The circus is back

I remember, in one of my first few weeks as a planner, about twenty-five years ago, talking to friends one evening about how I had been working on the design of the Lynx packaging. They were adamant (and impressed) that I meant I had been working on the ads. After a moment of basking in the glory of my contribution to BBH’s seminal work, I realised that people didn’t think of consumer brands as being designed, but as simply emerging, immaculately, from factories. And I imagine it would still surprise most people outside our industry exactly how much weighty work goes on behind things that are lifted from shelves with such lightness of thought.

Because behind every beer, cereal, chocolate, etc., of a decent size, there are teams of people poring over Ehrenberg-Bass test results and multivariate models of category space; squinting at half-formed concepts magic-taped to a wall; reading the tea leaves of consumer research, trying to get their heads into some collective consciousness; looking at inks and substrates under different lights; drop-lifting objects into fixtures, kitchens, bars. And making things, always making: trying things out, getting excited, getting stumped, trying something else, getting excited again. Playing around at the intersection of memory and material, design and media, brand and culture. And that’s just the people involved in the design process. Doing all this properly, creatively, pays dividends. Lots of little improvements to visibility, legibility, irrational appeal, attribution in communication, etc., let alone big improvements, can equate to millions in sales.

One of the highlights for agency folk in all this work is a trip to the archives. Consumer brands – again, in contrast to the lightness of buying – can have substantial archives. Carlsberg’s was like an antiquarian bookshop. Kellogg’s held an astonishing variety of advertising art; beautiful gouaches of corn, girls, bowls of cereal. Even those without dedicated rooms and archivists have history books, old packaging, old posters, old reels, letters, ephemera, etc.

And what these things offer up – aside from the chance of a rare find (a lost origin story, a lost graphic mark) – is a sense of the long view of the brand. The platonic form, the platonic idea, of the brand, moving through time and space, media and culture.

Because as Jessica Spence, one of our long-standing clients, put so well, we are really only custodians of a brand. We take its past and its present and – if we do our job well – give it a future in culture. True success is when the CMO of twenty years’ time appreciates the work we’re doing today.

And when you have seen a lot of these line-ups of brands over time, you start to notice that they all change in the same way, at the same time, at the same inflection points. Like a shoal of fish, moving with the currents. And not only that, but you get a sense that there are, broadly speaking, three ages of branding – certainly in the consumer goods space.

In the first age, brands are offered up as a kind of social contract, in a world where street chocolate was more likely to contain sawdust and lead paint than actual chocolate. Here the manufacturers advertise, package and make famous a better chocolate. And the customer gets the sense that no one with such an impressive neoclassical factory, such tall chimneys, such bearded founders and such promises of quality would risk their reputation selling chocolate made of sawdust – and hands over their threepenny bit. The design of brands in this first age, in package and print, is part salesmanship and part showmanship; and it is the showmanship that wins out (unsurprisingly, given a largely illiterate audience). This is the age of Fry’s Five Boys: five boys in sailor stripes running the gamut of pre-chocolate emotions. The age that brings the world Coca-Cola and its famous bottle. The age of Lyle’s Golden Syrup, with its strange rotting lion. Later, Polo, the mint with the inexplicable hole. And a host of other unforgettable characters. It is branding-as-circus – roll up, roll up, drawing a crowd – with occasional hints of freakshow. A golden age of entertaining, right-brain creativity.

In the second age of branding, the platonic forms persist (there is still a glass and a half full of milk on Dairy Milk, still a keystone on Heinz, of course), but things are modernised. The last few leaves of Victoriana fall away from the labels, serifed logotypes get an Astrid Kircher haircut, colours start to pop. And the role of packaging changes as it gets a walk-on part in the last few seconds of a TV commercial. This is packaging as logo-on-a-box, made for flickering black-and-white cathode ray tubes. And made easy for self-selecting shoppers to find in the new supermarkets. It is a much more left-brained, rational and less social design world; the salesmanship returns, the showmanship recedes – and the circus moves on (to the advertising, for a while).

The third age is where we are now, or where we are heading. And it’s a return – in part – to that original golden age of consumer branding. Unsurprisingly, the conditions are not dissimilar: the audience is not reading much, not thinking much, and the epicentre of brands has moved to social space. It’s not hard to see the parallels between the once-seen, hard-to-forget showmanship of brands like Tony’s Chocolonely, Liquid Death and our own Icelandic Provisions, and the roll-up, roll-up branding of a hundred years ago. More so in an age where not being normal, and entertaining the right brain, pays such dividends in media and culture. It’s an exciting time to be doing what we do – as it always is when the circus returns to town.