Paul’s letter to the Philistines

Dear Philistines,

You have excellent taste.

Your typography is impeccable, your palette has been reduced to three colors, two of which are nearly indistinguishable, and your website makes generous use of white space. Your photographer has discovered the remarkable versatility of natural light falling across a piece of expensive furniture. Somewhere in your brand guidelines, the words timeless, considered, and intentional appear with reassuring frequency. Everything is very beautiful, and I have no doubt that considerable effort has gone into making it look that way.

I have one question, though, and I fear it may be an inconvenient one.

Why?

I don’t mean why you chose the typeface or why the photographs have so little contrast. Those decisions are easily explained, usually with reference to other brands that have made similar decisions before you. I mean why any of it belongs to you. What is it about your business that makes this expression appropriate? Could someone arrive at these same choices by studying the company rather than your collection of references? And if your closest competitor adopted exactly the same identity tomorrow, would it seem at all out of place?

These questions tend to interrupt the otherwise pleasant business of making things look expensive.

We live in an age when the outward signs of sophistication have become astonishingly easy to acquire. The visual vocabulary of luxury and authority, of heritage and contemporary restraint, is available to anyone with an internet connection and a reasonably competent designer. The references are everywhere, the techniques are well understood, and a brand can now arrive in the world looking as though it has spent three generations developing an aesthetic sensibility when it may have spent three afternoons.

Good design should be accessible, and the democratization of visual literacy is hardly a cultural tragedy. I’m delighted that more people can recognize a handsome typeface or appreciate the virtues of restraint. What troubles me is how readily we accept these outward signals as evidence that the qualities they traditionally represented are actually present.

A young company borrows the mannerisms of a heritage brand without possessing a history. A consultancy assumes the tone of a philosophical society while producing work that would not survive a difficult question. Both may look splendid in a presentation, and both may leave the observer wondering what, precisely, lies beneath the upholstery.

This is hardly a problem confined to branding. Anyone who has spent time in a certain sort of newly fashionable hotel will recognize the phenomenon. The lobby contains the obligatory collection of mid-century furniture, the lighting is suitably subdued, and the cocktail menu has been composed with the gravity once reserved for constitutional documents. There may be a wall of art books that nobody has ever opened. Everything signals discernment, yet the place somehow remains anonymous. One has the uneasy feeling that the entire establishment could be moved to another city, given a different name, and carry on without anyone noticing.

I don’t object to borrowing from established aesthetic traditions. Culture would be a poorer place if every generation were required to begin again. But I do expect some understanding of what is being borrowed and why. A design vocabulary develops in response to something, whether a philosophy, practical constraints, or the accumulated habits of a culture. Remove that context and the visual language may survive quite handsomely, even as its meaning evaporates. There is a difference between possessing cultural fluency and dressing oneself in the artifacts of culture. The latter produces costume, however beautifully tailored, and costume has the unfortunate disadvantage of requiring its wearer to remain in character.

Taste, of course, is a useful faculty. I recommend acquiring some. But taste, however refined, is not a strategy, and this is where otherwise intelligent people occasionally get themselves into trouble.

A founder may have an excellent eye for architecture, an affection for Italian modernism, or an encyclopedic knowledge of obscure Swiss watchmakers. I would probably enjoy having lunch with such a person. Whether any of those interests should determine the identity of the company is another matter entirely. If an architectural sensibility informs how the business organizes complexity or constructs its products, architecture may offer a meaningful language through which to express its character. If the founder simply likes buildings, we have discovered a hobby.

This distinction is less obvious than it ought to be, judging by the assortment of visual references that populate contemporary brand presentations. Japanese minimalism and European modernism are perennial favorites, as are the editorial conventions of independent magazines and the understated grandeur of old money. Sometimes I wonder whether certain designers have acquired an entire visual education from looking at other designers’ work. There is nothing wrong with any of these influences, but their relevance to the business is too often assumed rather than established.

I have an affection for the language of old institutions myself, but I would be reluctant to employ it on behalf of a company that had not yet demonstrated the discipline or continuity such language implies. A crest can be drawn in an afternoon. The circumstances that make a crest meaningful generally require a good deal longer.

