It’s an easy mistake to make. When you’re asked to think about the brand of McDonald’s, you probably picture the golden arches. When you’re asked to think about the brand of Ford, I’m sure the blue oval springs to mind. It may be a little bit zen (or at least Heisenbergian), but the very act of consciously thinking about branding prevents you from experiencing it.

I’ve talked about some of these issues, independent of cigarettes, before.

To illustrate the difference consider, “And after the funeral, we’re all going to get brunch at McDonald’s”. Chances are you didn’t stop to think about their logo before deciding the Mickey D’s is a less than respectful destination for a wake. The brand of a thing is slippery; sensory cues like logos and jingles become twisted up with prior experience with the product or service to create a subconscious soup of how something feels to you.

Design considerations of the branding of cigarettes is well-tread ground. The film “Thank You for Smoking” and its fabulous opening credits does a respectful job. There’s also the series premiere of designer favorite “Mad Men”, containing this gem:

This is the greatest advertising opportunity since the invention of cereal. We have six identical companies making six identical products. We can say anything we want.

So, in many respects, the UK government finally deciding to pay attention to cigarette branding and “considering outlawing the use of logos, colours and graphics on packets and requiring them to be sold in plain packaging” is showing up un-fashionably late to the party.

The folks over at We Made This have a concept sketch of what that might look like. It’s kinda sexy and dangerous. It’s not, of course, sexy or dangerous. That’s just the transparency of Helvetica set in black on a white background allowing whatever else you already think about cigarettes to shine through. The prevalence of the International Typographical Style in modern society has repackaged “plain packaging”.

Let’s really think about logos for a moment. Do my health-conscious, eco-friendly activist friends really choose Brand “A” because of their unwavering commitment to Indigenous rights? Or even their hatred of cloven-hoofed mammals? No, it’s the subconscious soup!

Don’t get me wrong. Stripping logos off the packaging will no doubt have some effect. Analysts suggest that, “plain packaging would prompt many smokers to abandon the premium brands such as Marlboro and Benson and Hedges, and instead switch to much cheaper makes”. This is bad news for the tobacco companies and worse news for the public health folks, who were hoping to curb smoking—not drive an exodus.

The real problem here is not any cigarette’s individual brand, but the brand of smoking.

As long as guys like Don Draper include “drink and smoke constantly” in their guide to picking up women, it’s unlikely that striking the individual tobacco companies will lead to a decrease in rates of smoking.

In fact, I’d go so far as to say that as a persecuted pastime, smoking could gain an even stronger brand as cool, rebellious, revolutionary, and of course sexy and dangerous. I wouldn’t be surprised to see other products try to associate themselves with smoking in hopes that the brand would rub off on them.

One of the things I liked most about the Creative Review “green issue” was its admission that it couldn’t solve everything in one go (note my British turns of phrase), but that it was committed to getting its house in order and that the changes it made for its green issue—like the biodegradable polybag and recycled paper stock—weren’t just a gimmick but the first steps toward a sincere promise to address ecological concerns. To quote the article “CR and the environment” on page 36:

However, we know that this isn’t enough. There are a lot more aspects that we should consider including…

You can imagine my disappointment to get the new issue and see that the cover is back (no biodegradable polybag) and the indicia specifying the paper as Galerie One Silk, which doesn’t appear to be recycled, instead of the Cyclus Print (100% PCW) named in the last issue. It’s also a double issue, with “over 100 extra pages”.

Almost as disappointing is the “green issue” from one. a magazine produced by New York’s One Club, a non-profit dedicated to “the recognition and promotion of excellence in advertising”. They must have a different definition of “excellence” than I, as their awardees for their green issue include GE’s clean coal greenwashing, Diesel’s “global warming ready” clothing line, and BP’s Helios campaign which features a LEED-certified gas station as it’s centerpiece (or “branding beacon” as the Senior VP of Global Brand Marketing and Innovation calls it). Yes, a LEED-certified fucking gas station. Even BP’s ad agency Ogilvy & Mather admit the idea was:

Let’s take an existing gas station site and re-wrap it in an eco-friendly way.

Maybe just bulldoze it next time? I mean, it’s like they do this just to see if anyone notices how screwed up it is. They were probably giggling the whole time.

Speaking of “beacons”, the only light at the end of the tunnel was an article in the Creative Review by Tom Wnek about how the ad industry is (partially) to blame for everything from global warming to obesity called, “How Did We Get To Be The Bad Guys?” It offers a pretty good analysis of how “selling the sizzle, not the steak” has gotten us into some hot water. The next issue promises a part two on how to get out of this mess… Promises, promises.

