Simple humans
Last week I came across the image below of Lego’s brand framework. I tweeted that I thought it might not actually be theirs and multiple people rightfully corrected me, and pointed me to their website, where this jpg resides. Doh.
Because I work for a company that competes with Lego, I’m going to stay away from getting too deep into why I thought it wasn’t real, because there might be some trade secrets involved. But my overriding instinct was that the magic that makes Lego, Lego isn’t quite captured there. It’s not a judgement on its quality or whether it’s right. I was wondering whether the Lego we all know and love would come from it; is it predictive or just descriptive?
It got me thinking about one of my favorite questions: where do ideas come from? In this case, do they come from brand frameworks?
I’ll give an example from my old life that’s less constrained by sensitive info. When I worked on Volkswagen, around 2017, we were working on a brand refresh, knowing that a slate of EVs would be hitting the market in 2022 and beyond. This was also on the heels of a rather large corporate crisis that left the company searching for a way to define its next phase. Part of the refresh involved redefining the tone, perhaps a fool’s errand but the kind I’ve always gleefully embraced.
At the time, their tone was Simple, Human, Cool. It was great and everyone got it. We were discussing a few ways to modify it to meet the needs of the next Volkswagen and a senior creative insisted on adding “Volkswagen” to the words. Now, this makes zero sense. Why on God’s luscious, green Earth would a word that defined the tone of the brand be the… name of the brand? Would said senior creative describe a pinot as pinot-y?
Thinking about it now, it was no sillier than a smoothie of words like “optimistic” and “inspiring.” If we wanted the brand to act and sound like it had for decades, it was probably much more useful to ingest a few dozen ads from the DDB to Crispin to Deutsch eras, as an AI bot might.
Whatever updates we made certainly never made a difference. It was just Volkswagen.
In The Great Mental Models, Shane Parrish relays a story about IBM bringing in a wartime CEO named Lou Gerstner to turn the company around. After assessing the state of the business, his solution was to focus on what the company had always done well (serve its customers, compete for business, focus on profitable business units), not radically change it. He said, “The last thing IBM needs right now is a vision.” Going straight can be radical, too.
Brand frameworks are our best attempts to capture how we generate magic. How we create a brand that acts like us. But they’re maps, not territories. They’re going to be incomplete.
The same goes for creative ideas.
Paul Feldwick writes about this in Why Does The Pedlar Sing when he says, “There is no simple recipe for creating fame*, nor can it be done in a purely calculating or clinical way; it needs the energy, imagination, risk taking, and shameless braggadocio that street entertainers and charlatans have relied on in all ages.”
(*this assumes one is in the camp is fame as a brand goal. I wouldn’t have been a couple years ago; I definitely am now.)
Watching the reaction people had the Super Bowl ads, we (used royally to describe all people who make ads) all have wildly different ideas of what’s good, much less how we get there. Coinbase’s QR code got everything from “This is cheap QVC garbage” and “It’s just a logo!” to “Their market cap went up and a lot of people downloaded the app so it was a success.” Who’s to say either is right or wrong?
If you want to read Coinbase’s CEO’s take on how they landed on that idea, it’s here. I offered a moderately hot take here.
We play a messy game. Growth looks different depending on where you sit and how far out you look. As Eisenhower said, “Plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.” It’s definitely the fun part, too. Happy planning.
