Brands, along with their strategies and identities, are expected to endure. They should stand the test of time, pave the way to brighter futures, and remain resilient as change happens around them.
How long should a brand last? It’s a question every designer, strategist, and brand professional has been asked at various points in their career. Confidently we answer “forever”. We assure clients—and ourselves—that brands should rarely change, and that consistency is paramount. This belief is part industry doctrine and part commercial necessity. It eases the conversation about investment into a brand, helping both sides feel confident that they’re selling and buying a legacy—something meant to last for generations. Do it once, do it right.
Why is this the way? Why do we feel the need to build strategies and brands that are promised to outlast us all? Perhaps there is a deeper reason behind our pursuit of longevity. I feel that as humans, temporary beings, we’re obsessed with creating ideas and entities which outlive and outlast us. It gives us a sense of permanence in the world around us and helps us work through the unsettling thought that one day our actions won’t matter. By leaving something behind, something bigger than each of us, we can find comfort in the idea that part of us will still exist even after we are gone.
Over the past century we’ve elevated brands to the status of gods—immortal entities. We invite them into our lives and homes, attributing to them social values and human characteristics. We work to create conditions for their endurance, establishing rules to support consistency of appearance and to prevent any unexpected behaviour.
Immortality certainly has its benefits. In a world filled with change and disruption, it creates a sense of reliability and stability. When everything else is changing, knowing your car, supermarket, or favourite shampoo will be there, unchanged and unmoved is a small but comforting reassurance.
But what if we reconsidered the way we built brands—not as entities built to last forever, but as ones designed for the here and now? What if we thought of them in terms that made them mortal, fallible, and finite. What could that mean for our creative practice, their operations, and our expectations?
It’s clear that we’re searching for a different way to build, grow, and nurture brands. A clear indicator of this is the proliferation of the most meaningless word in all of design and branding: “human”. Branding and design are intoxicated with “human”. It has lost all of its original meaning and is merely a synonym for non-threatening, bland, or hard to disagree with. It’s infected creativity, making brand after brand, and campaign after campaign feel, look, and sound the same—hard to disagree with but impossible to care about.
Ironically, to be human is a wonderful thing. It is soaring highs and crushing lows, it’s being energised and passionate, selfish and slobbish. It’s uneven, original, and inconsistent. It connects us with others, helps us build families and communities, enables us to tell stories and leave behind pieces of ourselves for others to remember. However, that is not what “human” has come to mean in creative work, at the moment it is a shorthand for something forgettable and uninspiring.
If it’s so problematic to create brands which are human, how did we end up in a place where what we are and what we create seem so opposed? As individuals, as families, as societies, we’re driven by fear – fear of fading irrelevance; of being forgotten, and being replaced. So, we create and support structures, symbols, and brands which outlast each of us and become generational. Religions, families, corporate brands, and identities. When we’re temporary, we look to things which are permanent to help us navigate the world.
The permanence and endurance of brand and brand identities created the conditions for “human” to flourish. They need to reach people, show that they are just like them, that this large multinational business has a heart. It’s warm and approachable. Sadly, humanity is only being considered at a surface level. A gentle colour palette, a charming illustration style, language to sound informal and friendly. All delivered with impeccable, unarguable consistency.
To be human is to be inconsistent. To be human is to be mortal.
What if we changed our thinking? We put “human” to bed once and for all and started thinking of brands and businesses as mortal. Ideas, entities, and structures which are born, live and eventually die. How would this change our thinking, actions and creative ambitions?
The best ideas are born, live, and die.
To think of a brand as a mortal is to consider its place in the world, to embrace its temporary nature, along with its strengths and its faults. It considers itself and its responsibility as part of a larger ecosystem and ultimately prepares for its retirement and demise.
If we think of brands as mortal, our role as creatives shifts—we move our thinking from forever to for here and now. We shift from risk aversion and the tendency to smooth out the spiky edges to embracing the individuality of something, giving it moments of great contrast and difference. We think more about being remembered than we do about being consistent.
It changes each moment of a brand’s life from birth and introduction to the world, to the way it matures, grows, and builds meaning, to how it interacts with the world around it, and ultimately to how it dies, moves on, and creates space for the next great idea.
Why is this important? Why do we need a different way to think about brand, business, and creativity? Our world is full and overflowing with ideas, products, and services. Some beautiful, sparkling, and vibrant, and others as dull as dishwater. Creativity has an incredible opportunity to help businesses navigate their responsibility in the social and environmental crises of our times. Instead of greenwashing a business into looking human, we have an opportunity to help shape it into something more active, more alive, and more mortal.
To start this journey, we need to shift our thinking, and ways of working and collaborating. We’ll need to move away from “human” and towards a place where we work in partnership long term with businesses, shaping how they launch, live, and leave behind better worlds than they entered into.
We need to be braver with our creativity, amplifying individuality and beautiful inconsistency and leaving behind corporate consistency. Because if we keep picking pastel colours and human language, we’ll miss our chance to really make the world a little better.
Cover Illustration: Marcus Cheong