My step-father is a business professor at Krannert School of Management and recommended I check out David Aaker, whom I guess is considered a bit of an authority on the subject. Aaker stresses relevance as an element of branding that a lot of people forget.

Relevance occupies the space between someone knowing who you are and someone liking what you do. Say I’m hungry for a salad. There are thousands of places I could go to get one (including produce stores to make my own). Even though I’m familiar with McDonald’s, it’s not going to pop into my brain as a destination. I don’t connect “salad” and “McDonald’s”, even though I might connect “food” with “McDonald’s”. It’s not relevant to the current question. Similarly, while I might consider Black & Decker relevant if I were looking for a hedge trimmer or cordless drill, I wouldn’t if it were a rice cooker I was after.

In this way, branding closely mimics findability on the web. Findability is the conceptual sequel to information architecture that stresses the process of users finding your information over the internal structure of the information itself. Do I care if your product is considered top of the line if I never click to the page that describes it?

The folks over at Xerox PARC (who have previously brought you the mouse, desktop icon, etc.) have put together a model of human behavior while looking for data that they call “Scent Navigation Information Foraging”, abbreviated both appropriately and hilariously as SNIF. SNIF suggests that people roam the web like hungry beasts in search of information. When we catch a scent, we bound off in that direction (by clicking a link) and smell the air again (by scanning the page). For instance, if I were looking for a job from Lockheed Martin, I wouldn’t expect to find a job description on their (awful) homepage, but I would scan for any trigger words that might help me get closer like “careers”, “jobs”, “opportunities” or failing those “about us” or “corporate”. Finding one, I’d pounce and then see if I could get closer from the next page, until I had the poor data-gazelle in my gnashing teeth.

With farms and factories producing far more than we could ever want, the problem of scarcity has been for the most part solved on a physical plane (though problems of sustainable production and equitable distribution of resources remain). Still, demand for branding remains high due to the “supply” of relevance being finite. We simply cannot hold information about the offerings of every single company in our heads. Our collective psyches are slashed and burned for profit, with very little regard for what we ourselves may or may not want to store in there. Cynicism, sarcasm, and an increased resistance to advertising is the end result.

A healthier and more sustainable strategy for branding may be to further pursue the foraging model in greater depth. Advertising would be limited to those seeking advertising, and specifically seeking the products being advertised. This simple evolution—contextual branding—is not only respectful, but how Google makes billions of dollars a year. Like other landscapes allowed to recover after intense resource extraction, perhaps our minds will eventually return to a more peaceful state.

McDonalds, a hamburger company who claims to have served billions of us—possibly someone you know—is now upset that the Oxford English Dictionary contains the word McJob. Specifically, they’re upset with the definition:

An unstimulating, low-paid job with few prospects, esp. one created by the expansion of the service sector.

They say that it’s disrespectful to the all the hard-working employees in the fast food world. Maybe they should have thought of that 17 years ago when crappy conditions first allowed the word to come into usage.

First of all, I don’t believe that the word “McJobs” is necessarily describing jobs like the one of working at McDonalds. No, my perception of the word has always been that it describes jobs like the hamburgers McDonalds produces. Cheap, mass-produced crap devoid of any craft or humanity. I’ve had a McJob, at a record store. There were no hamburgers anywhere but slinging Beyonce and Clay Aiken, being told to “think less” at work, and drinking cough syrup to get through the day definitely evoked a certain McQuality.

McDonalds has always been a bit persnickety about their branding. Similarly, it’s always bothered me that someone owns the word McNugget. “Pardon me but that oscillation in your vocal chords which subsequently produces a specific longitudinal air pattern perceived by others as ‘McNugget’… you know that one? Yeah, I fucking own that.”

It seems completely just to me that, with McDonalds’ insistence that the prefix “Mc” is their Manifest Destiny, it’s that very prefix that bites them in the ass.

Step 1: Finding a name.

This part didn’t involve me. My co-worker Levana had already canvassed the multitudinous youth groups that we work with at various trainings, gatherings, and presentations. The name RYSE, possibly but not necessarily an acronym for RAN Youth Sustaining the Earth, rose to the top (no pun intended). Kids liked it, despite—or perhaps due to—its deliberate misspelling.

Step 2: Crafting a brand.

