I’ve spent most of the last twenty years trying to make brands work. Not brand building or ‘creating iconic brands’, just trying to make them work. And it’s hard. Through some wonderful successes and some abject failures, I’ve developed strong beliefs about how these odd things we call ‘brands’ work.
One of the most central of these is that design is your biggest lever. It’s the most powerful thing you can use to make your brand work. Think about brands that have sustained amazing results over time – it’s really hard to think of one that has bad design. There are plenty of weak brands with good design, but the strong set, that iconic group we all want to be part of, they all have great design. So, why does this happen? I think there are three main reasons.