I encountered a useful example of this during my tenure as director of the Riverside International Automotive Museum in 2007 and 2008. The institution was dedicated, in part, to preserving the history of Riverside International Raceway, the celebrated Southern California circuit that had closed in 1989. Its identity drew upon the raceway’s original emblem: a bold R surrounded by a circular arrangement of red arrows and blue squares, a graphic unmistakably of its period. It had none of the studied minimalism that a contemporary branding exercise might have imposed upon it, and that was precisely its virtue. The emblem belonged to Riverside. It had an actual history, and the museum had a legitimate claim to that history. A designer might have produced something more fashionable, but fashion would have been a poor reason to discard a connection the institution had every reason to preserve.

This brings me to the tyranny of the mood board, a subject about which I have developed a degree of impatience.

Mood boards have their uses. They can be valuable instruments for considering atmosphere, visual relationships, and possibilities for expression. They become troublesome when they begin doing the work that thinking ought to have done first. Presentations featuring evocative photographs, beautifully composed typography, fragments of architecture, details of materials, and poetic quotations from people who have been dead long enough to be considered authoritative have become familiar enough that I can usually recognize the procedure within a few slides. One is invited to admire the sensibility of the proposed identity before anyone has adequately explained why that sensibility belongs to the enterprise.

And it can be remarkably persuasive. Put together a sufficiently handsome collection of references, articulate the intended atmosphere with confidence, and even experienced people may begin discussing the merits of the proposed direction before examining the assumptions underneath it. The presentation has established a mood, and everyone is now responding to the mood.

Of course, visual exploration is part of the creative process. But an identity system cannot acquire a genuine relationship to a business through the sheer quality of its execution. That relationship has to be discovered, developed, and occasionally argued over. It is less glamorous work than assembling beautiful references, and the results may not lend themselves to a compelling presentation at first.

I would prefer to begin in the less photogenic territory of business reality, examining the decisions a company makes and the capabilities it has developed. Its history may be revealing, particularly when habits or convictions have survived changes in leadership, markets, or fashion. I’m interested in what the organization does when its stated principles become inconvenient. That tends to tell us more than the principles themselves.

The answers are not always flattering, which is one reason they are useful. A company may discover that its supposed commitment to innovation is largely an enthusiasm for describing ordinary improvements in extravagant language. It may learn that the quality its founder considers most distinctive is regarded by customers as a basic condition of doing business. Occasionally, it may discover a genuine strength hiding in plain sight, so familiar to the people inside the organization that nobody has thought to mention it. Finding something of that sort is more rewarding than selecting another shade of beige.

There is another habit of contemporary branding that deserves scrutiny: the conviction that every enterprise must possess an elaborate philosophical reason for existing.

There is apparently something faintly embarrassing about simply making excellent furniture these days. One must also be engaged in a profound reimagining of human connection. The software company that has developed a better way of handling invoices now finds itself redefining the future of civilization. I sometimes wonder whether commercial competence has become an insufficiently glamorous ambition.

The tendency is curious because many businesses have interesting reasons for existing that require no such embellishment. A company may have been founded because someone recognized an opportunity to do a familiar thing better, or because an existing product was unreliable, inconvenient, or needlessly expensive. Some businesses emerge from a personal obsession with quality. Others are the result of someone noticing that a group of customers has been poorly served. These are respectable origins, and they often explain a great deal about the company’s subsequent behavior.

I admire businesses that know what they do, do it exceptionally well, and understand why their customers value the result. There is dignity in competence, particularly when it is accompanied by the good manners not to announce one’s own importance at every opportunity. A company can possess a distinctive philosophy without publishing a manifesto. Its principles may be evident in its operating decisions, its treatment of customers, and the standards it maintains when nobody is watching. I would regard these as better evidence of conviction than a declaration of purpose commissioned for the About page.

A business that repairs something exceptionally well or exercises superior judgment on behalf of its clients may have a compelling reason to exist. Its story should make that reason intelligible, perhaps even memorable. There is no need to inflate the matter into a spiritual awakening.

The temptation is understandable. Meaning confers importance, and importance can command attention and money. But invented meaning creates expectations that the underlying business may be unable to fulfill. Eventually someone encounters the actual product, receives the actual service, or speaks to an actual employee, at which point the poetry must contend with the evidence. This can be an awkward encounter for everyone concerned.

