RANT: AESTHETIC DISTRACTIONS
BRANDING IS A POLITICAL ACT.
Businesses are disrupting every category imaginable. Mattresses, cookware, underwear, pet food, shoe laces, practically every aspect of the modern day living has a modernized brand identity and value proposition, occasionally with a comparable business model.
Options Overload
Cheaper, smarter, healthier, higher quality, more convenient and eco-friendly, these new products and services offer features and benefits that more established brands can’t, or won’t provide at scale. And many of these emerging businesses suffer similar challenges as they grow (Casper lost $80.1 million in returns and refunds last year alone). When you offer customers forgivingly seamless services they will use of them. And beyond the appearance of disruptive business models and human-centered services, there is a deeper trend at play here, reckless branding. This is not an indictment of new companies that value elevated brand aesthetics as part of their offering but it is an indictment of dispassionate and purposeless brand strategies.
A few years ago, Fast Company dubbed this phenomenon “blanding.” The gist of the argument is that tech giants such as Apple, Google, and Uber have embraced aesthetics of simplicity which have produced a “formula” for other brands to assume the veneer of tech brilliance and human-centered philosophies by applying the vernacular of simplicity. Looking simple, backed by temporary business models unable to scale, are a solution to all problems created by corporate practices.
This critique of current brand design techniques highlights a broader problem in the Design industry, speed to a complex operating market reduces thoughtful expressions that consider context. Designers are forced to create brand expressions that are on “trend” to relate to broad audience segmentations.
Provocation
What if branding were guided by a set of ethical standards and regulated practices? A business that engages such a professional practice would be guided by designers and strategists whose job entails the deliberate construction of cultural codes. This happens implicitly today through agencies and firms that value ethical standards in capital markets,. Unfortunately demands for growth, combined with irresponsible brand differentiation driven by uncritical trend mapping, have created an environment that rejects thoughtful design and development practices in favor of speed to market. Pace layering considers the rate of change through the layers of civilization and ecology (see the image below: replace fashion with brand). If our branding practices are unconsidered and irresponsible then a shock to symbolic systems in the “fashion layer” can not withstand major social disruption, thus affecting all layers below.
Pace Layering
Each layer has a metabolic rate of change and level of resilience determined the laws of its underlying systems.
As Stuart Brand writes: “In recent years a few scientists (such as R. V. O'Neill and C. S. Holling) have been probing the same issue in ecological systems: how do they manage change, how do they absorb and incorporate shocks? The answer appears to lie in the relationship between components in a system that have different change-rates and different scales of size. Instead of breaking under stress like something brittle, these systems yield as if they were soft. Some parts respond quickly to the shock, allowing slower parts to ignore the shock and maintain their steady duties of system continuity. Consider the differently paced components to be layers. Each layer is functionally different from the others and operates somewhat independently, but each layer influences and responds to the layers closest to it in a way that makes the whole system resilient. From the fastest layers to the slowest layers in the system, the relationship can be described as follows: Fast learns, slow remembers. Fast proposes, slow disposes. Fast is discontinuous, slow is continuous. Fast and small instructs slow and big by accrued innovation and by occasional revolution. Slow and big controls small and fast by constraint and constancy. Fast gets all our attention, slow has all the power. All durable dynamic systems have this sort of structure. It is what makes them adaptable and robust.”