Brands as Patterns, a white paper written by Marc Shillum for ‘10x10’ a publication series by Experience Design Company Method Inc, laid the foundation for coherent brand building in the digital age. It was first published in March of 2011, it has since been republished by FastCompany and Contagious Magazine, became a keynote at PSFK and two back-to-back panels at SXSW, with co-panelists, Robin Lanahan, Greg Johnson, and Walter Werzowa.
Brands as Patterns attempted to challenge consistency, the core measurement of Brand effectiveness, positing the idea that relevance would be an equal measure if the access point to a Brand was through an interactive interface. The premise of the paper is that brands are no longer definitive, they are temporal. It stated that Brands are informed by multiple voices, and they exist in multiple mediums and through multiple contexts. It surmised that 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. The key question that Brands as Patterns posed — Without repetition, how does a brand create consistency? And without consistency, how does a brand maintain value?
We created two follow-up papers. The Speed of the Market and Orchestrating a Business. This will be followed by seven other chapters of the thinking throughout the year, culminating in a book. The papers are free to the community, acknowledging that achieving a more cohesive future will need many minds. You can download all the white papers at our sister site brandsaspatterns.com
