Humanfrog's presentation at the KCDM training: Brand personality across all touchpoints

In the spring, we at Humanfrog were delighted to be invited to participate in a training titled 'Sharpening the brand and its strategy', organized by the Competence Center for Design Management (KCDM) at the premises of SIP Sempeter, one of the most successful companies in implementing design management approaches in business operations. They asked me to prepare a perspective on brand strategy from the standpoint of its visual presence — the 'designer's perspective'. 

Many thanks to all who attended, and I hope you will be able to use the insights shared as fuel for growing your brand. If you missed the event … After I opened by introducing Humanfrog and myself as the speaker, I continued roughly as follows: 

Touchpoints 

'A touchpoint is any interaction between a customer and a company, product, or service that contributes to shaping the customer's impression and experience.' 

Touchpoints too often come off as a buzzword. Something we put into an annual report or on a website to make the text look more modern and professional. Interestingly, the concept of touchpoints is, at its core, quite simple yet critical for brand presence. In contemporary life, we are exposed every day, across various touchpoints, to hundreds of communications, most of which are in fact brand promotion. And yes – as you surely know – we have learned to ignore them. After all, brands are an entirely artificial invention, while human nature is wired to recognize … well, the human, right? 

Why, then, do we not ignore certain brands? Moreover, some are so iconic that near-religions have formed around them. 

Perhaps the answer for your brand — and this was the core of my talk — lies in teaching your customers to perceive your brand as a personality. We recognize people, especially those we know, far faster than we do brands. That is the power of their personality, which they carry within and communicate outward. 

So how do we build a personality for a brand so that, across different touchpoints, customers will encounter it at least as an acquaintance or, better yet, a friend?

Identity 

'No one will ever buy anything from someone they do not know.'
- Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People

The first step toward turning your brand into a personality is, of course, its identity. After all, with a person we also ask what the person is like. Fun, serious, reliable, loyal, loving? 

Various tools have been developed for building a brand personality, such as Brand Star—an instrument that defines the brand's communications, its culture, image and reputation, the nature of the business the brand represents, the external (environmental) forces that act upon it, and the architecture of the brand and its subordinate brands. I touched on the latter topics—brand architecture and concepts such as a branded house, sub-brands, endorsed brands, and a house of brands—at the June talk as well, but I will present them in more detail in one of the upcoming pieces in the Frog Perspective. I promise. 

Let's return to the tools for finding identity. Brand Star is certainly a very serious, corporate tool, but for many who advocate a softer, more human approach to defining brand identity—including myself—it can come across as rather technocratic and, ironically, lacking real personality. 

That is why I lean toward a juicier tool called the Brand Archetypes Wheel. Just as we tend to slot people we know (perhaps not even personally, but say from the media) into archetypes, we can file brand personalities into the same buckets. And yes, you guessed it—consultants, out of a sort of bizarre political correctness, avoid the much more pejorative term 'stereotypes.' That would likely scare off the few clients who would otherwise listen to us. 

In short, we are talking about 12 archetypes of a brand's 'personality,' which we can put to good use precisely because they describe it with qualities that are natural and human. 

Name 

As with getting to know people, we usually first know a person's name and their appearance—the face. Only in the next steps are we ready to accept (or reject) their personality traits. What a face is to a person, the logo is to a brand. What a person's name is to a person, a name is to a brand. 

So let's start with the name. One of the most common mistakes entrepreneurs make—typically in the early stages of building their business—is opting for a generic 'name.' Caricatured, that means an auto mechanic naming their business 'Auto Mechanic.' That is not really a name at all, but a description of the activity or product, which in branding we usually call a descriptor. To know which auto mechanic we are talking about, it is certainly a good idea to say whether it is Janez or Jaka. 

But … who would choose a generic descriptor as a brand name in the first place? Perhaps this decidedly poor idea echoes the rather dated approaches of the early 2000s, when, instead of branding consultants, search engine optimization specialists 'helped' pick brand names. The concept rested on the assumption that for a given keyword—say 'auto mechanic'—the domain avtomehanik.com would rank better in search engines than a domain with a unique brand name. 

