The British automaker Jaguar unveiled its rebrand last week, its first step at relaunching the brand as an all-EV carmaker. Much ink has been spilled about the effort already, primarily negative, regarding the toy-like logotype in design circles and the bizarre film in the general town square.

Jaguar’s new brand film

Interestingly, Brand New, the preeminent brand design website, hasn’t weighed in yet. It has decided to wait until after December 2, when Jaguar will unveil the first “physical manifestation of its Exuberant Modernism creative philosophy, in a Design Vision Concept” at Miami Art Week. (Update: Brand New has weighed in with a review of the rebrand. My commentary on it is below.)

There have been some contrarian views, too, decrying the outrage by brand experts. In Print Magazine, Saul Colt writes:

Critics might say this is the death of the brand, but I see it differently. It’s the rebirth of a brand willing to take a stand, turn heads, and claw its way back into the conversation. And that, my friends, is exactly what Jaguar needed to do.

With all due respect to Mr. Colt—and he does make some excellent points in his piece—I’m not in the camp that believes all press is good press. If Jaguar wanted to call attention to itself and make a statement about its new direction, it didn’t need to abandon its nearly 90 years of heritage to do so. A brand is a company’s story over time. Jeff Bezos once said, “Your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room.” I’m not so sure this rebrand is leaving the right impression.

Here’s the truth: the average tenure of a chief marketing officer tends to be a short four years, so they feel as if they need to prove their worth by paying for a brand redesign, including a splashy new website and ad campaign filled with celebrities. But branding alone does not turn around a brand—a better product does. Paul Rand, one of the masters of logo design and branding, once said:

A logo derives its meaning from the quality of the thing it symbolizes, not the other way around. A logo is less important than the product it signifies; what it means is more important than what it looks like.

It’s the thing the logo represents and the meaning instilled in it by others. In other words, it’s not the impression you make but the impression you’re given.

There were many complaints about the artsy, haute couture brand film to introduce their new “Copy Nothing” brand ethos. The brand strategy itself is fine, but the execution is terrible. As my friend and notable brand designer Joe Stitzlein says, “At Nike, we used to call this ‘exposing the brief to the end user.’” Elon Musk complained about the lack of cars in the spot, trolling with “Do you sell cars?” Brand campaigns that don’t show the product are fine as long as the spot reinforces what I already know about the brand, so it rings authentic. Apple’s famous “Think Different” ad never showed a computer. Sony’s new Playstation “Play Has No Limits” commercial shows no gameplay footage.

Apple’s famous “Think Different” ad never showed a computer.

Sony’s recent Playstation “Play Has No Limits” commercial doesn’t show any gameplay footage.

All major automakers have made the transition to electric. None have thrown away their brands to do so. Car marques like Volkswagen, BMW, and Cadillac have made subtle adjustments to their logos to signify an electrified future, but none have ditched their heritage.

Volkswagen’s logo redesign in 2019

BMW’s logo redesign in 2020

Instead, they’ve debuted EVs like the Mustang Mach E, the Lyriq, and the Ioniq 5. They all position these vehicles as paths to the future.

Mr. Colt:

The modern car market is crowded as hell. Luxury brands like Porsche and Tesla dominate mindshare, and electric upstarts are making disruption their personal brand. Jaguar was stuck in a lane of lukewarm association: luxury-ish, performance-ish, but ultimately not commanding enoughish to compete.

Hyundai built a splashy campaign around the Ioniq 5, but they didn’t do a rebrand. Instead, they built a cool-looking, retro-future EV that won numerous awards when it launched, including MotorTrend’s 2023 SUV of the Year.

We shall see what Jaguar unveils on December 2. The only teaser shot of the new vehicle concept does look interesting. But the conversation has already started on the wrong foot.

Update

December 3, 2024

As expected, Jaguar unveiled their new car yesterday. Actually, it’s not a new car, but a new concept car called Type 00. If you know anything about concept cars, they are never what actually ships. By the time you add the required safety equipment, including side mirrors and bumpers, the final car a consumer will be able to purchase will look drastically different.

Putting aside the aesthetics of the car, the accompanying press release is full of pretension. Appropriate, I suppose, but feels very much like they’re pointing out how cool they are rather than letting the product speak for itself.

Update 2

December 9, 2024

Brand New has weighed in with a review of the rebrand. Armin Vit ends up liking the work overall because it did what it set out to do—create conversation. However, his readers disagree. As of this writing, the votes are overwhelmingly negative while the comments are more mixed.

