A Study in Consistency in Branding
The World Cup is happening at stadiums in the U.S., most of which are already under naming rights for particular brands. However, other brands have paid to be sponsors exclusively during the World Cup. As a result, many stadiums’ names and logos are getting draped to “hide” them.
But what makes my branding heart happy, and also makes me giggle a bit, is that because some of the brands are SO well known, even draping the logo it is still blatantly obvious what the “hidden” brand is.
The loudest example of this I have seen is Levi’s Stadium in San Francisco. Under a large, white tarp, the outline of the batwing emblem is still clearly visible. As more people commented on it, Levi’s decided to embrace it with a sense of humor.
They changed their social media profile images from any standard branding into Levi’s logo into a red background (Levi’s red tab brand color) with just the tarp-draped shape.
They are running ad trucks around the city that have the same red background and the image of the sheet-draped shape.
They posted a video of stores at malls around the world with their signs above the entrances covered in white drapes.
They posted a video of them taking a pair of jeans, removing the red Levi’s tab, and wrapping a blank, white tab around the red tab to hide it, and then sewing it back into place.
Levi’s has such well-known, iconic branding seared into the minds of the public that they can take a moment to embrace this theater-of-the-absurd, see the potential to play with it, and use it to laugh with the rest of us. And, they probably have gotten more attention and bang-for-their buck for this than if they had paid to be a World Cup sponsor in the first place.
When your branding is so dialed in that you can bend it a little bit for a temporary period of time and still be instantly recognizable, that is a commanding brand presence.
Now, I don’t ever anticipate that I’ll design a Levi’s or a Coca-Cola or A McDonald’s level brand. But it is my intention to develop visual brands — and subsequent applications of that brand — that are so consistent that people know when they’ve seen it, and they build trust with that brand.
I’ve got a client, Nexus Primary Care, who tells me they get feedback pretty regularly from people along the lines of “Oh, yeah, I’ve heard of you. You’ve been around for several years, yes?”
And the answer is no, they’ve been around less than two. But what we’ve been able to do in that time is to create a visual brand that is so consistent, that when people see it they absolutely know if they’ve seen it before because they recognize it, and it creates this sense that it has been around for much longer.
So any time Nexus needs a form, or a notepad, or a marketing piece, or signage, or a giveaway item, they have me create it because they know that it will maintain the visual brand standards I created. Each item becomes a seamless part of the visual brand, which makes it even more likely that people will recognize it.