Tools not Rules

Reading about Pete Buttigieg’s campaign system today warmed my heart. It’s a simple thought — create better advocacy for your Brand’s message by ceding some control of your identity to your customers.

It’s not a new idea, AirBnB adopted a similar plan with the launch of Belo in 2014 and there have been many since. But what is remarkable is that a political campaign adopted the strategy. It shows that the mainstream approach to Brand building has changed forever.

I anticipated this in my paper published in 2011. The paper outlined that a Brand had become an interface between the customer and the company, and so was created by the company and the customer. “Through the interface the customer assumes the right to some control, ownership, and authorship of the brand.” The idea had been in my head since 2007, when a trip on the London Underground made me realize that the map was the main most essential identity element, and the logo was just way-finding. The map was the interface and it gave the end user control of the experience.

Challenging repetition as the fundamental measurement was always going to raise eyebrows. The paper and it’s central idea — relevance, was shunned by most of the large Branding Agencies but almost universally accepted by User Experience designers. They could see the future and welcomed giving end users control of information and action. This culminated at a SXSW presentation in 2012 which gathered more than 2000 attendees.

In the last few years all of the major Branding companies have adopted this iterative approach to building a brand. Some, like Landor, use terminology from the paper and others like Prophet have sought to measure Brand Relevance. I see this as a positive thing, a unification of Brand thinking and User Experience Design, which has to be better for customers who want to own the messages they share. But what wasn’t so clear was how to manage a brand which has less rules and maintains less control.

Deroy Peraza, the principal and creative director of Hyperakt deployed a sensible approach. Creating a tool for participants in the Brand which cedes control but without loosing consistency. Since writing my paper I’ve developed thirteen other tools to help companies navigate this new approach to Brand Building.

Some of these rules I was able to apply most recently in my role at eBay. I was in a unique position, joining a stellar Brand team under the control of a progressive VP who reported directly to the Chief Product Officer. I’d already set out a plan for the Brand as a consultant three years earlier. This became the basis for Form& retooling the Brand Design System but the result was way too complex for a massive company to manage pushing most of the burden on internal design teams to make sense of a hundred page pdf.

Joining eBay full-time gave me the opportunity to take part in the massive task of systematizing the Brand, to build digital tools instead of creating cumbersome rules and guidelines. My team was relentless, navigating complex and valuable security protocols, hosting complexities and being patient while my small design team coded the system into math.

eBay’s Brand had always been colorful, the Word-Mark containing Red, Blue, Yellow and Green. These three primary colors and one secondary gave us a clue how to decrease the amount of complexity in the overall system while retaining colorfulness and accessibility in all digital contexts. Eight colors gave us the final Spectrum: Three primaries (from the logo), three secondaries (one from the logo) and two tertiaries. This ‘lop-sided’ color system was drawn directly from the lop-sidedness of the Word-Mark. It’s unique, in the way that a detuned ‘Honky-Tonk- Piano is unique, creating it’s own cadence, retaining the original spirit of Brand Pierre Omidyar started in 1995. The four colors of the original eBay interspersed with four new colors expressing the new spirit of the Brand.

But this system although refined, was still too complex to share with a twenty thousand person organization. So we created the first of many tools, a Color-Picker tool to create pairings that work for accessibility and a Color-Blocking tool to create texture and patterns for Brand Expressions. Color Blocking became the central visual language for the launch campaign for eBay “Fill your cart with color.” which had to work globally across all regions.

Much like Pete Buttigieg’s campaign the Color-Picker tool revolutionized the way teams and partners applied color. Whereas they used to read guidelines, check accessibility and build pdfs, the new tool became a single source of truth to create and express. Everything made by everyone who used the tool was automatically on Brand. This saved thousands of hours of complex workflows, ceded control to the author and created local relevance and global consistency.

As I said in my paper — Brands are no longer definitive. They are temporal. Brands are informed by multiple voices, and they exist in multiple mediums and through multiple contexts. The media that a brand inhabits is no longer fixed or linear, it is iterative, with no beginning, no end, and little permanency. Adherence to a big idea and endless repetition of centralized, fixed rules can make a brand seem unresponsive, mechanized, inhuman, and out of step with its audience.

This new way of building Brands needs new approaches, new tools, which fuse interaction design, brand management and user experience. The kind of talent you need to manage more open brands live across the spectrum of creativity, engineering, service design and management.