What does Wolff Olins do anyway?
This is an age-old question for anyone who works in the often-murky world of brand. Defining exactly it is what we do and what our role is in an industry, which isn’t shy of a buzzword or brand blah blah, isn’t always the easiest of tasks. But returning to it every now and again is definitely a useful exercise.
So Wolff Olins has a heritage in doing great, sometimes even game-changing branding. For me, branding is about creating really distinctive design (systems), which are led by and help represent a bigger idea about what an organization stands for.
So RED’s branding is guided by the idea of a new model of conscientious commerce, the principle that you can help raise money to fights AIDS in Africa by doing something as everyday as buying a t-shirt or a coffee. So London 2012’s branding is defined by the idea that the London Olympics will be like no other Olympic games – everyone Olympic, everyone’s Olympics. And Tate’s branding – an organization who re-invented the idea of gallery – is about making art more accessible without dumbing it down.
At our best these big ideas have gone beyond purely influencing the branding of an organization, beyond how it looks, beyond how it communicates to the world. These big ideas inform what the organization actually does.
Sometimes this happens by intent, sometimes by chance. For example, with Mercedes Benz we created three new businesses for them – beyond their core strength of selling cars - in ten short months, but we haven’t had enough of these projects, as we would have liked. This is now starting to change.
After an internal exercise at Wolff Olins – which we called the Growth Plan – we’ve decided to be much more intentional about the type of work we do and the way we approach it. It’s still a work in progress but has a different starting point to other projects we’ve done.
Today, we work from the mindset of defining a clear role for a brand, put simply what role does or should a given organization play in people’s lives. Instead of our next step being branding, creating a distinctive design, our next step is increasingly business design.
That means focusing on answering deeper questions about the links between brand and business. Highlighting specifically the connection between the role a brand wants to play and the type and nature of products a business makes. More and more we’re envisioning the individual features and functionality a business will need to develop in order to change. We’re stretching this to include the services they’ll need to provide and the business model required to support these changes. We’re also experimenting with creating our own digital product, check out the beta version http://whtespace.com
Design still plays a fundamental part in helping visualize, imagine and realize these connections, branding as we knew it far less so. This is less and less about doing better branding, instead it’s about making better products, services and businesses that have a clear and useful role in commerce and society.
These aren’t necessarily new questions, nor is this rocket science, we’re just much more focused on the fact that this needs to be our mindset and approach in order to create game-changing brands.
(Richard Houston)