Of course, names that perfectly matched search queries soon ran out, and beyond search engines, 'names' that were not true brand names could not work on any other touchpoint. Meanwhile, new brands with 'real'—i.e., unique—names kept getting stronger. 

In Slovenia it happened—and to a lesser extent still happens—that the authors of a generic 'name' try to solve the problem by simply translating the 'name' into English. Ironically, this works very rarely, and even then only with those (even rarer) customers who do not speak good English. For everyone else, the generic nature of the name could not be changed by translation—as shown in the Byte Zone brand example we developed at Humanfrog. 

Logo 

To make your brand's logo become its face, we try to mirror onto it the personality defined through the archetypes. One of the tools brand designers often use is semantic analysis—a game of associations and sketching. The sketches we add to associations are typically not sketches of the final logo. They are more about translating verbal associations into a visual language. The actual design of the mark follows in later steps. 

To verify that the associations are right and align with the desired brand personality, it is certainly a good idea to collect both verbal and visual ones within a team that includes the 'client,' i.e., the brand owner. But they must be aware that we are not yet designing the logotype. Otherwise, some disappointment could follow in the later stages of the process. 

Before we tackle the final details that will create not only the brand's logo but also its entire visual environment—you likely know this as the corporate visual identity—it makes sense to identify touchpoints first. At Humanfrog, we approach this by defining two primary touchpoints: the most exposed one and the most critical one.

Take a transport company as an example—the most exposed touchpoint is likely the appearance of the brand's logo on the vehicle, whereas the most critical one may be the stamp—it is small, single-color, and the production method does not handle detail well.

Corporate visual identity 

If the logo is your brand's face, then the corporate visual identity is surely what we call a person's 'image.' You know—the style of dress, behavior, manner of speaking, and perhaps what mattered most in our teenage years: what music they listen to :) All of this helps create a connection between us and the brand. Is it meant for us? Is it part of our tribe? 

Alongside the various logo executions (for different media techniques and backgrounds), two foundational elements of the corporate visual identity are the color palette and the supporting typefaces. The former will secure quick recognition for the brand versus competing brands—in much the same way teams differ in group sports. Think of football, for instance: there, color is so tied to a club's or national team's identity that some have even earned nicknames such as the 'White Ballet', the 'Red Devils', or 'Oranje'. If your brand ever gets to the point where its 'fans' dress in its colors, that is certainly a success comparable to a Champions League trophy or a World Cup win. 

But a color palette is usually easier to grasp than the next element: the supporting typefaces. I am well aware that most of your customers may not distinguish individual type families at all. Consistency in using the supporting typeface or typefaces (few visual identity systems use more than two, perhaps three, type families) represents that detail which users may not notice at a rational level but subconsciously feel as part of the organization's identity system. Therefore, do not allow anyone—from employees and the advertising agency to those managing social media—to deviate from the definitions laid down in the corporate visual identity guidelines. 

As you develop the corporate visual identity, also remember that you will very likely need paid licenses for the typefaces, especially the more premium ones. 

Are you already tired of it? 

When this question flashed up in the presentation, most of the audience smiled. But the question really refers to whether you have already grown tired of your corporate visual identity. In my career, I have often encountered clients who (too) soon 'got bored' of their more or less tightly defined visual identity. The result is that uncontrolled changes start creeping in—color palette, typefaces, layouts … Unfortunately, because of this lack of control, the visual identity quickly begins to fall apart, as the definitions in the guidelines become irrelevant. New vendors often rely on the newer, now inconsistently designed communication assets. 

Why does this happen at all? This 'boredom' stems from employees' constant exposure to the brand within the organization. You know: every day walking past the same sign at the office, the same business cards on the desk, the same look of social media posts all the time … And this is precisely the crux of the misunderstanding: customers—the people we want to feel the personality of your brand across different touchpoints and come to know it as an acquaintance—are not in constant contact with it. They need to recognize it among the hundreds of visual stimuli they receive every day. And it is consistency in communications that sustains the sense that it is the same personality throughout.