I’ve always been a maker at heart—someone who loves to bring ideas to life. When AI exploded, I saw a chance to create something new and meaningful for solo designers. But making Griffin AI was only half the battle…

Birth of an Idea

About a year ago, a few months after GPT-4 was released and took the world by storm, I worked on several AI features at Convex. One was a straightforward email drafting feature but with a twist. We incorporated details we knew about the sender—such as their role and offering—and the email recipient, as well as their role plus info about their company’s industry. To accomplish this, I combined some prompt engineering and data from our data providers, shaping the responses we got from GPT-4.

Playing with this new technology was incredibly fun and eye-opening. And that gave me an idea. Foundational large language models (LLMs) aren’t great yet for factual data retrieval and analysis. But they’re pretty decent at creativity. No, GPT, Claude, or Gemini couldn’t write an Oscar-winning screenplay or win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, but it’s not bad for starter ideas that are good enough for specific use cases. Hold that thought.

I belong to a Facebook group for WordPress developers and designers. From the posts in the group, I could see most members were solopreneurs, with very few having worked at a large agency. From my time at Razorfish, Organic, Rosetta, and others, branding projects always included brand strategy, usually weeks- or months-long endeavors led by brilliant brand or digital strategists. These brand insights and positioning always led to better work and transformed our relationship with the client into a partnership.

So, I saw an opportunity. Harness the power of gen AI to create brand strategies for this target audience. In my mind, this could allow these solo developers and designers to charge a little more money, give their customers more value, and, most of all, act like true partners.

Validating the Problem Space

The prevailing wisdom is to leverage Facebook groups and Reddit forums to perform cheap—free—market research. However, the reality is that good online communities ban this sort of activity. So, even though I had a captive audience, I couldn’t outright ask. The next best thing for me was paid research. I found Pollfish, an online survey platform that could assemble a panel of 100 web developers who own their own businesses. According to the data, there was overwhelming interest in a tool like this.*

Notice the asterisk. We’ll come back to that later on.

I also asked some of my designer and strategist friends who work in branding. They all agreed that there was likely a market for this.

Testing the Theory

I had a vague sense of what the application would be. The cool thing about ChatGPT is that you can bounce ideas back and forth with it as almost a co-creation partner. But you had to know what to ask, which is why prompt engineering skills were developed.

I first tested GPT 3.5’s general knowledge. Did it know about brand strategy? Yes. What about specific books on brand strategy, like Designing Brand Identity by Alina Wheeler? Yes. OK, so the knowledge is in there. I just needed the right prompts to coax out good answers.

I developed a method whereby the prompt reminded GPT of how to come up with the answer and, of course, contained the input from the user about the specific brand.

Through trial and error and burning through a lot of OpenAI credits, I figured out a series of questions and prompts to produce a decent brand strategy document.

I tested this flow with a variety of brands, including real ones I knew and fake ones I’d have GPT imagine.

Designing the MVP

The Core Product

Now that I had the conceptual flow, I had to develop a UI to solicit the answers from the user and have those answers inform subsequent prompts. Everything builds on itself.

I first tried an open chat, just like ChatGPT, but with specific questions. Only issue was I couldn’t limit what the user wrote in the text box.

Early mockup of the chat UI for Griffin AI

AI Prompts as Design

Because the prompts were central to the product design, I decided to add them into my Figma file as part of the flow. In each prompt, I indicated where the user inputs would be injected. Also, most of the answers from the LLM needed to be stored for reuse in later parts of the flow.

AI prompts are indicated directly in the Figma file

Living With Imperfect Design

Knowing that I wanted a freelance developer to help me bring my idea to life, I didn’t want to fuss too much about the app design. So, I settled on using an off-the-shelf design system called Flowbite. I just tweaked the colors and typography and lived with the components as-is.

Building the MVP

Building the app would be out of my depths. When GPT 3.5 first came out, I test-drove it for writing simple Python scripts. But it failed, and I couldn’t figure out a good workflow to get working code. So I gave up. (Of course, fast-forward until now, and gen AI for coding is much better!)

I posted a job on Upwork and interviewed four developers. I chose Geeks of Kolachi, a development agency out of Pakistan. I picked them because they were an agency—meaning they would be a team rather than an individual. Their process included oversight and QA, which I was familiar with working at a tech company.

