Volume 77: Re-blanding.
1. Visa re-blands. Thankfully nobody likely to notice.
Tl:dr: Visa, looking backward, turns beige to 11.
If you happen to run the world’s largest payments network, you likely realize two things. First, as a monopolist that precedes the internet, the revenue you generate via transaction fees is extremely tantalizing for others to disrupt, and second, that your brand is both your second largest asset behind the payment rails themselves and one of your primary defenses as you seek to deflect the disrupters.
This is why the recent re-branding and advertising re-launch (or whatever they’re calling it) of Visa should come as absolutely no surprise. With 1 in 5 VC dollars pouring into fintech right now, shifts in things like the digitization of information flows, blockchain decentralization, buy-now-pay-later, etc., mean that Visa and its oh-so-tempting transaction fees look absolutely ripe for the picking.
Unfortunately, looking at the work Visa has graced us with, it’s impossible not to come away feeling completely underwhelmed…and a little confused. This isn’t a confident branding move made to head off new competitive threats; this is a weak branding move made to appease internal stakeholders suffering Mastercard FOMO.
Let’s start with Mastercard because so much of what Visa has done appears precisely calibrated to pay homage to their most traditional competitor. First, the radical minimization of the Mastercard symbol undertaken by Pentagram a few years ago was inspired. It captures everything that makes Mastercard instantly identifiable as Mastercard in just two intersecting shapes and three colors.
It’s obvious the new Visa “equals” symbol is intended to do for it what the intersecting circles do so elegantly for Mastercard, but it’s a vastly weaker solution for a bunch of reasons:
Unlike the intersecting circles, which were already instantly identifiable as Mastercard, the equals sign is new to Visa (assuming we accept that the box eliminated in 2005 is at best an abstract inspiration by this point), generic, and all around us from others already.
Unlike Mastercard, where the circles are the logo, this new graphic lives separately from the Visa wordmark. And just watching any of their new ads where they flash the = before the Visa mark shows just how clumsy this relationship is. These graphic forms seem barely able to live together, let alone be interchangeable with each other.
While Mastercard has real ownership of the combination of red, orange, and yellow, it’s far from clear that the same can be said of Visa, where others commonly use blue and yellow. Just think Ikea or Best Buy, to name two. So, seeing the two together in this way doesn’t immediately say “Visa,” it just says “could be anyone.”
It’s utterly boring and instantly forgettable, which is rather unfortunate for something you want to be recognized as.
Add to this new graphic an unnoticeable-to-anyone-but-a-typographer simplification of the Visa wordmark, cliched cut-out imagery of diverse millennials jumping in the air with sheer joy (in stark contrast to the racial makeup of the Visa management team and board btw) and yet another utterly generic ode-to-Helvetica “made for digital” typeface, and you can’t help but sigh in frustration at this generic, bland soup they have the nerve to refer to as “bold.”
The camouflage of Helvetica in pastels happened because startups couldn’t afford anything better, and the economics of designing for them meant the agencies they hired ended up doing the same job repeatedly because this was the only way to make these clients economically viable. Add clueless VCs to the mix demanding startups look a certain way because that’s what successful startups look like and a few young designers who didn’t know any better, and we get where we are today: a digital universe of the 21st-century that’s being held hostage by a pastiche of the modernism of the 20th, but without any of the underlying philosophical idealism that people now unwittingly refer to as “millennial branding.”
When looking at the design agency that did the work for Visa, their standout feature isn’t their creativity or craft, but that they do the same job for every client, including themselves. These aren’t designers out to make their clients unique; they’re designers with a very distinct house style that you’re buying into. And while this is entirely fine as a value proposition if you’re a small design agency, and kudos to them for winning such a big job, I’d expect a brand with the resources, scale, and marketing sophistication of a Visa to both know better and have a little more respect for itself and its unique needs. Instead, this makes Visa look like dad aspiring to wear his kid’s jeans under the mistaken idea they’ll make him look younger.
It would be easy to use the excuse that it’s hard to get brave work through at a massive brand like Visa, and this would absolutely be a correct observation. And maybe some absolutely brilliant ideas hit the cutting room floor during this process. But, by the same token, it’s the massive brands that have the resources to hire the very best to do things that wouldn’t be possible for startups to do, so they should be doing braver work, especially as these companies in-house, more highly paid (and experienced) practitioners.
So what are we left with? Well, what’s most frustrating is that re-brands for major corporations don’t happen very often, so if you’re going to do one, you should at least push the work toward the future and make it interesting. Instead, Visa clearly geared its rebrand toward Mastercard FOMO and did so in a way that’s bland, boring, and instantly forgettable. As a result, this is likely to do little or nothing to move the needle. And that’s before we even get to the “Meet Visa” “Network working for everybody” campaign, which pretty much ignores the new identity entirely. However, aside from being weirdly self-referential, it ultimately feels like a bad copy of what Mastercard has been doing for years with “Priceless” (Spotting a pattern yet), and there’s only so often you can say “Meet my network” before nobody cares anymore. Probably instantly.
