Simplicity is the key to rebranding

LATER THIS YEAR, Microsoft will be releasing Windows 8, a release of the ubiquitous operating system that will be absolutely critical as we shift towards a touch-based computing future. To mark this shift, Microsoft updated its famous Windows logo – for years, it’s been a variation on the multicoloured window theme, but fluttering, almost like a flag. For Windows 8, they went monochrome blue, and the flutter was gone – now we had a slightly angled, four-pane window, echoing the application tiles in the new user interface, while also referencing the window concept.

Beside the icon was the name, Windows 8, in simple, sans serif lettering. If Microsoft was hoping to establish that this was a big break with the past, and a declaration of future intent, it worked. But if they were hoping to generate some goodwill towards the new release, it was less successful. People hated it. When it comes to new logos and rebranding, they often do. The art of rebranding, it seems, lies somewhere between modernising the pre-existing image and not irritating loyal customers.

“It’s not so much that people are attached to a logo,” says designer Armin Vit, who has become one of the web’s most high-profile commentators on logos and branding design with his Brand New blog.

“It’s more that they care about what the logo represents. So when something changes, it’s not so much that the logo’s changing, it’s that something that they’re familiar with, that they’ve been living with or interacting with, when that thing changes, it breaks a certain trust and familiarity with this thing that you kind of never paid attention to anyway.”

On the Windows redesign, Vit was scathing. “This ‘minimal’ approach looks like, well, a window,” he wrote. “A window in a $400-a-month studio apartment rental with beige carpeting and plastic drapes. Moving away from the more flag-like icon seems like abandoning two decades of equity – crappy equity, but equity nonetheless.”

This illustrates the perils of the redesign – the attempt to signal modernity and change can so often clash with the need to maintain the symbols associated with tradition and experience. The inevitable friction between the two can manifest itself in irate customer reaction.

“The best example was Tropicana,” says Vit, referencing the disastrous 2009 logo and packaging redesign of the orange juice titan. “It wasn’t that people necessarily loved the old logo, the orange with the straw sticking out, it’s just that when they took that away, they literally could not find it in the grocery store. It happened to me, and I’m pretty aware of design things. I kept looking at the fridge, I couldn’t find it. For a lot of people, that sort of thing generates a very guttural reaction.”

For Steve Payne, design director at the Dublin studio of global branding firm the Brand Union, that common reaction speaks to how deeply people associate with brands. “It’s interesting to understand how people build bonds or relationships or loyalty with brands,” he says.

“It’s because it comes from a point where it’s actually a statement about themselves, and their own self-perception. That’s where you get this strong emotional connection. About why people sometimes don’t like change, or why people are so vocal about it – it’s because it’s a statement about people’s self-perception, and if you start messing with that it becomes quite difficult if you don’t respect that. The challenge for designers is to be very aware and cognisant of that relationship that the brand has with its customer base.”

Payne has vast experience both building and rebuilding global brands, having worked at Saatchi Saatchi, Interbrand and now Brand Union. Clients have included Lexus, Selfridges, the Sydney Olympics, Ulster Bank and the GAA – the need to be aware of the heritage of a brand while keeping it fresh is tantamount when dealing with such big names.

“Brands need to move, they can’t be static,” he says. “Sometimes people get caught up with identity, ie the physical logo, rather than the communication and manifestation of how that identity talks through different channels. A mistake a lot of people make is ‘We need to change the logo’. But actually it’s not about the logo. It might be about something else, they come back to the logo because we’re now into a different market, and a lot of the time it’s a bit of a red herring, because what they need to do is think about how they communicate, the language, the tone of voice, the images, rather than change something that may have a certain amount of equity already built up.”

Above all, he points out how branding affects far more than the mere visual impression of a company. “A lot of businesses get caught up in the brand word, thinking it’s the logo,” he says, “but another way to think of it is the reputation of an organisation, and the goodwill and loyalty that people have associated with that name or marque. When you start messing with the goodwill, then that gets a little bit more about reputation.”

One businessman who is all too aware of the crossover between design and reputation is Jerry Kennelly, the Kerry entrepreneur who sold his photography company, Stockbyte, to Getty for $135 million in 2006. His latest venture, Tweak.com, is all about branding – it offers affordable online design services for small and medium businesses, including a logo-building service. Projecting a brand image isn't just for the big multinationals, he points out.

“Obviously, every major brand that’s been around for a while has a huge legacy, and they can very easily go wrong. I guess it’s one of the things in terms of small business where people don’t really understand the challenges that are there, and that’s one of the reasons we created Tweak, in that small businesses operate by all the same rules as the major brands – somebody running a small local coffee shop is really in competition with Starbucks.”

Kennelly is eager to democratise the design process that goes along with maintaining a reputation, whether it’s small start-ups or venerable businesses that find themselves having to compete with much larger companies. The reality is that a lot of small or medium business owners haven’t realised that there’s a huge cost to looking crap,” he says. “It costs as much to buy the space to put a crap ad on as it does to put a really well designed and considered one. The same with printing collateral.”

For companies of any size, what is the secret to successfully rebranding? For Vit, the answer is simple, literally. “By the time many of these companies redesign, they’ve been doing the same thing in 100 different ways for the past five years or whatever, and someone will say ‘Wait a second, we’re losing message, or we’re sending too many messages, everything is getting too complicated’. That’s what usually triggers a redesign.

“So I think simplicity – getting rid of anything that’s not really necessary. Trusting that the audience will recognise your product or service based on the minimal amount of visual cues, and just having one main driving idea that will drive everything. I think that’s where you see the most successful ones, which is that they’re able to find the one message, the one visual cue, the one idea that drives it forward.”