Working Proof-of-Concept in Six Weeks

In just six weeks, I had a working prototype that I could start testing with real users. My first beta testers were friends who graciously gave me feedback on the chat UI.

Through this early user testing, I found that I needed to change the UI. Users wanted more real estate for the generated content, and the free response feedback text field was simply too open, as users didn’t know what to do next.

So I spent another few weekends redesigning the main chat UI, and then the development team needed another three or four weeks to refactor the interface.

The revised UI gives more room for the main content and allows the user to make their own adjustments.

AI Slop?

As a creative practitioner, I was very sensitive to not developing a tool that would eliminate jobs. The fact is that the brand strategies GPT generated were OK; they were good enough. However, to create a real strategy, a lot more research is required. This would include interviewing prospects, customers, and internal stakeholders, studying the competition, and analyzing market trends.

Griffin AI was a shortcut to producing a brand strategy good enough for a small local or regional business. It was something the WordPress developer could use to inform their website design. However, these businesses would never be able to afford the services of a skilled agency strategist in addition to the logo or website work.

However, the solo designer could charge a little extra for this branding exercise or provide more value in addition to their normal offering.

I spent a lot of time tweaking the prompts and the flow to produce more than decent brand strategies for the likes of Feline Friends Coffee House (cat cafe), WoofWagon Grooming (mobile pet wash), and Dice & Duels (board game store).

Beyond the Core Product

While the core product was good enough for an MVP, I wanted to figure out a valuable feature to justify monthly recurring revenue, aka a subscription. LLMs are pretty good at mimicking voice and tone if you give it enough direction. Therefore I decided to include copywriting as a feature, but writing based on a brand voice created after a brand strategy has been developed. ChatGPT isn’t primed to write in a consistent voice, but it can with the right prompting and context.

Screenshots of the Griffin AI marketing site

Beyond those two features, I also had to build ancillary app services like billing, administration, onboarding, tutorials, and help docs. I had to extend the branding and come up with a marketing website. All this ate up weeks more time.

Failure to Launch

They say the last 20% takes 80% of the time, or something like that. And it’s true. The stuff beyond the core features just took a lot to perfect. While the dev team was building and fixing bugs, I was on Reddit, trying to gather leads to check out the app in its beta state.

Griffin AI finally launched in mid-June. I made announcements on my social media accounts. Some friends congratulated me and even checked out the app a little. But my agency and tech company friends weren’t the target audience. No, my ideal customer was in that WordPress developers Facebook group where I couldn’t do any self-promotion.

I continued to talk about it on Reddit and everywhere I could. But the app never gained traction. I wasn’t savvy enough to build momentum and launch on ProductHunt. The Summer Olympics in Paris happened. Football season started. The Dodgers won the World Series. And I got all but one sale.

When I told this customer that I was going to shut down the app, he replied, “I enjoyed using the app, and it helped me brief my client on a project I’m working on.” Yup, that was the idea! But not enough people knew about it or thought it was worthwhile to keep it going.

Lessons Learned

I’m shutting Griffin AI down, but I’m not too broken up about it. For me, I learned a lot and that’s all that matters. Call it paying tuition into the school of life.

When I perform a post-mortem on why it didn’t take off, I can point to a few things.

I’m a maker, not a seller.

I absolutely love making and building. And I think I’m not too bad at it. But I hate the actual process of marketing and selling. I believe that had I poured more time and money into getting the word out, I could have attracted more customers. Maybe.

Don’t rely on survey data.

Remember the asterisk? The Pollfish data that showed interest in a product like this? Well, I wonder if this was a good panel at all. In the verbatims, some comments didn’t sound like these respondents were US-based, business owners, or taking the survey seriously. Comments like “i extremely love griffin al for many more research” and “this is a much-needed assistant for my work.” Instead of survey data with a suspect panel, I need to do more first-hand research before jumping into it.

AI moves really fast.

AI has been a rocket ship this past year-and-a-half. Keeping up with the changes and new capabilities is brutal as a side hustle and as a non-engineer. While I thought there might be a market for a specialized AI tool like Griffin, I think people are satisfied enough with a horizontal app like ChatGPT. To break through, you’d have to do something very different. I think Cursor and Replit might be onto something.

I still like making things, and I’ll always be a tinkerer. But maybe next time, I’ll be a little more aware of my limitations and either push past them or find collaborators who can augment my skills.

Let me tell you a story…

Imagine a smoky wood-paneled conference room. Five men in smart suits sit around a table with a slide projector in the middle. Atop the machine is a finned plastic container that looks like a donut or a bundt cake. A sixth man is standing and begins a pitch.