What an utter waste of an opportunity.
2. Brand architecture isn’t about pretty PowerPoint slides.
tl;dr: Think maps, not frameworks.
I’ve been having a lot of brand architecture conversations recently, and I figured there was an underlying conceptual point worth sharing.
Most people understand concepts like master-brand or sub-brand when discussing how a brand portfolio goes to market, but all too often, we confuse things by getting unnecessarily into the weeds of the small differences that don’t really much matter. For this reason, it’s easier to start from the basis that there are only 4 architectures: Master-branded, sub-branded, endorsed, and portfolio. Everything else is just nuance. (I try not to use the terms “branded house” and “house of brands” because I end up mixing them up and confusing everyone, including me) More importantly, it’s OK to mix these as appropriate depending on your unique circumstances (more on that in a minute).
Where people get most stuck, though, isn’t the concepts themselves; but their miss-application. The biggest challenge I see happens when you start from a top-down perspective, usually drawn on a PowerPoint slide where all the brands/names/logos are shown in a hierarchical chart. The problem with this is that instead of showing how to organize your brand to cut-through from the perspective of the customer, who always experiences an architecture from the bottom-up, we instead start to optimize for the neatest way to place our brands on a PowerPoint slide, which are always drawn from the top-down.
This is why, rather than thinking in terms of hierarchies, we should instead be thinking of this more like a map. When you open Google Maps on your phone, you’re always at the center of your own map, and it helps you navigate easily from there. When we consider brand architectures, we need to think similarly. If the customer is at the center of their own map, how are we helping them navigate what we’ve got to sell? How is the architecture built to make it easy for them, rather than expecting them to figure us out? And how are we using our architecture to compete more effectively with the other brands they may be choosing from? And sometimes that might mean, as is often the case, that you don’t have a single architecture but a blend of many.
But, that’s OK because your brand architecture isn’t about having neat hierarchies and naming structures that look good on PowerPoint; it’s the vehicle through which you bring your business strategy to market. As a result, the hierarchies are much less important than creating clarity and cut-through for the customer and competitive differentiation from your competition.
And if that means mixing architecture frameworks and having seemingly messy PowerPoint slides, so be it, because those slides don’t matter anyway.
3. Herman Miller buys failing Knoll. RIP.
tl;dr: Perhaps not so game-changing after all.
If you’re at all steeped in the design world, Knoll is one of those storied American brands that’s held in the highest esteem. Formed in 1938, it played an important role in 20th-century modernism, at various times commissioning and licensing famous furniture designs from the likes of Eero Saarinen, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Marcel Breuer, many of which are now on museum display in places such as the Cooper Hewitt.
But, nostalgia is not a business strategy, and in more recent times, the Knoll business has found itself in increasingly difficult waters. Focused on office furniture, it has for years suffered from corporate trends that reduced the amount of furniture that companies needed to buy. Then, already weakened, it hit the pandemic wall: Office furniture purchasing fell off a cliff, distribution partners sought extended payment terms, and they had no direct-to-consumer capability to service people furnishing their home offices. To put it bluntly, Knoll was in bad shape.
So, they were bought for $1.8bn by equally storied brand Herman Miller, with the joint business being re-labeled MillerKnoll. But, make no mistake, irrespective of the new name, this is an acquisition rather than a merger, with the entire executive team of the new business coming exclusively from Herman Miller.
Looking deeper into the deal, it’s clear that the former CEO of Knoll did a great job negotiating a 45% premium over its pre-deal stock price for what looks suspiciously like it might be a distressed asset, and that Herman Miller took on additional debt and made aggressive “cost-synergy” estimates to make it happen. Arguably, this may leave them weaker rather than stronger, as they service that debt and aggressively cut costs while also trying to turn around a Knoll business that’s been slowly failing for years in what remains a low-margin and highly cyclical industry.
So, I had to chuckle when I saw the breathless commentary on LinkedIn that this was, in fact, “Big, game-changing news. For design and everything design touches.” I couldn’t for the life of me figure out exactly what game was being changed here? Is this combination somehow going to create innovative design magic? Is the combined back catalog of these two iconic firms going to somehow transmogrify into something nobody has ever seen before? Could it single-handedly change the dynamics of the furniture business? Sadly, I don’t think so.
The reality is that the vast majority of mergers fail. And mergers that concentrate markets (The new MillerKnoll is now the countries largest office furniture company) tend not to do things that positively “change-the-game” at all. No, if this acquisition follows the most typical pattern, the likely outcome will be that prices go up, quality goes down, and innovation stalls, while whatever it is that made Knoll, Knoll disappears under the hatchet of a MillerKnoll management team seeking to eliminate the $100m of costs (8% of yearly Knoll sales, btw) that they promised shareholders they would. Far more likely than any games being changed is Knoll becoming just another brand within a portfolio, with little or no uniqueness of its own.
So, while it’s nice that Knoll didn’t go bankrupt, this is far from a game-changing deal. More likely, it just means Knoll dying more slowly.
RIP.