelf to the first drink? Or facing the label outward, to advertise to others that someone is drinking the brand? I think it’s a tough choice. Fish or cut bait, right?

As I quaffed my caffeinated corn syrup, I turned this problem over in my head, but I couldn’t come up with a solution that would satisfy both goals. Everything I thought of was too complicated. When I came back to the refrigerated case for more “research”, I stumbled upon a profound solution, Zen-like in its perfection.

Do nothing.

What I noticed, as I looked over the cans, is that the placement of the mouth is completely random. I assume this is just a quirk of the manufacturing process. On average, the label will face out half of the time and face the drinker half of the time. Pretty elegant, I must say.