Technology is a glittering lure, but there’s the rare occasion when the public can be engaged on the level beyond flash, if they have a sentimental bond with the product.

My first job, I was in-house at a fur company with this old pro copywriter—Greek named Teddy. And Teddy told me the most important idea in advertising is “new.” Creates an itch. You simply put your product in there as a kind of calamine lotion.

But he also talked about a deeper bond with the product. Nostalgia. It’s delicate, but potent.

Courtesy of Lions Gate Entertainment, Inc.

Of course, I’m describing an iconic scene from the TV show Mad Men, in which Don Draper, creative director of Sterling Cooper, a mid-level advertising agency on the rise, vying for Kodak’s business.

Draper weaves a story about technology, newness, and nostalgia. As he clicks through a slideshow of his family on the screen, he channels the desire—no—need of everyone, i.e., consumers, to be loved and how the power of memories can take us there.

Teddy told me that in Greek “nostalgia” literally means “the pain from an old wound.” It’s a twinge in your heart, far more powerful than memory alone. This device isn’t a spaceship. It’s a time machine. It goes backwards, forwards. It takes us to a place where we ache to go again.

It’s not called the Wheel. It’s called the Carousel. It lets us travel the way a child travels. Round and around and back home again, to a place where we know we are loved.

This isn’t brand strategy. However, it is an excellent illustration of how using insights about an audience and the uniqueness of your brand can create a powerful emotional connection. You see, one of Don Draper’s gifts is his instinct about people. He can immediately get deep into a single person’s heart and manipulate them, and he can also apply that skill to audiences. It’s about understanding what makes them tick, what they care about, and then combining their desires with whatever is unique about the brand. (Ironically, in the show, he knows himself the least.)

What is brand strategy? It is identifying the intersection of these two circles of the Venn diagram and finding the emotional truth therein.

Understanding the essence of brand strategy

In Alina Wheeler’s seminal book on brand identity called Designing Brand Identity, she emphasizes that:

Effective brand strategy provides a central, unifying idea around which all behavior, actions, and communications are aligned. It works across all products and services, and is effective over time. The best brand strategies are so differentiated and powerful that they deflect the competition. They are easy to talk about, whether you are the CEO or an employee.

Wheeler goes on to say that brand strategy is deeply rooted in the company’s vision, which is aligned with its leadership and employees, and encapsulates a deep understanding of the customer’s perceptions and needs.

A brand strategy enhances the connection with ideal customers by clearly defining the brand’s value proposition and ensuring the messaging resonates with their needs, preferences, and desires. It streamlines marketing by creating a cohesive narrative across all channels, making it easier to communicate the benefits and unique selling points of products. Furthermore, a solid brand strategy amplifies brand awareness, setting a foundation for consistent and memorable brand experiences, which fosters recognition and loyalty among the target audience.

The core elements of an effective brand strategy

There are five essential elements of brand strategy:

1. Brand purpose and mission
2. Consistency in messaging and design
3. Emotional connection and storytelling
4. Employee involvement and brand advocacy
5. Competitive awareness and positioning

Brand purpose and mission

All good brands must exist for some reason beyond just the financial aspect. No consumer will have any affinity with a brand that’s only out to make money. Instead, the brand needs to have a higher purpose—a reason for being that is greater than themselves. Simon Sinek’s Start with Why is a great primer on why brand purpose is necessary.

A brand’s purpose is then distilled into a succinct statement that acts as the brand’s mission. It is the unifying internal rallying cry for employees so they can share a common purpose.

Branding is consistency in messaging and design

Target’s brand is very consistent with its white and red color palette.

Keeping the message and design consistent is critical to making a brand stand out. This means always sharing the same core message and look, which helps people recognize and trust the brand. It’s like they’re getting a note from a familiar friend. This builds a strong, trustworthy brand image that people can easily remember, connect with, and love.

Emotional connection and storytelling

Nike celebrates the athlete in all of us.

Creating an emotional connection and weaving compelling storytelling into the fabric of a brand goes beyond mere transactions; it invites the audience into a narrative that resonates on a personal level. Through stories, a brand can illustrate its values, mission, and the impact it aims to have in the world, making its purpose relatable and its vision inspiring. This narrative approach fosters a deeper bond with the audience, turning passive consumers into passionate advocates. Engaging storytelling not only captivates but also enriches the brand experience, ensuring that every interaction is meaningful and memorable.

