The success of a name comes from its instant memorability. When it precedes the product or brand experience, it creates an expectation of a certain quality or personality. It prods the instinct, provokes a reaction and directs curiosity. This is triggered by the sound of the name, by employing the appropriate use of phonetic aesthetic.

What are Names Made of?

The Sound of Names

Certain sounds have phonetic properties that appeal to deep-set instinct. The name Google, we argue, has less to do with its derivation from the googol (a very large employing known only to math-heads) and more to do with its resemblance to a baby’s blabber (known to every human). It is clear that the Google identity wears the visage of a curious child by using primary colours and basic shapes that cloaks its world-dominating, and some say sinister ambitions, with a childlike personality.

Similarly, culture (the noise through which the name passes from sender to receiver) can influence how we process a name. Take the case of the brand of mashed instant potato mix we named Vegit. Its brevity incites immediate action–do we hear ‘Just do it’ somewhere? It beckons the consumer to listen to his hunger and act on it instantly, no instruction manual required. The name semantically and phonetically suggests efficiency.

Similarly, a name like Inme immediately paints a picture of a confident but naive, childlike presence. Inme is a pioneer in the summer-camp business in India and they speak of the uniqueness of every child. The name is a simple utterance, designed as self-directed positive rhetoric that is meant to echo in every child—I have [desirable trait] in me!

Making Meaning

But this is not to say that the deeper meanings associated with names don’t work their effect. A name like Vrixa (our name for a human-resources-focused technology fund) has all the phonetic intent to turn heads, as also the x, which phonetically suggests efficiency. It’s a playful take on the Sanskrit ‘vriksha’ meaning tree, because tree names are beloved of venture capital firms, which need to suggest stability and growth at once. By astutely addressing this dimension the name first sets and later entrains a customer’s expectations.

Think Global, Say it Local

Local cues can make brands seem closer and more recognisable. For example the name Minute Khana addresses the ambitions and concerns of a modern homemaker who loves the convenience of ready-to-eat food but also finds the idea alien. While the quickness and convenience is implicit in Minute, it is the Hindi word ‘khana’ which alludes to a wholesome Indian meal that inspires her to include this product in her kitchen.

Another example is our name for Haldiram’s triangular nachos-like chips. Panga, an untranslatable slang usage in Hindi (roughly, a casual confrontation) phonetically echoes the sharp taste and angular shape of the product, giving it the edge of a light-hearted confrontation; not quite playing nice, but always with a wink.

Despite the enthusiastic allusions to tradition and local aesthetics, sometimes it serves the brand to avoid parodying its own culture. Haldiram’s foray into South Indian snacks was done with poise: our name Southern Delights, exemplifies southern restraint as it purveys ‘murukku’ to the North. Yet it has the sound of a small-town eatery that the Indian ear will pick up.

Constraints

…can often be the stimulus for innovation.

Design begins with empathetic conversation, but awkward situations arise when clients have preferences for particular sounds or letters based on feng-shui, astrology or vaastu. Clearly, the High Tech Robotic Systemz, looking to rebrand, needed to communicate their expertise more succinctly without compromising on its youthful energy. But there was a caveat— the name had to be numerologically sound and begin with the ‘th’ sound. We settled on Thebo, suggestive of a robotic pet (and rhyming with ro-bo, as robot was sometimes pronounced).

When the couture brand Ashima Leena decided to launch a pret line, as a daughter brand, it was to be similar in spirit but different in form. It required a link to the established original but also the freedom to be itself. The name Alias neatly resolves the contradiction. Embedded within the name is the abbreviation AL—a cheeky nod to the original brand Ashima Leena. To visually articulate this lineage, the logo itself carries the letters A and L from the Ashima Leena logo and completes the heist.

The Visual Word

Words are heard, and read; but they are also seen. And the way they are spelt or graphically represented augments the force with which they are read or heard. Our name for Haldiram’s healthy ‘namkeen’ snacks Snac Lite economically uses two syllables, doing away with the k to accentuate its ‘liteness’.

Vrixa’s identity also visually buttresses the sound of the x. The sound and look are simultaneous: they are synesthetic, or sensed together in a way that can’t be pried apart. The x marks the spot, and the x multiplies, as the tagline “HR x tech” implies.

