The multiplicity of supports and touchpoints grew exponentially, are very atomized, therefore the big change in the brand-consumer relationship. Brands need to communicate in a customized way and go along with the consumer in an organic way, serving a purpose beyond the functionality of the product or service they sell. They need to add value to people’s lives. Given this dynamic scenario, what are the new rules to build a successful brand, today?
Ricardo Drab, CEO y Creative leader of Drab Brand Agency, thinks that the concept of a brand is what it represents its own DNA, it's positioning, its territory, its architecture, its personality, its purpose; what it’s going to build the positioning in people’s minds, helped by its relations and interactions, which today are very atomized. “The challenge-he says- is to create brands with the story by doing at its core”. The stage changed. Think about the studies that say that more than 70% of people wouldn’t care if brands disappear. They can’t stand them. It’s important to think about how these brands are going to impact people’s lives beyond what they sell. A brand is never static, a brand is always organic, alive, in motion, and today more alive than ever”.
Then it is imperative to put together a control center to equalize what the brand says and does: “Today, from the strategy to the execution are many players interrelated, internally inside companies and external partners. These numbers grows depending if the brand is local, regional or global. Then we need to add the number of different contexts and supports where the brand can live. Without a clear branding strategy, it becomes very difficult to build this universe in an efficient way to be able to ad value. “It’s not important to have a strategy, is vital”, ads Drab. For him, also, the place “design” has inside companies many times is not clear at all. In his view, to talk about “Identity in design” is to talk about many things that together give life to the brand, putting some order, boosting it and helping the way the brand is managed inside the companies and with all its roster of strategic partners to keep consistency.
“Let’s not forget that a big part of what brands do today is very tactical. From there, if you are not able to customize the way you communicate it’s going to be difficult to connect, and what generally happens is that in the attempt to generate something new, many different resources ad up to the equation to say something different, and soon, ends up fading”, Drab comments. He thinks one of the most common mistakes is to think that identity is just a logo, typography, and color. “The basic concept of the traditional brand is static, not flexible”. Trends are tied to create organic identities that allow brands to be always the same, always different, that build a dynamic personality, modular y coherent, that connects with people and accompany them day by day”
6 Rules to create a Brand
By: Ricardo Drab
Listen what people want, what they need and what they will need.
Think about the place from where the brand will relate and how people will be able to verify that place where the brand will stand.
Create a discursive map, strategic and tactical to set up the roles of the brand and from where the brand will relate with the functional and the emotional. How to cocreate actional communication moments and platforms, interrelations, activation and experience, short and long term. This is a new step that solves many of the problems that exist in today’s brands between the research and strategic face and the executional one.
Create a visual frame (a visual that contains all the communicational universe of the brand), identity pillars that contain the innovation, pregnancy, and unicity.
Create a brand and communication ecosystem from the brands owns language that helps to boost the way to customize its communication and generate engagement. The concept of brand language is something innovative, it related to the idea of an alive brand, that goes along with people, not only interrupting.
Manualized in an execution able and editable way, the strategic pillars and tools, brand books, identity manuals, and visual identity systems.
Ricardo Drab, Creative leader y founder of Drab™ Brand Agency, a business with more than 20 years of experience, based in Buenos Aires, Argentina, with offices in Mexico City and Los Angeles, California, developing identity projects at a local and regional level for brands like: Fox, Unilever, Coca- Cola, Toyota, Disney, Powerade, Fuzetea, Cablevisión, Telecom, Sony, Noblex, Bimbo, among others. Creator of tools related to the innovation of the communication and brand identity, and its relationship with people.