By integrating authentic stories into the brand strategy, companies can give light to the human element of their brand, making it more accessible and emotionally appealing to their audience.

Competitive awareness and positioning

Understanding the competitive landscape and strategically positioning the brand within it is crucial. It involves recognizing where your brand stands in relation to competitors and identifying what makes your brand unique through techniques like SWOT analyses and competitive audits. This awareness enables a brand to differentiate itself, highlighting its unique value propositions that appeal to the target audience. By carefully analyzing competitors and the market, a brand can craft a positioning strategy that emphasizes its strengths, addresses consumer needs more effectively, and carves out a distinct space in the consumer’s mind, setting the stage for sustainable growth and loyalty.

More than a logo: The power of storytelling in brand strategy

The character Harry Crane reacting to Don Draper’s Carousel pitch.

Brand strategy is much more than just a pretty logo or shiny new website. It’s about creating a meaningful connection with a brand’s audience, as demonstrated by Don Draper’s memorable pitch in Mad Men. The key lies in storytelling and emotional resonance, moving beyond the novelty to forge a genuine bond with customers.

Alina Wheeler’s work further highlights the importance of a unified narrative that aligns with the company’s mission and resonates with both employees and customers. A successful brand strategy differentiates the brand from competitors, not just through its products or services, but through the story it tells and the values it embodies.

To navigate the complexities of brand development effectively, creating a narrative that speaks directly to the audience’s needs and desires is essential. Building a brand is about more than just standing out in the market; it’s about creating a lasting relationship with customers by reflecting their values and aspirations.

What is brand strategy? It’s a secret power.

Apple’s Think Different campaign celebrated iconoclasts and invited those consumers into their tent.

Not all clients know they need this. Effective brand strategy is key to all successful brands like Nike, Apple, Patagonia, and Nordstrom. It’s the foundation upon which all lasting brands are built. These companies don’t just sell products; they sell stories, experiences, and values that resonate deeply with their customers. These brands stand out not only because of their innovative offerings but also because of their ability to connect with consumers on an emotional level, embedding their products into the lifestyles and identities of their audience. This deep connection is the result of a carefully crafted brand strategy that articulates a clear vision, mission, and set of values that align with those of their target market.

Moreover, an effective brand strategy acts as a guiding star for all of a company’s marketing efforts, ensuring consistency across all touchpoints. It helps businesses understand their unique position in the market, differentiate themselves from competitors, and communicate their message in a compelling and memorable way. By investing in a solid brand strategy, companies can build a robust and cohesive brand identity that attracts and retains loyal customers, driving long-term success and growth. In a world where consumers are bombarded with choices, a well-executed brand strategy is not just a secret power—it’s an essential one.

Designing since 1985

I’ve been a designer for as long as I can remember. I usually like to say that I started in the seventh grade, after being tenacious enough to badger my father into buying my first Macintosh computer and then spending hours noodling in MacPaint and MacDraw. Pixel by pixel, I painstakingly drew Christopher Columbus’s ship, the Santa Maria, for a book report cover. I observed the lines of the parabolic exterior of Saint Mary’s Cathedral, known colloquially in San Francisco as “the washing machine,” and replicated them in MacDraw. Of course, that’s not design, but that was the start of my use of the computer to make visuals that communicate. Needless to say, I didn’t know what brand strategy even was, or why it’s important, but we’ll get there.

Screenshot of MacPaint (1984)

Amateur hour

The first real logo I designed was for a friend of mine who ran a computer consulting company consisting of only himself. Imagine the word “MacSpect” set in Garamond, with a black square preceding it and then a wave running through the shape and logotype, inverted out of the letters. I thought it was the coolest thing in 1992. But it meant nothing. There was no concept behind it. It borrowed Garamond from Apple’s official typeface at the time, and the invert technique was popular in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Author’s attempt at recreating his first logo from memory, 32 years later

Concept is king

Fast-forward to my first real design job after design school. One of my early projects was to design a logo for Levi’s. It was not to be their official corporate logo, but instead, it was for a line of clothing called Americana. It would be used on hangtags and retail store signage. I ended up designing a distressed star—grunge was the shit in the mid-1990s—with a black and white inverted bottle cap pattern behind it. (There’s that inverting again!) Even though this was just as trendy as my student-level MacSpect logo, this mark worked. You see, the Levi’s brand has always been rooted in American authenticity, with its history going back to the Gold Rush in the mid-1800s. The distress in the logo represented history. The star shape was a symbol of America. And the pattern in the circle is straight from the label on every pair of Levi’s jeans.