Atomistic Naming

The phonetic, semantic and graphic aspects of a name are the ways in which minds, ears and eyes can be drawn to a name. But whole words are not necessary, nor always ideal. The use of word fragments can lend flexibility and precision. From these atomistic units, a new compound can occur, much like a chemist creates one in her lab. Vegit, encountered earlier, is one such.

A fragment can work on its own, too. Exper is our name for a leadership development firm that trains senior, junior or mid-level teams. Their methods involve no classrooms, but are experiential, their advice backed by the experience of the trainers as businessmen, as they help leaders maximise their expressive potential for exponential benefits. Apart from the extensions it suggests, the truncated word fragment Exper is a phonetic exhalation, a whisper, thus achieving a lightness that wholly befits the brand.

However, the best cases are when the chemist has creative influence over the goal of the experiment itself. Read on.

Integral Design

Not always does identity design influence the ethos of a brand. But when it does, the brand’s identity and ethos seem inextricably intertwined, making a telling and authentic statement. A new design school was to be positioned as a Master’s course at the center of design thinking, helping students tackle real world issues through design methods. The brand implores designers to grapple with the complex interactions of society, economy and technology. The name School of Integral Design is just as unassuming as it is profound. It communicates the serious intent of the school clearly by integrating the ethos into its name. The skeletal visual identity echoes this by revealing its structure while allowing ample room for creative play.

The Opportunity

The potency of a name must not be understated; it is the irreducible expression of a brand’s values. At ICD we encourage clients to invest time and effort in naming so that the brand and the consumer are coupled in text, speech and graphic. And in meaning: the word ‘logo’ is derived from the Greek ‘logos’ meaning ‘word’, and also ‘reason’ or ‘meaning’. Identity starts here: a name that points to its logos, and its ethos at the same time.

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Design, properly understood, is inherently social. Designers make objects and symbols, for the eventual use of other people, to fit into, or sometimes transform socially determined situations. So an invitation to ‘share a fresh perspective’ at a consumer summit, to an audience of marketers, should hardly have caused unease.

But inquiry is born from unease; in this case, from Deep Design’s dawning realisation that designers don’t really deal with consumers. They aren’t trained for it.

Marketers and designers want to work together more closely, but they lack a common view of the humanscape. Wherever the marketer can speak for the consumer, he has the mike, so to speak.

Design, to use the current argot of the trade, is centred on users, or humans—a carpenter using a drill, a reader scanning a newspaper page, book or website, a mother manoeuvring her toddler into a high chair. It addresses the unchanging human system: the body and its limbs; a sensory apparatus dominated by sight; a logical tendency, subject to a fickle attention and the twitches of the lizard brain; perhaps some rudimentary notions of pride.

Finally, design’s problem-solving orientation focuses on the user’s behaviour in the context of interacting with the designed solution, not an inner drive. We care about a score of things: from whether her task got done, to whether our work left society better in some way. But not whether this user was insecure about her future, socially constrained, or struggling with being modern: a user is a user.

Joy to the world, the consumer is born

Advertising created the consumer, or a person viewed purely by a propensity to buy, use up, and buy more of something, when industrial capitalism started to produce increasingly better but increasingly similar products. Human ingenuity responded by creating new needs, (like the ability to impress friends at a party) and fears, (like the failure to be a good mum). Not much design here; and while the human traits assumed here are fairly universal, it does introduce psychology into the mix.

More sophisticated efforts from the time of Cheskin’s sensory marketing have co-opted design, realising that a product’s visual imprint can transcend its function. These marketers were not just after simple beauty, but saw form as whispering to a consumer psyche, per the psychological fashions of the day. So Bernays’ stunt of getting suffragettes to simultaneously light up cigarettes, during a march down a Manhattan avenue, was meant to convince women to overcome their unconscious (Freudian) fear of the cigarette’s ‘phallic’ shape. Post-war American cars were endlessly re-designed, to engineer their appearance to work with the consumer’s hidden mental apparatus, arguably to appeal to masculinity and power.

But consumer theory is a braid with two strands. One strand is empirical, quantitative and cognitive. It aims to tease out the best approach to (for example) segmenting markets, studying things like demographics, spending power, geography, and physical constraints to buying. Rather like applied economics, it deals with the consumer’s rational side, offering benefits like efficacy or economy that are universal. Complexity notwithstanding, a great deal can be made out by careful statistics and reason working hand in hand, to some degree of certainty.

