Volume 82: Advertising falls, design rises.

1. Advertising falls, design rises.

tl;dr: New Coke platform a microcosm of the broader environment.

Last week saw the release of the first refresh to the Coke “brand platform” (tagline and ad campaign to you and me) in the past five years. For context, the Coke brand isn’t in a particularly great place. It’s facing a long-term structural decline as consumer tastes shift toward healthier fare. It smacked facefirst into a cyclical downturn as COVID closures eliminated restaurant and bar sales. And then it blew its foot off when senior execs blinked and slashed marketing spend in 2020, which led to share declines relative to major competitor Pepsi. (For more on the impact of slashing ad spend on business results, this report from the Ehrenberg Bass Institute is well worth a read).

Anyway, when looking at the new work, this very much feels like two completely different approaches to the same brand: A disappointingly poor advertising effort partially rescued by some rather brilliant design. Let’s start with the ads.

Coke has focused on gaming, partnering with known gaming influencers in a new hero spot in a fairly obvious attempt to revitalize its position with “the youth” (sorry, Gen Z). It’s not hard to see what they’re trying to do here as video games increasingly represent a major chunk of time spent in general, and especially among teenagers. But, the kind of hardcore gaming they’re trying to attach their brand to represents a subculture within a niche. And watching the ad, I couldn’t help but feel that this cheese-fest was likely a big miss. So I asked my gaming-obsessed 14 year old what he thought. His response:

“This is like someone who doesn’t play video games peeking through the window at what they think gaming is like.”

Ouch. So, it’s an “old man in designer jeans trying to look cool” miss with the data-point of a single teen. More concerning, though, isn’t just the potential miss of the ad with a young and gaming obsessed audience, but resting a global refresh of a brand like Coke on a narrow niche like hardcore gaming, and how unlikely this focus might be to do what they need, which is attract a broader array of occasional drinkers that includes a lot of non-teens and non-gamers.

Enter the design work.
(sorry I can’t share more of it, but it’s surprisingly hard to find).

Where the new TV ad leaves me scratching my head strategically and creatively, the design work does the opposite. A new spin on the Coca-Cola logo made to look like it’s wrapped around an invisible bottle floating atop imagery, often of people and characters hugging. It’s simple, and it’s powerful, it’s universal, and it’s well designed, and, well, it’s kind of brilliant.

The big miss in all of this, then, is that the design work should’ve defined the advertising, but clearly, it did not.

The idea that there’s a crisis in advertising is not at all new. Peter Field says ads have become so bad that there’s no longer a connection between creatively awarded advertising and effectiveness, while the advertising holding companies can’t make more than single-digit margins from their creative agencies, suggesting a deeper structural malaise and associated inability to create value.

However, much less commonly mentioned is that while advertising has been getting objectively worse, corporate design has been getting objectively better.

This of course raises some big questions, like why brands aren’t elevating design as the focal point of their brand refreshes? Or why the advertising agency isn’t being forced to follow the lead set by design? (it’s still vastly more common to see the opposite) Or why there isn’t more being done to use design as the unifier to stop the whole thing feeling like two disconnected approaches to the same brand? And ultimately, why more design-first agencies and internal groups at brands like Coke aren’t pushing really hard to take control of the advertising. Because increasingly, it’s the advertising that’s letting their work down.

2. Arguing about what, why & how is entirely pointless.

Tl:dr: Hard to be taken seriously when dancing on the head of a pin.

For fun, I’ll sometimes post a comment on LinkedIn that goes along the lines of “Why” is a terrible basis for a brand strategy. And, like all trolling click-bait, it invariably gets the most views and comments of anything I post. Sigh.

But, as amusing as this is to do, what isn’t as funny is how quickly the comments devolve into a face-off between the “why” crowd and the “how” crowd, where it seems the only thing they can agree on is that “what” doesn’t matter, which is an excellent example of fantastical, nonsensical thinking.

Now, I know where this comes from and where it’s led us to. Back in the days when CPG/FMCG ruled the branding roost, there weren’t a whole lot of differentiating options inherent in the product itself. I mean, a Coke is a Coke, a Bud is a Bud, an Advil is an Advil. The opportunities to meaningfully do anything to the product limited to the occasional line extension or new packaging SKU, which frankly isn’t that exciting. So, instead, we got a winding journey through emotional laddering, where candy bars result in self-actualization, then brand experience where banks become beautiful and seamless, and now brand purpose, where tobacco companies are saving the world.

But, if we think about the realities of our technology-enabled environment, then the CPG/FMCG-underpinnings of all this thinking aren’t just unhelpful; they’re downright destructive.

Today, the lines between “how” and “what” are blurring to the point of irrelevance, and the only “why” that matters to consumers facing an unprecedented array of choices is “why I should care.” Which intrinsically has to include the products on offer at least as much as anything else. (How else can we explain the rise of Shein at the same time we’re being told Gen Z customers buy only on the basis of a higher-order purpose?)

This is why over the past few years, I’ve found that the most fruitful client engagements rarely come from working with communication-driven marketers but instead working with sophisticated product thinkers and visionaries who’re very much invested in what their business does first, how it does it second, and why it does it last.

The combination of brand thinking and digital product thinking provides an opportunity to explore the actionable implications of the brand in a vastly more comprehensive fashion across a broader system of innovation than either could alone, which offers more opportunities for meaningful differentiation and distinctiveness.

So, what does all this add up to? Well, simply put, if we want to be taken seriously at the top levels of business, we need to stop dancing on the head of a pin, stop having circular grammatical arguments, and start focusing on the stuff that actually matters to businesses and their stakeholders.

3. When icons fail.

tl;dr: Shifting from consistency to coherence.

I don’t know about you, but I find the icons Google uses to identify its apps an abject disaster. I can’t tell you how often I tap the wrong icon on my phone because they’ve been genericized to look the same.

Something I was reminded of just this week as my alma-mater, Wolff Olins, published a case study showcasing this much-cursed work as at least partly their doing. This is a ground-zero example of what happens when good design becomes terrible. First, they fell into the trap of designing for top-down neatness on a slide for an internal audience rather than designing for bottom-up usage by customers. And second, they fell into the trap of elevating simplification and brand consistency over coherence and clarity. (As a friend pointed out, it’s entirely possible to simplify something in a way that makes it more confusing.)

In the digital world, consistency of brand expression is becoming vastly easier to execute as corporations hire larger design teams and use automated systems and templates to execute at scale. But a knock-on problem of this kind of consistency is rigidity, and like other rigid systems, there’s a tendency to become brittle and break under pressure.

The intent in re-designing the family of Google apps was no doubt right as they sought to bring order to the previous chaos and create brand consistency where previously there was none. But if the consistency of the solution is so rigid and brittle that it breaks because somebody hits the wrong icon, which for me is daily, then it’s not a very good solution.

Instead of simplicity and rigid consistency, we need to start thinking more about coherence and clarity. Now, it’s rare that I’d hold Microsoft as better at design than Google, but as a direct comparison, Microsoft Office is vastly more coherent and clear than the equivalent from Google. And I’d argue that by delivering greater coherence and clarity, the MS Office icons are doing more to support the Microsoft brand than the “trying to navigate the controls of a Japanese toilet” experience we’re given by Google.