This logo worked because it was rooted in a concept, or put another way, rooted in strategy. And this is where I learned why brand strategy was important to design.

Why is brand strategy important? Why does it matter?

Designing something visually appealing is easy. Find some inspiration on Instagram, Dribbble, or Behance, put your spin on it, and call it a day. But what you create won’t be timeless. In fact, its shelf life will be as long as the trend lasts. A year? Two at best?

Trends like neumorphism come and go quickly

But if your design is rooted in brand strategy—concepts representing the essence of the brand you’re designing for—your creation will last longer. (I won’t say forever because eventually, all logos are redesigned, usually based on the whims of the new marketing person who takes charge.)

Brand strategy is the art of distilling a brand

Big design, branding, marketing, or advertising agencies have dedicated brand strategists. Clients pay a premium for their expertise because they can distill the essence of a brand into key pillars. The process is not unlike talking to a friend about a problem and then having them get to the heart of the matter because they know you and have an objective point of view. For a client, seeing excellent brand strategy deliverables is often jaw-dropping because strategists can articulate the brand better than they can. Their secret isn’t telling clients something they don’t know. Instead, the secret is revealing what they know in their hearts but can’t express.

Brand strategists work their magic by being therapists to clients. (Midjourney)

How do brand strategists work their magic? Through research and by acting as therapists, in a way. They listen and then reflect what they hear and learn.

Branding is more than just creative work

The brand insights articulated by brand strategists are typically used to inform the creative work. From logos to slogans, from landing pages to Instagram posts, all the creative is rooted in the pillars of the brand. So then, the brand’s audience experiences a consistent voice.

However, what clients find most valuable is the illumination of their brand purpose and company mission. You see, brand strategy also crosses into business strategy. They’re not one and the same, but there is overlap. The purpose and mission of a company help align employees and partners. They help with product or service development—the very future of the company.

This is why Simon Sinek’s “Start with why” talk from 2009 resonated with so many business leaders. It’s about purpose and mission. Why also happens to be the root of great branding.

Brand strategy is the foundation for building brands—and the companies they represent. And the partner agencies that create that brand strategy for them are invaluable.

Offering brand strategy can propel you from “vendor” to “partner”

Clients will call freelancers and agencies “vendors,” lumping them into the same category as those who sell them copy paper. To transcend from being thought of as a vendor to being a partner, offering brand strategy is crucial.

Nearly all clients not listed in the Fortune 500 will not know what is brand strategy, nor why is brand strategy important. But once they see it, they’ll come to appreciate it.

This shift demands not just skill but a change in mindset. As a freelancer or small agency owner, your value lies in weaving brand stories, not just creating aesthetically pleasing designs and building websites. Your work should mirror the brand’s ethos and vision, making you an essential part of your client’s journey.

We communicate in stories. Storytelling has been around as long as our species has existed. From paintings on cave walls in Lascaux, to hieroglyphics in ancient Egypt, to radio dramas like “War of the Worlds” that cause city-wide panic, to the fantastical Game of Thrones television series on HBO, stories impart culture, history, information, and ideas. Stories are primal so we are receptive to them, and we remember them.

Today when we think of storytelling, we think of our modern day’s Golden Age of Television or the Marvel Cinematic Universe (“MCU”) movies. Comic-Con in San Diego is the Mecca of pop culture storytelling, and this year brought an estimated 135,000 fans from over 80 countries. Attendees packed over 2,000 panels and screenings and lined up for more than 250 autograph events from their favorite actors, writers, and artists. Fans lined up for hours, often overnight, for a chance to get into the infamous 6,500-seat Hall H where they were able to get a glimpse of their favorite star talking about their latest film or TV project. Many came to the con dressed as their favorite characters, often constructing their own elaborate costumes. That is fandom, otherwise known as brand loyalty.

What lessons for design and branding can we learn from Comic-Con and its pilgrimage of rabid fans? Storytelling has power, and design is storytelling.

In this article we’ll take the primary elements of storytelling and apply them to design, namely branding, marketing, and product design:

1. Worldbuilding: Where does the story take place?
2. Main characters: Who are the people we’ll care about?
3. The plot: What will happen in the story?​

PANTONE Colors and Worldbuilding

Stories have to exist in a self-contained universe, one that follows its own defined rules. Sometimes that world is familiar, reflecting our reality, and other times the environment is foreign, futuristic, or magical.