I have a feeling

The other strand hypothesises the consumer as an emotional being who is an actor in a social, cultural and economic drama, to explain or identify her deep motivations and anxieties. It uses data, but interpretively, and also pays heed to trained impressions. Its findings are qualitative and uncertain. It seeks validity, postponing the need for certainty.

Of particular interest are the consumer’s values and culture. This is an attempt to extend our knowledge of the consumer including but beyond his observed behaviour in the context of our product or brand, but a deep orientation that influences his actions, at various if not all times. The idea is that a brand’s values can resonate with that of a group of consumers, and make them loyalists. (Go back to paragraph 3 and appreciate the contrast).

These groupings offer a kind of alternate market segmentation, cutting across income classes, social class lines (defined by entitlements like access and status) or communal ones (such as religious, ethnic or national). For example: the multitudes that see in a Trump or a Modi a corrective to a historical power grab by a mealy-mouthed elite. Or others who belatedly learn ritualism from a previous generation to compensate for the Indian-ness they see evaporating from their lives. Each grouping, united by attitude, offers multiple predictions, not for a single, narrow product or context, but with multiple economic, social, cultural and political possibilities, with lasting implications.

Design speaks up

It is in this second strand that designers can come into their own, not in their accustomed role as downstream providers of expression, who take their cues from marketers. Instead, as intelligent observers and interpreters of culture, especially the visual. They are uniquely placed because they pour products into the stream of culture, as well as fish in it for reference and inspiration.

Designers can observe how people express themselves visually: the fashions and codes their choices seem to converge on. How we decorate our homes (why is a comic book style print of Meena Kumari doing on that cushion cover?), and how the groom’s niece dances at a sangeet function, why not? And yes, how they buy. Then, they need to join the dots: what does this say about people and their responses the forces shaping their life? The anthropologist Grant McCracken, who studies culture and commerce, sees this as the source of design’s power in the boardroom.

Alessi is more

Or take the Italian household appliances maker Alessi, which commissions famous designers for its products, and has several iconic products among them. The business scholar Roberto Verganti, who has studied the methods of innovative Italian businesses, points out that these icons are not merely awards-circuit darlings but broad commercial successes. They command significant price premiums and disproportionate volumes, for years together. That last criterion implies deep attachment, not an acute social contagion with a brief, steep peak.

Alessi’s method relies on trusted interpreters, who identify large cultural swells (a fatigue with a joyless modernity, for example) and select a designer based on the likelihood that his temperament can speak to that mood. Their choices may be surprising: Alessi’s best known classic, a kettle, came out of a collaboration with the American architect Michael Graves.

The challenge for marketers with this type of thinking is to tolerate the uncertainty of a payoff, in exchange for its size and longevity. Innovative products or market strategies need more than a jaap of the Steve Jobs naam. Designers need to be able to not just observe and imagine, but to convincingly interpret and act. They can start by convincing themselves.

So, I accepted the invitation. Will you?

The post Design to Consumer: I’m Not Sure We’ve Met? appeared first on ICD | Blog.

Everyone loves a logo, or loves to hate one. Designing logos is the most easily understood example of the graphic designer’s work. Among the additions to visual culture since the 19th century, the logo ranks with television and cinema. Stand in Tokyo’s Ginza or New York’s Times Square and you will be overrun by them; in India, we experience a booming town through the sprouting of familiar logos on its streets.

Yet the logo is under attack. Dead, say bolder commentators, or irrelevant, say the more nuanced: it is a product of evolution, and eligible for extinction. The London designer Simon Manchipp found them “a hangover from old-school thinking… an old-fashioned approach to differentiating”.

Ironically, to the extent that this view is valid, the logo is under threat from the same processes that made it so successful in the first place. Though logos are ancient in the sense of marks that denoted community (the cross, the shaivite tripundara or the swastika), the modern logo is a creation of trade, media and transportation.

