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

In the spring, we at Humanfrog were pleased to accept the invitation to participate in the training titled "Sharpening the Brand and Its Strategy", organized by the Competence Center for Design Management (KCDM) on the premises of SIP Sempeter, itself one of the most successful companies in integrating design management approaches into business. I was asked to prepare a perspective on brand strategy from the standpoint of its visual presence—or, the "designer’s view". 

Many thanks to all of you who attended the event, and I hope you will be able to use the knowledge shared as fuel for your brand’s growth. And if you missed the event… After I first introduced 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 all too often end up as a buzzword. Something we put in the annual report or on the website to make the text look more contemporary and professional. Interestingly, the concept of touchpoints is quite simple at its core, yet critical to brand expression. In modern life, at various touchpoints we are exposed daily 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 tuned to recognizing… well, the human, right?

So why is it that we do not ignore certain brands? Moreover, some are so iconic that almost religions have formed around them.

Perhaps the solution for your brand—and this was the crux of my talk—is to teach your customers to perceive your brand as a personality. We recognize people—especially those we know—far more quickly than brands. That is the power of their personality, which they carry within and communicate outward.

So how do you build a personality for a brand so that, at various touchpoints, customers will encounter it at least as an acquaintance—or better yet, as 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 your brand becoming a personality is, of course, its identity. After all, we also ask of a person what that person is like. Are they fun, serious, reliable, loyal, loving? 

Various tools have been developed to build a brand’s personality, such as Brand Star, a tool that defines the brand’s communication, its culture, image and reputation, the nature of the business the brand represents, the external (environmental) forces that affect it, and the architecture of the brand and its sub-brands. These latter topics—the architecture of brands and concepts such as a branded house, sub-brands, endorsed brands, and a house of brands—I touched on in the June lecture, but I will present them in more detail in one of the upcoming articles in the Frog Perspective. I promise. 

Let us return to tools for finding identity. Brand Star is certainly a very serious, corporate tool, but to many who advocate a softer, more human approach to defining a brand’s identity—myself included—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 are used to pigeonholing people we know (perhaps not even personally, but say from the media) by their archetypes, we can put brand personalities into the same pigeonholes. And yes, you guessed it—we consultants, out of some sort of bizarre political correctness, avoid the rather more pejorative term “stereotypes.” That would probably drive away even the few clients who would otherwise listen to us. 

In short, we are talking about 12 archetypes of a brand’s “personality” that we can use to good effect precisely because they describe it with traits that are natural and human. 

Name 

As is customary when getting to know people, we typically first know a person’s name and their appearance – the face. Only in the next steps are we ready to accept (or not accept) their personality traits. What a face is to a person, a logo is to a brand. What a name is to a person, a name is to a brand as well. 

So let us start with the name. One of the most common mistakes entrepreneurs make – usually in the early stages of building their business – is choosing a generic “name.” To take a caricatured example, this would mean that a car mechanic, for instance, names 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 mechanic we are talking about, it is certainly a good idea to say whether it is Janez or Jaka. 

But … who would even choose a generic descriptor as the name of their brand? Perhaps this very poor idea echoes the rather outdated approaches from the early 2000s, when, instead of brand consultants, search engine optimization specialists “helped” choose brand names. This concept was based on the assumption that, in search engines, for a given keyword, say “auto mechanic,” the domain avtomehanik.com would achieve better rankings than a domain with a unique brand name. 

Of course, names that matched search queries perfectly soon ran out, and, moreover, brand names that were not actually names could not work at any other touchpoint beyond online search engines. Meanwhile, new brands with “real,” i.e., unique names were becoming ever stronger. 

In Slovenia, it used to happen – 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 English well. For everyone else, the generic nature of the name could not be changed by translation – as shown by the example of the brand Byte Zone, which we developed at Humanfrogu. 

Logo 

For your brand’s logo to become its face, we aim to reflect the personality we defined through archetypes in it. One of the tools brand designers often rely on is semantic analysis – a game of associations and sketching. The sketches we add to the associations are typically not sketches for the final logo yet. It is more about translating verbal associations into a visual language. The actual design of the mark follows in later stages. 

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

Before we move on to the final details that will define not only the brand’s logo, but also its entire visual environment — commonly referred to as the corporate visual identity — it makes sense to first identify the touchpoints. At Humanfrog, we approach this by defining two primary touchpoints: the one that is most exposed and the one that is most critical.

Take the example of a company engaged in transport — the most exposed touchpoint is likely the presence of the brand logo on the vehicle, while the most critical might be the stamp — it is small, single-color, and its production method does not reproduce details well.

Corporate visual identity 

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

Alongside the various logo applications (for different presentation techniques and different backgrounds), two of the basic elements of the visual identity are certainly the color palette and the supporting typefaces. The former will ensure the brand is quickly recognizable compared to competing brands – in much the same way that teams differ in team sports. Think of football, for example: there, color is so closely 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 “the Orange.” Well, 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 title. 

But the color palette is usually easier to understand within the visual identity than its next element: the supporting typefaces. Of course, I am aware that most of your customers may not distinguish individual type styles at all. Consistency in the use of the supporting typeface or typefaces (few visual identities use more than two or perhaps three type families) is, for users, that detail which they may not notice consciously at a rational level, yet subconsciously perceive as part of the organization’s identity system. Therefore, do not allow anyone—from employees and the advertising agency through to those managing social media posts—to deviate from the definitions set out in the visual identity manual. 

Already during the development of the visual identity, be mindful that you will very likely need to secure paid licenses for the typefaces you intend to use, especially the more premium ones. 

Tired of it already? 

When this question flashed up in the presentation, most of the audience smiled. But the question actually refers to whether you have already grown tired of your visual identity. In my career, I have often encountered clients who have (too) soon grown “tired” of their more or less strictly defined visual identity. As a result, changes to the color palette, typefaces, layouts … often start being introduced in an uncontrolled way. Unfortunately, due to this lack of control, the visual identity quickly starts to fall apart, as the definitions in the manual become irrelevant. New vendors often take their cues from the newer, by now inconsistently designed communication assets. 

Why does this happen in the first place? This “fatigue” stems from employees in the organization being in constant contact with the brand. As you know: every day, past the same sign on the way into the office, the same business cards on the desk, the same look of social media posts … This is precisely the crux of the misunderstanding: customers, or those whom you want to experience your brand’s personality at different touchpoints and recognize it as something familiar, are simply not in constant contact with it. They have to recognize it among the hundreds of visual stimuli they receive every day. And it is consistency in communication that preserves the sense that it is the same personality throughout.