Branding is one of the most neglected and misunderstood aspects of advertising.
Article by Josh Manning, head brand thinker at Thinkerbell.
While we agonise over what the message should be and push hard to grab attention, branding is, more often than not, an afterthought.
I’d go out on a limb and even say that most don’t understand what it actually means to brand an ad well. And, even if you think you do, this might challenge you to think differently.
Recently, our executive creative tinker, Tom Wenborn, wrote a piece on the trend of minimalist OOH ads, including ads by Coca Cola, British Airways, KitKat, Heinz and KFC. Ads lauded by the industry for their simplicity and smart, sophisticated use of branding.
We wanted to see if they were actually well branded. So, we gave our mates at Ideally a bell and they’ve helped us put these ads to the test.
Each ad was shown to a nationally representative sample for a total of 6 seconds, mimicking the average time you’d be exposed to a piece of large format OOH. They were then asked, unprompted, what brand the ad was for.
This is what we found…
Don’t torture your assets too much
Play with assets too much and they become unrecognisable. This is true for even the most long-standing brands and brand ideas.
Research through Ideally found that despite using colour, and playing with the logo shape and the brand line, when you take “Heinz” out of “It has to be Heinz” hardly anyone knows its Heinz. Warping the iconic bottle, and using part of the “Enjoy Coca Cola” line still fell flat despite the context of the classic summer Coke refreshment occasion. Only 28 percent recognised it as Coke communicating to them.
Context can aid branding but only if its sufficiently category specific
Competing associations. They’re a thing. Look them up.
People don’t just think soft drink when it comes to summer refreshment. They also think beer. They don’t just think of ketchup when it comes to burgers. They think fast food.
Context can definitely help aid branding. It did for British Airways – showing an aircraft – and KFC – depicting eating in a restaurant.
But other categories often play in the same occasions and fulfil the same, or similar, consumer needs to your brand. If you don’t have enough brand or category cues you’ll end up cuing other categories and brands. According to the research run through Ideally, beyond itself and soft drinks there was a fair amount of beer associations with Coke’s ad, and Heinz did more for Hungry Jacks and Macca’s than for itself.
Branding doesn’t have to be hamfisted
Yes, Coke and Heinz may have cooked it, but KFC, KitKat and British Airways all achieved high levels of branding – research saw attribution above 75% for all of them – without having to slap a massive logo on top, or use a big coloured background.
Incidental logo and/or product use, plus some strong category cues, and you’re cooking with gas… For the more artistically minded among us, there’s definitely some comfort in that branding doesn’t have to be hamfisted to be done right.
However, you don’t achieve this by pushing your brand to the edges – KitKat, British Airways and KFC were all integral parts of the narrative and, in the case of KFC and KitKat, also very much at the heart of their brand ideas. Coke and Heinz also have very brand centric ideas but pushed their brand and product too much to the edges in execution.
Overall, branding deserves A LOT more thought
Slap a logo in the corner. Make the logo big on the end frame. Dress the set with brand colour. These are easy, default, path-of least-resistance afterthought methods of branding.
Knowing you need to build, and maintain, distinctive brand assets is just the first step. It doesn’t mean much if you then don’t then consider how to apply them.
If brands and brand ideas with this much longevity can still fuck it up, then it should be a big wake up call for brands everywhere that very few have it figured out and that branding deserves a lot more thought than we give it.
So, if you’re not giving branding much thought, if you’re thinking of it as a bolt-on at the end of the creative process, or you’re blindly following brand guidelines that tell you the logo goes in the bottom right-hand corner, I’d say its is highly likely that your ad is not as branded as you think it is.