The next step was to gather adjectives that would describe the kind of identity that we wished to create for RYSE. Since it’s a youth network (as in high school age), a lot of the RAN staff excused themselves from this step, leaving the younger members to generate the list. The list of adjectives for the logo ended up being a good mix of useful (doodleable, authentic, upward movement) and generic (hip, cool, smooth).

Step 3: Casting a wide net.

The design process now on my plate, it seemed right to start with a brainstorm. Based on the list of adjectives I received, I put together these twelve designs. Having just read “The Wisdom of Crowds” on my holiday train ride, I was very wary of the process turning into a consensus-based design by committee, turning the logo to poop.

Step 4: Raising the bar.

Instead of circling up and talking through our opinions, the team was asked to vote on their three favorites without mutual consultation. The idea was that the least inspired logos would quietly drop out of the race. That’s indeed what happened, and we ended up with these. There were still too many to send to our youth groups, so next was a quick “embarrassment vote” to remove the ones we didn’t even want the youth to consider.

Step 5: Getting feedback.

Now we were down to five designs, which we felt were good enough to send back to our youth allies for consideration. We asked for both word associations (so we could match them to our list) and Favorite/Least Favorite votes from them. Though the voting for Favorite showed a dead tie across all the logos, the word associations we got back were priceless. “Skyward” and “empowering” were used to describe one, while another just received “weak”. The silver bullet was the feedback that one of our activists would, “totally wear a t-shirt with that one on it.”

Step 6: Closing in.

This next step involved tweaking the design chosen from the feedback through multiple variations to see if there were other treatments that we preferred. Some people had asked beforehand if we could see this one like this or that one like that, but I kept punting the tweaking until after we had gotten a little closer to a decision—no sense in making multiple versions of a bad logo, especially when we’re crunched for time.

Step 7: The devil’s in the details.

Everyone was pretty sure that we had found our logo at this point and all that remained was the tweaking, fitting, squishing, and squeezing of what I considering a rough “scribble”, albeit digital, into the “final” version. Sending these details around for a final vote, most of the comments were in the family of, “they all look great” or “those are very small differences, any are fine”. Only a few people actually kept voting this far into the process.

Step 8: The new RYSE logo.

I took the final logo and did all the technical things in Illustrator to make it feel more “final”, like stroking borders, expanding appearances, and simplifying paths. The vectors went from about 1300 points of complex paths to about 300 points of much simpler paths—stripped for export if you will. Then I had a little fun exploring what it might look like in a two-color piece and made the birth announcement to the team. We had a new logo.

The whole process took just about two weeks, not including the casual conversations and market research that led to the name in the first place. I’m quite pleased with the logo, especially that we managed to include so many voices—like the youth we’ve been working with (it’s their logo, after all)—while keeping the process from slipping into groupthink and lowest-common-denominatorism. Bravo, my inner Creative Director.

The term “Conspicuous Consumption” was coined in 1899 to describe (with no small amount of disdain) the buying patterns of the Nouveau Riche. They suddenly had lots of money and wanted to let everyone know. Huge cars, lavish mansions, fur coats, sparklin’ dookie, etc.

Who’s sexier: George Cloonery or Al Gore?

The same thing seems to be happening with the trend-setting creative class in the present day. These Nouveau Righteous have developed a conscience and, by god, they’re going to let people know. Fashion magazines this summer were abuzz with the new “Eco-Chic” trend (as opposed to Eco-Chick, which is always in season). Everyone was checking labels to make sure they were toting certified organic, sustainably cultivated, fair-trade clutch bags that really reflected their worldly values on the way to the plastic surgeon for lipo, in their Hummer.

Evangeline Lilly thinks you should wear more hemp.

Making known one’s ethical affiliations is nothing new. Bumper-stickers proclaiming preferences for love-making over war-making could have grandkids by now and the colored-ribbon frenzy of the 90s has merely evolved into the colored-bracelet frenzy of the 00s (no, not that one). Still, there’s something about the ultra-ubiquitous white iPod as symbol for cultural capital that suggested to me that this (RED)^TM coalition was more about capitalism than activism. Afterall, fancy iPods and Bono go hand-in-hand.