In Star Trek, transporter technology allows the teleportation of a person or thing from one place to another.

Internal logic is essential to building a believable world. In other words, it’s about defining the rules and consistently following them. For instance in the Star Trek universe, transporter technology exists—being able to teleport a person or thing from one place to another—but there are rules around its use. It has a limited range, i.e. you can’t beam a person from one end of the galaxy to the other; it cannot be used to or from warp-moving vehicles; and there are certain materials the technology cannot penetrate. And while there are faster-than-light-traveling vehicles in the show and aliens with extra capabilities, humans remain human and don’t have any extraordinary abilities.

I believe that branding, specifically brand identity is the world a brand builds for its customers to live in.

Target’s advertising lives in a world of red, white, and Helvetica.

Target has built a world of red, white, and Helvetica. Its customers know that world and trust it. But if Target decided to suddenly throw in blue, straying from the rules they’ve consistently followed, its customers would scratch their heads.

When creating your own brand, your customers need to see consistency. They need to feel they are in the right place when they interact with your brand. Use brand identity guidelines to document your brand world’s internal logic. Every touchpoint a customer sees should have the same colors, typography, and art direction.

The Hero and the Guide

Our world has been established, so now we need characters to be in our story. All stories have a protagonist, the main character. Many stories pair that character up with a guide or mentor. For our purposes we’ll call them the hero and the guide.

Donald Miller in his book Building a StoryBrand: Clarify Your Message So Customers Will Listen, says that the hero is not the brand! Instead, the hero should be the customer, and the brand should be the guide. This makes sense when you stop to think about it: customers seek out new brands to buy from because they have a problem to solve. And by playing the part of the guide, brands have the opportunity to be the mentor, the facilitator.

Captain Marvel has Nick Fury to show her around S.H.I.E.L.D. and Earth in the 1990s.

Luke Skywalker is mentored by Obi-Wan Kenobi who introduces him to the ways of the Force.

In fiction we all want to be the hero, not someone who is the helper to the hero. We want to be Captain Marvel who has Nick Fury to show her around Earth in the 1990s, or Luke Skywalker who is mentored by Obi-Wan Kenobi who introduces him to the ways of the Force. The guides are characters the heroes trust and look up to.

Nike’s ad campaigns celebrate the athlete within each of us.

Apple’s “Think Different” campaign wasn’t about how they had the best computers, but about celebrating geniuses like John Lennon and Yoko Ono.

Plotting User Experience Design

All stories have a plot, something that happens. Sometimes those plots are thin, simple, or dense and convoluted. But the best, most popular stories can be distilled to a very simple formula. Miller in his book outlines this structure as follows:

1. A character
2. Has a problem
3. And meets a guide
4. Who gives them a plan
5. And calls them to action
6. They avoid failure
7. And end in a success

StoryBrand Framework by Donald Miller.

Let’s apply it to one of my favorite movies, Star Wars:

1. Luke Skywalker
2. Wants to defeat the evil Galactic Empire
3. Meets Obi-Wan Kenobi, former Jedi Knight
4. Who teaches Luke to trust the Force
5. Luke helps deliver the Death Star plans hidden in R2-D2 to the Rebels
6. Without the plans the Rebels would be obliterated by the starbase
7. With Luke trusting in the Force, he’s able to destroy the Death Star, thus saving the Rebels

StoryBrand framework applied to Star Wars

While Miller’s StoryBrand framework is geared towards marketing and messaging, I believe we can extend it to user experience and product design as well. Remember that the hero is the customer or the user. And our product is the plot through which our hero can solve their problem.

For fun, let’s apply this framework to Dropbox:

1. An information worker
2. Has multiple devices and often can’t access her files when she needs to
3. Meets Dropbox
4. Whose product can sync and store all her files in the cloud
5. Encourages her to sign up and install their product
6. So she can stop forgetting to email herself files to/from work
7. And access her files instantly from any device anywhere, impressing her bosses

For the user to trust Dropbox with her files, Dropbox’s brand identity needs to be consistent from its advertising and marketing, to its landing page and website, and finally to its application. Remember their world needs to stay internally logical by using the same color, fonts, imagery, and even brand voice.

