G.K. CHESTERTON got it half right: when people stop believing in God they don’t believe in nothing. They believe in brands. Companies spend as much time thinking about their brands as their products. Countries and cities hire brand consultants. Up-and-coming footballers want to brand it like Beckham. Writers cultivate their brands as assiduously as their literary style.
The idea that not just bars of soap but organisations, people and places can have brands is such a commonplace that it is easy to forget how recent it is. In the 1960s admen concentrated on devising brands and campaigns for specific products and markets, rather than on creating an identity for the companies that made those products. The industry that churned out these campaigns was dominated by a handful of giant ad agencies, each divided between an officer corps of “suits” (who managed the accounts) and an army of lower-status “creatives” (who wrote the jingles).
Wally Olins started his career as an officer in one of these companies: as a history graduate of Oxford University he could, in those days, hardly be a private. He spent five years running Ogilvy & Mather’s office in Mumbai (and kept close ties with India for the rest of his life). But when he returned to England in the early 1960s he was disillusioned with his profession’s prevailing ideas. He decided to form a new company with a young designer called Michael Wolff. And he turned Wolff Olins into the command centre of a brand revolution.
He told his clients they needed to think more seriously about the collective identity of their organisation: if nurtured, this would provide them with a unique selling proposition in a crowded market, and an emotional connection to their customers. This changed both the focus of advertising and the relationship between the admen and their clients. Brand-building, Mr Olins saw, is not just an add-on which the company can buy when it wants to launch a new product. It is an integral part of its long-term strategy that guides the sort of products it rolls out.
Mr Olins spent the rest of his life broadening and deepening this insight. He urged companies to apply brand thinking to every corner of the corporate world, from the sort of people they recruited to the look of their delivery vans. Everything had to be “on brand”. He also applied brand thinking to an ever-wider range of institutions, from individuals to NGOs to museums to cities to countries. Though Mr Olins insisted that he never applied his prescriptions to himself, he was a highly recognisable figure, with his round glasses, bow ties and multicoloured socks.
He was at the heart of two more revolutions—one corporate and one cultural. He helped to launch a “niche revolution” in his industry, in which all-purpose ad agencies lost business to smaller specialist firms, such as ones concentrating on buying advertising space, or on designing corporate livery (although many of these specialists have since been swallowed up again by huge marketing conglomerates). And he was a pioneer of the bourgeois-bohemian style. His views were as trendy as his clothes. But he was a ruthless capitalist who merrily applied commercial thinking to once sacrosanct areas such as national identity.
Clients beat a path to the branding guru’s door. He found himself offering advice on corporate identity to a host of big-name clients such as Apple (The Beatles’ business rather than the Californian tech firm), British Oxygen, Cunard, Renault and even London’s Metropolitan Police. He continued to advise cities and governments on rebranding well after he retired: Narendra Modi, the leading candidate to become India’s next prime minister, was the latest rising star to fall under his sway.
Some of his branding exercises were memorable in a positive sense: it was clever to brand a new mobile-phone operator not with technobabble but with a colour, Orange. Others seem even more buttock-clenchingly awful in retrospect than they did at the time. He helped fashion Tony Blair’s attempt to rebrand Britain as “Cool Britannia”. He persuaded British Telecom to spend a fortune changing its name to BT and adopting an ugly logo featuring a prancing piper (now abandoned). He got Guinness to change its corporate name to the laxative-sounding Diageo. And he convinced officials in Poland to market their country, ponderously, as a land of “creative boisterousness, unusual but fun”.
Brands on the brain
At times Mr Olins seemed incapable of seeing the world except through his brand-tinted spectacles. He once argued that the French Revolution was a perfect example of rebranding, with the Tricolore as its logo, “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité” its slogan and “La Marseillaise” its jingle. Likewise Ataturk’s founding of modern Turkey and Bismarck’s uniting of Germany. He seemed to be forgetting Walter Bagehot’s insight about the risks of letting “daylight in upon the magic”: treating something as nothing more than a brand can actually diminish its brand equity. Thanks in part to Mr Olins’s empire-building, branding itself now has a branding problem: “W1A”, a BBC satire about the BBC, portrays brand consultants as airheads who prattle on about “upsizing your footprint”.
Yet branding’s footprint is unlikely to be downsized soon. Attempts to put precise values on brands may be a bit spurious: Millward Brown, a consulting firm, argues that the top 100 brands worldwide were worth $2.6 trillion in 2013, up 7% on the previous year. But brands are certainly worth a lot of money. Mr Olins recognised two great truths about the modern capitalist economy. The first is that the most precious resource in a noisy, crowded market is people’s attention. The second is that consumers are not just looking for utility in the things they buy. They are also looking for meaning. “In the absence of a spiritual mentor,” he once declared, with his signature nonchalance, “the idea of what the brand stands for—‘Just Do It’, or whatever it is—is a substitute.”
Economist.com/blogs/schumpeter