The (RED)^TM campaign (yes, they’ve trademarked the term “(RED)”) has a wonderful manifesto that explains their intention with the branding strategy. My favorite bit is reproduced below:

(RED) is not a charity. It is simply a business model. You buy (RED) stuff. We get the money, buy the pills and distribute them. … If they don’t get the pills, they die. We don’t want them to die, we want to give them the pills…

Does that read like a protection racket to anybody else? “Hey kid, buy this iPod or Africans die. I could help ‘em out y’know, all you gotta do is buy this iPod. C’mon, you wouldn’t want anything bad should happen.” This is strange to me, because the (RED)^TM products seem to be priced exactly the same as their non-African saving contemporaries, what kind of “business model” is that?

The new face of activism?

In the end, I don’t think this campaign is truly about leveraging the power of consumption to help resolve the world’s tragedies, it’s leveraging the world’s tragedies—and the incredible transformative power of activism—to further fuel consumption. Otherwise, we could skip the iPods and just send $10 to The Global Fund ourselves and save $189 plus tax. The truth is that many corporate business plans rely on Third World poverty to keep costs down and if we really want to address global inequities, it’s probably not best accomplished by pouring money into the very institutions that have perpetuated them.

In chronological order, both in terms of the evening and human history, let’s start with the Commonwealth Club. The presentation was named for Nunberg‘s new book Talking Right: How Conservatives Turned Liberalism into a Tax-Raising, Latte-Drinking, Sushi-Eating, Volvo-Driving, New York Times-Reading, Body-Piercing, Hollywood-Loving, Left-Wing Freak Show, itself a reference to those hilarious anti-Dean ads. The combination of the title, the $18 admission, the copius wine and hors d’oeuvres, and the lobby photo gallery with a small plaque saying “sponsored by ExxonMobil” made me suspect I was going to have to do something to get myself thrown out.

My suspicions were largely unfounded as Nunberg, a Berkeley Professor, clearly acknowledged the entire spectrum of Liberalism. Further, he well-illuminated the fact that it’s not for lack of political unity that the Left feels so disjointed but another conflict entirely. In fact, most of America agrees with Liberal issues. “Ask a welder,” Nunberg offers, “if he’s for healthcare, social security, reining in corporate greed, and protecting the environment and he’ll say yes. Ask him if he’s a liberal and he’ll tell you he can’t afford the granite countertops and the hybrid car.” The Right, he claims, has made deliberate effort over the last 40 years to divorce the Left from its politics and re-attach it to a decadent, elitist, sanctimonious, spineless lifestyle. Thus all political discourse is over conservative Middle America vs. liberal Coastal Fringe.

Add the Culture War to the long list of wars the Right has manufactured to distract us from the real debate. Fortunately, ending wars is one of the things the Left does pretty well. One of the more recent efforts is the STORY program, who were giving a reportback on their last Collaborative to End the War in Iraq.

It was markedly different than the Commonwealth Club. Where that had been downtown with escalators and people in suits, this was in the Mission with a rickety staircase and you had to be buzzed in. Also, the presenters here were easily 30 years younger here than at my previous engagement. The presentation was therefore understandably less confident (some may replace “confident” with “smug”) though equally as knowledgable. While a professor speaks in nuggets of wisdom, these youth leaders asked salient questions, “How can there be leadership in a community that doesn’t identify as activists? How can we make room for the pain and anger of our veterans in the public discourse? What is the peace symbol of our generation?” Answers were carefully revealed, especially as the discussion opened up to the audience. Strategies for crafting stories, and passing on the stories of previous generations, emerged along with great advice like “activism must present itself as strategy, not therapy” and “we must recruit more graphic designers”. I may have giggled in delight at this proclamation.

The similarities were plentiful as well. Both groups recognized the power of language as a tool to bring about change. Nunberg noted that as language became more driven by advertising, the Right seized the opportunity to direct it. Products that were soft or white (like chardonnay and brie) were deliberately associated with “Liberals” in order to brand them as weak and exclusive. STORY shared a victory where 750 people turned up for a “silent procession” and “town hall meeting” that would have found a “march” and “protest” too confrontational. Ultimately, the Left needs to shift culture to the point where standing up to one’s government is not confrontational but expressly democratic (and it would be nice if “freedom” could mean something again, too) but battles are being won. Baby steps, baby steps.

This message of incrementalism was perhaps the most common thread. The Right did not suddenly control the airwaves or the words we use or the White House. It has been lost over the last 40 years. Likewise, we won’t win them back with a clever t-shirt or perfect bumpersticker, it may take 40 more. I was left with a vision of these twenty-something youth leaders in their 60s giving a similar presentation to the Commonwealth Club of 2046. They would be wise, well-spoken, and victorious. Or, I suppose, they could have lost and San Francisco would be underwater.