Using Design as Storytelling to Create Fans

In 2008 Marvel began their incredibly ambitious MCU movies with Iron Man. But from that very first movie, they started to build their world. They introduced us to new characters with subsequent films and wielded familiar story beats while bringing something new. Ultimately over the course of 23 interconnected movies, they created millions of fans worldwide who collectively spent more than $22 billion at the box office.

We’ve already mentioned Nike, Apple, Target, and Dropbox, but what about a newer brand that’s doing this right? Slack.

From day one Slack built personality into the design of their product. Their quirky plaid pattern and colors in their hashtag logo made its way to the product, allowing users to customize their own workspaces with themes. Their UX copy is charming, personable. In other words, Slack’s brand from the colors to the fonts to the brand voice is infused from their marketing website all the way into their product. And this attention to design as story has helped drive Slack to over ten million daily active users, and propelled the company’s valuation to $20 billion when they IPO’d.

Design as storytelling is an incredibly powerful tool to build a brand, create a better product, and promote fanaticism. As young startups enter an increasingly crowded marketplace, they need to differentiate through memorable and consistent branding. And they can by incorporating storytelling in their design.

There’s been a lot of chatter in recent weeks about how so-called “digital” agencies are or are not ready to be the lead for a campaign. But I think the question is a little off.

Instead the question should be “Why are clients splitting up campaign work based on tactic?”

Despite the maturing of digital agencies such as Razorfish (for whom I work), R/GA and AKQA, today’s clients are still sending digital work to digital agencies and traditional work to traditional agencies. And equally bad is having a third company plan and buy their media (sometimes there’s a traditional media agency and a digital one). Why is this bad?

OK, the end-zone is down that way 50 yards! Make sure you talk to each other along the way. Now go! [Download PDF]

I’ve seen it time and time again: if you want an integrated marketing campaign, how could you possibly brief all the companies and hope they work together and come back with something good and cohesive? The agencies will pay lip-service and say they’re collaborating, but there’s only so much collaboration that can happen in reality. Each agency is moving fast and really has no time to talk to the others. Plus there is always unspoken political jockeying for protecting the work each agency does have and trying to steal more business from the others. I strongly believe that this model is inefficient (money and time), makes agency people insane, and creates less-than-stellar campaigns.

What should instead happen is the client needs to brief one agency who will create a singular idea and execute on that idea across different tactics and mediums. Therefore the messaging, art direction and strategy for the campaign are cohesive.

Let the one Agency bring in specialists as needed to serve the idea. [Download PDF]

Agencies should not be labeled “digital,” for digital is only a tactic. I’d say the same with “traditional.” What clients should ask for is strong strategic work that drives results. Let the agency—regardless of its label—decide on who to sub-contract to if necessary.

When we see clients trust their agency and its vision, we witness great work all around:

• TBWA\Chiat\Day + Apple
• Crispin Porter + Bogusky + Burger King
• Goodby, Silverstein Partners + Sprint

Oh wait. There isn’t a “digital” agency on that list. But there soon will be.

Further reading:

• Why Digital Agencies Aren’t Ready to Lead
• Why Digital Agencies Are Indeed Ready to Lead
• What if we held a controversy and nobody cared?
• Digital must be anchored at the heart of agencies

Please feel free to use the above diagrams which I’m making available through a Creative Commons license.

Yesterday the design and advertising community was abuzz over the leaked presentation deck (PDF) for the new Pepsi logo by the Arnell Group. Yes it is absolutely a work of pure horseshit. But, I was reminded of the decks that my colleagues and I create every day and how somebody’s horseshit may be someone else’s chocolate cake.

We all have to sell our work. Ideally the concepts and ideas come from a well-formed strategy, but that doesn’t always happen. Many times the strategy must back into the creative. In other words sometimes you might have a great idea that you’ll need to justify after the fact.

This is even more true if you’re dealing with a purely formal exercise such as redesigning an iconic logo like Pepsi’s. A good design strategy would be to do the due diligence and look at the different historical variations of the logo and then just have at it, coming up with dozens if not hundreds of iterations. But afterwards when you find the new design you subjectively like, you’re going to need to explain in an intelligent, tangible, evidence-based manner detailing how you arrived at that solution—especially if you’re getting paid $1 million for the effort. So that’s when you break out the horses and shovels.

(via Brand New)

Update: Validation that the Arnell strategy deck is all BS from a freelancer:

(the logo design) nothing to do with any of that bullshit on the PDF, that was (I believe) just a way to keep the client entertained (like we, viewers of this PDF were) and make them feel like their money (1.2B) was worth something.