And while we are discussing evidence, perhaps we should consider the market, which has the irritating habit of maintaining opinions of its own.

Founders understandably believe they know their companies better than anyone else. In many respects they do. They know the history, the ambitions, the compromises, and the innumerable decisions that have shaped the enterprise. What they do not necessarily know is which of these things matters to the people they wish to serve, or how those people understand the choices available to them.

The market is under no obligation to admire the qualities a company most admires in itself.

A business may sincerely regard itself as unusually thoughtful, meticulous, innovative, or principled. These are all agreeable characteristics, and I would hesitate to recommend their opposites. But precision, trust, excellence, authenticity, and innovation are among the most heavily populated territories in the language of commerce. Declaring oneself precise is uninteresting in a category where everyone is expected to be precise. Nor is trust a compelling distinction when mistrust would disqualify a provider from consideration in the first place.

Some of the most revealing work in brand strategy involves discovering what people actually consider when making a choice. Their concerns may be entirely different from those the company has assumed. A founder may be immensely proud of a technical achievement that customers take for granted, while a seemingly mundane aspect of the service turns out to be the reason people return or recommend it. Unless someone has bothered to investigate, the company can spend years emphasizing the wrong things.

This is where the more romantic business of brand creation encounters the useful discipline of commercial reality. The company has competitors, including some it may not recognize as competitors. Buyers have alternatives and constraints of their own. A distinctive idea must make sense within those circumstances, and it is worth remembering that an attractive position on a competitive map is not necessarily an opportunity simply because nobody else appears to occupy it. Sometimes the territory is empty because nobody wants what is being offered there.

None of this makes branding a purely analytical exercise. Research can clarify the circumstances, expose mistaken assumptions, and provide a firmer basis for judgment, but it cannot make every consequential decision on its own. An abundance of information does not necessarily confer discernment, as anyone who has attended a meeting devoted to reviewing a large collection of charts will appreciate.

There is a point at which someone must decide what the evidence means, which truths deserve emphasis, and how the organization ought to present itself. Such decisions require an understanding of the business and the market, certainly, but they also call for sensitivity to language and the impressions people form without consciously examining them. It is demanding work, which may explain the continuing popularity of the mood board.

I would like to see us become a little less interested in what brands look like before we understand what they are. We might stop treating differentiation as an exercise in finding adjectives competitors have neglected to claim. We might regard a founder’s personal tastes as clues worth examining rather than instructions to be followed. And perhaps we could allow businesses to possess genuine virtues without insisting that they become movements.

There is no reason any of this should diminish the role of design. I would be disappointed if it did. I have spent too much of my life appreciating beautiful things to argue that their appearance is incidental. A brand may be restrained or exuberant, traditional or radically contemporary. There is no single aesthetic of strategic intelligence, despite the number of consultancies apparently convinced that it comes exclusively in black, white, and a particularly solemn shade of taupe.

There is a special pleasure in encountering an identity that seems entirely appropriate to the thing it represents. You may not be able to explain immediately why it works, but the relationship holds up under examination. Its language suits the organization, its visual character makes sense, and the experience of dealing with the business generally reinforces the impression. It has the confidence to be itself without repeatedly insisting upon its own uniqueness.

I would suggest that this is a better ambition than simply looking sophisticated, although it requires more patience and occasionally means telling a client that a very attractive idea is wrong. That conversation can be uncomfortable, especially when everyone in the room has already become attached to the attractive idea.

I suspect the Philistines will continue to prosper. There is a reliable market for the appearance of distinction, particularly among those who wish to acquire its social benefits without undertaking the more troublesome work of developing any. There will always be talented people prepared to supply the appropriate materials, colors, vocabulary, and visual references, and I have no quarrel with the commerce involved. Everyone must make a living.

I would merely observe that possessing sophisticated objects, ideas, or appearances does not necessarily make their possessor sophisticated. A beautifully designed brand may be excellent, and I take genuine pleasure in encountering one. It may also be an exquisitely presented misunderstanding of the business beneath it.

One ought to know which before admiring the typography.

Yours in the pursuit of discernment,