Trade and modern transportation ended local monopolies: suddenly, the village washing-soap maker was competing with imports from another district, and needed more than his initials on the product. Traders (wholesalers and retailers), being closer to the eventual customers, had bullying rights over manufacturers. These gents fought back with differentiated products, now with ‘maker’s marks’, regaining control over the customer and thus, terms of trade. These marks became the modern brand logo. (The tussle continues; the behemoth Amazon is a retailer).

Advertising speeded and sharpened the change in the design of these marks to answer the need for visibility, compactness and differentiation. It’s easy to make too little of the difference between these new logos and, say, the coats-of-arms and heraldry of earlier centuries. Those early marks served to identify, a deliberate act accomplished by reference to convention. In the modern mark, recognition, a more spontaneous form of knowing, along with ownability and recall, that marketer’s favourite, are additionally necessary.

Those early marks served to identify. In the modern mark, recognition, along with ownability and recall

By the middle of the 20th century, the power of the visual trade mark was firmly acknowledged, and the forerunners of the modern brand consulting firms were born. The logo became big business, a store of both value as well as meaning. This is where things started to change.

This turn in the logo’s fortunes was linked to the evolution of the language of marketing, and then a new understanding of the brand, approximately in the last quarter of the 20th century. The brand was now not just the name of the business, but an evocation of new ideas—benefits, values, promises and other more or less emotional fragments, tied by association to its name and other ‘signifiers’, like the logo. Oh, and It had a personality, like a human.

The logo’s fortunes was linked to the evolution of the language of marketing, and then a new understanding of the brand

This bundle was, said the gurus, at once embedded in the product or business and also, separately, an abstraction, capable of being explicitly managed, and concretised at will, into an entirely different product, again a late 20th century phenomenon. It gave rise to a new notion of the corporate brand, now as progenitor of brands, and thus to the concept of brand architecture. Also, the brand could also now be separately valued as an asset.

This complexity now required the logo to distill this bundle of properties, and made it a strategic decision: big business for consultants. But this wasn’t all.

New, geographically dispersed brands, including the modernised corporate brand (so went the thinking) now needed a consistent visual appearance, implemented via a centrally mandated visual system: a set of graphic assets, such as colours, and typefaces and added graphics, governed by rules for correct usage.

Crucially, corporate and other brand owners were convinced that these visual systems were also central to the bundle of associations that made up its brand, this new, mystically powerful lever. In other words, not just visually consistent but ideationally and emotionally linked—enter another new word, coherent.

Over the next decades, these visual systems grew in sophistication and ingenuity. In addition to ensuring recognition, they now cover the style of imagery, and the mood of the communications, across product design, retail spaces, advertising and more. Often not rigidly consistent like their forebears, they may go by names like ‘brand world’ or ‘experience’. The argument: sufficiently well executed, brand worlds obviate the need for a logo, while still delivering a powerful whiff of the brand, so to speak.

These visual systems grew in sophistication and ingenuity. Sufficiently well executed,brand worlds obviate the need for a logo, while still delivering a powerful whiff of the brand

There’s another strand to the anti-logo argument. Logos, by themselves, have no meaning, but derive it from the businesses they mark. Mercedes’ three-pointed star gets its value from the consistently admired cars it sits atop, not the other way around. So why bother with the hype and fuss of designing them to distill the brand into the logo?

We can see these as a clash between two notions: brand as experience, vs brand as a symbol. Deep Design believes that the brand-as-symbol perspective is under-appreciated.
Symbols, as carriers of identity are inseparable from human life, from tribe to kingdom, ancient to modern. And all aspects of brand experience—even the taste of Johnny Walker whisky—whisper to our identity (and are thus signs). Taste is sensory, but also associative, and there’s neurological evidence for this: it just tastes better with the label.

Second, symbols such as logos focus organisational and social energies, by substituting a physical thing for an idea that must be defended, in war or in peace. Most of all, a logo can travel from the bonnet of a Mercedes car to an advertisement, and trigger the same feelings with incredible economy of time and space. Of course, there’s no doubt that it’s a part of a ‘brand world’.

But why design them, if any old logo will do? Because it’s easier to build an association when the logo’s content encourages it. Laboratory-reared monkeys have been trained to ignore snakes and fear flowers, but it’s far harder to do than the converse.

It’s easier to build an association when the logo’s content encourages it

Does the logo rank with television? Just look out of the window: far from a burial, the party is in full swing.

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