Truly Deeply/Madly

Where’s the Brand Design?
As a cre­ative brand agency work­ing with clients through­out Aus­tralia and the Asia Pacific, we spend much of our lives div­ing deep into the craft of brand design. Whether it is pub­lish­ing our com­pre­hen­sive guide to trends in global brand design or trans­lat­ing the bril­liant brand strat­egy and propo­si­tion def­i­n­i­tion work we do into brand iden­ti­ties and brand com­mu­ni­ca­tions for our clients, brand design is a crit­i­cal part of our game. We see brand design as a par­tic­u­larly spe­cial­ized skill-set, where every nuance of a brands’ visual mes­sag­ing is care­fully crafted to present exactly the right com­bi­na­tion of visual cues to the mar­ket. The dif­fer­ence between brand design and it’s flashy cousin adver­tis­ing is is nei­ther widely under­stood, nor widely lever­aged by busi­ness, as the focus of today’s Post illustrates.

The Visual Lan­guage of Lux­ury
Recently on a flight to Syd­ney I cam across this adver­tise­ment for ‘Lux­ury Hotel Brand’ Sof­i­tel. I was instantly struck by the beau­ti­ful image shot for the cam­paign by famed Eng­lish pho­tog­ra­pher Tim Walker. The pho­to­graph (and the oth­ers shot for the cam­paign) beau­ti­fully sum-up the spirit that the brand is wish­ing to com­mu­ni­cate. The global theme for the cam­paign is; ’”Life is Mag­nifique” depict­ing the essence of French sophis­ti­ca­tion and lux­ury found at Sof­i­tel’. Sofitel’s ambi­tion is to become the pre­mier French ambas­sador of inter­na­tional hos­pi­tal­ity. As a brand, Sof­i­tel has always strug­gled to posi­tion itself in the pre­mium end of the mar­ket in our cor­ner of the world, and in my view, the visual brand lan­guage of the brand here must take much of the respon­si­bil­ity.

At left is a copy of the add in ques­tion, which is part of a broader larger cam­paign. The visual lan­guage of the ad fea­tures the won­der­ful hero imagery, but from there nose-dives into a tan­gle of mixed-visual mes­sages and inap­pro­pri­ate visual cues.
• The ad design fea­tures no less than five dif­fer­ent type faces. A golden rule of luxury/premium visual brand lan­guage is ‘less is more’ — the axiom of sim­ple ele­gance should be the guid­ing prin­ci­pal for any and all design for this brand.

• The ‘Life is Mag­inifique’ head­line has been reduced to the role of a con­fus­ing, sup­port­ing design ele­ment, rather than play the lead­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tion role it was des­tined for. The poorly designed typog­ra­phy for this line appears to be inher­ited from the global cam­paign, but the chal­lenge here must be to show it in the best pos­si­ble light rather then hide it in the wings through embarrassment.

• The adop­tion of a new French Inspired’ head­line does the brand com­mu­ni­ca­tion no favors. Firstly it intro­duces a new type­face to the mix — in iso­la­tion there’s noth­ing wrong with the font choice, but an addi­tional font in that colour, size and loca­tion fights against the very cues of sophis­ti­cated ele­gance it is try­ing to com­mu­ni­cate. Sec­ondly, we believe firmly that a brand demon­strates it’s propo­si­tion first and com­mu­ni­cates it sec­ondly. As a piece of com­mu­ni­ca­tion ‘Mag­nifique French Inspired Hotels’ does noth­ing to con­vince me that what they say is what you get. A French Chef in the hotel restau­rant, a French inte­rior designer of note cre­at­ing the guest rooms, French toi­letries in the bath­room, an exten­sive French wine list, even a French accented concierge would all inspire me to believe the Sof­i­tel brand expe­ri­ence would cap­ture some­thing of the French essence of ‘Life is Maginifique’.

• Whilst on the sub­ject of Inspi­ra­tion Francé, the visual lan­guage design has also missed-out on  the oppor­tu­nity to incor­po­rate some authen­tic French cues. A visual decode of lux­ury French hotel visual lan­guage pro­vides a num­ber of cues from lay­out to colour palette, from type style to sim­plic­ity that would pro­vide the brand some much needed French spirit.

• Finally, the brand mark treat­ment. Launched in 2007, the Sof­i­tel brand mark has under­gone a trans­for­ma­tion into 3D. As we cov­ered at length in our 2010 pub­lished Trends in Global Brand Visual Lan­guage Report; three dimen­sion­al­ity has become the trend of last resort. As a trend it has been picked-up across every indus­try and used and abused by brands across the mar­ket. Although the use of three dimen­sional brand marks has rarely been seen in the lux­ury end of any mar­ket — that is for good rea­son. The visual cues com­mu­ni­cated by this style of brand mark ren­der­ing are any­thing but lux­ury. This style of brand visual com­mu­ni­ca­tion has been hijacked-by and is strongly asso­ci­ated with mid-to-lower end brands. Even lux­ury car maker Mercedes-Benz, who were early adopters of the three dimen­sional brand mark have recently changed back to a sim­pler, ver­sion of their mark to avoid the cues now asso­ci­ated with this trend.

With due respect to the many pro­fes­sion­als who have worked on this cam­paign for Sof­i­tel, the lack of brand designer in the mix is painfully clear. Given the care, detail and expense invested in the won­der­ful photo shoot for this cam­paign, it’s a pity the same con­sid­er­a­tion wasn’t afforded to estab­lish­ing a brand visual lan­guage palette of equal qual­ity and integrity.

Below are sev­eral other shots from the won­der­ful photo shoot by Tim Walker

Dave Ansett, Bran­da­men­tal­ist
Designer of Brand Visual Lan­guage
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