It is a truism of marketing practice that small, “niche, brands are smaller and more nimble than great, big ones. Someday, this may prove to be wrong.
Thanks to Piers Fawkes and Simon King at PSFK (and http://www.Vogue.co.uk), this news of design innovation from Coca-Cola UK.
Coke invited Matthew Williamson, Manolo Blahnik, Damon Dash, Jonathan Saunders, Wayne Rooney, Gharani Strok and Bay Garnett to redesign the Coke bottle. Some of the bottles enter limited circulation through Harvey Nichols stores, and the original is auctioned to raise money for the Terence Higgins Trust, the UKs leading HIV charity.
We may take this as a test run for the day, in the not very distant future, when even the most pedestrian Coke bottle will feel the transforming touch of great design. There will be many Coke designs in circulation at any one time, and the turn-over will be fierce. You like the Manolo Blahnik (as above) now in the stores? Snap it up. It will be gone in a week. (We never repeat ad campaigns, however successful they were. Someday we will take the same attitude towards packaging.)
We know that the current uniformity of packages is the artifact of an economic moment that has come and gone. National brands bargained for consumer loyalty by delivering uniformity. We were as a culture mesmerized by the idea of consistency and constancy. Both these moments are disappearing like morning mist on the links of St. Andrews. Someday, consumer packaging will stream with innovation.
What happens to the competitive landscape when this is so? Big brands will stream better than small ones. We may think of them as big pipes, capable of carrying a vast amount and diversity of brand meanings. Little brands, new to the world, will “stream at their peril. They will need constancy to stake their claim to a place in the marketplace.
Clearly, this reverses the traditional relationship. Now big brands will be the changeable ones. Little brands will be boring, stodgy, and a little predictable. They will be forced to give away the very dynamism on which new entries traditionally depend. Hmm. How then will little brands manage to come up? What will the advantage of littleness be?
Its as if we have been occupying just to quadrants of a four-part table, the “fast but little plus the “large but slow. What happens when big brands take up residence in the “large and fast?”
Reference
The post from PSFK here
Post Script
This blog has been preoccupied with the dynamism of consumer taste and preference and we have from time to time wondered about the instruments with which we might improve our ability to track and predict this dynamism.
So I was impressed to hear of the work of PSFK and its founders Piers Fawkes and Simon King. Here’s how they describe themselves:
PSFK is a community of trend spotters, futurists, forward-thinking-individuals and cool hunters in Fashion, Design, Advertising, IT, Government, Art, You-Name-It around the world. Sightings of trends are fed to a group of main site editors who then may or may not publish them on the site. We email a weekly and monthly newsletter too to subscribers.
Hey Grant,
Fantastic posts lately. Talked about this one today at my site. I tried using your TrackBack link, but it appears to still be broken. Hope all’s well–
Yes, Grant, PSFK is a great site, for sure.
Here’s my question: will large brands be able to remain sufficiently organizationally nimble to pull off the kind of fast-paced campaigns you describe, or will “big-companyisms” of the type we discussed the other day gum up the works with “process?”
(blush)
Ed, thanks for the hello. I think MT is disabled url postings and trackbacks as a way of diminishing blog spam. Whatever they’ve done, I am grateful I used to spot 20-30 minutes a day weeding. Best, Grant
Tom, well, no, exactly, the problem is not the conceptual one (how do we reconceptualize the brand so that it can be as dynamic as the culture to which it must respond) but the organizational one (can a group of people locked into a corporation, a corporate culture, and all of the stasis this represents, actually sustain prime the new pump.) And I thought our conversation was particularly grim. Even organizations primed to be more innovative are failing often to get it. We await your book on the topic. Thanks, Grant
Piers
There is no blushing in blogging.
Thanks for a great website.
Grant
Great post, though i wonder if people buying the manolo bottle realize they are actually buying a coke, and if that is a good thing or not. even though coke trademarks it, i wonder if the average consumer is sensitive enough to the coke brand to understand the bottle shape and pantone colors associated with it to know that this graphic skin is the consistant soda taste that they came to the store to buy. confronted with this package vs a standard pepsi package, would a consumer who really knows there soda go for the new package or the old standby, with its predictable taste. the new packaging and graphical treatments seem less risky for new brands trying to win consumers, but for the established brands that people know and love, does it really help the bottom line to jazz up packaging?
Anthony, good and useful skepticism; thanks; naturally, we would need to keep some visual identifiers constant; in the Coke case this might be the brand name in Spencerian script; and this is so locked into contemporary culture and our experience of the branding world that i think it would be enough; (naturally all these propositions need testing);
I respect the argument that argues against too much dynamism here; but two points: 1) Coke’s great problem at the moment is that it look relatively lifeless compared to all the brands, 2) this effect will grow worse as contemporary culture grows more lively and changeable (and I think it’s safe to say it will). (It is precisely point 2 that creates point 1.)
In sum, there is a very real opportunity cost for sticking to the old strategies of packaging, that Coke drifts farther from the fountain heads of contemporary culture and becomes increasingly that “boring old standby.”
Thanks. Great question. Best, Grant
good points grant. i agree with your opportunity cost assessment, though i wonder whether coke can do better overall by leaving the old standby unchanged and then spinning out a new brand that is filled with ‘innovation’. i find it interesting that whenever coke or pepsi buys a brand, they slowly ruin its uniqueness, eg. snapple. it seems like it would be an easy play to use these brands to both test out innovative design strategies rather than muddle with the staple brands (coke, diet coke, etc). interesting stuff, and i think, having worked extensively with one of the big two as a design consultant, they could both use a big of design to spice up their offerings. actually, they pay consultants tons of money for great work and then it never makes it past the bane of every designers existance….the focus group!!!
Anthony, thanks again, that is the other way to do, to allow brand extensions to do all the heavy lifting and to allow the mother ship brand to coast merrily along. I think in a perfect world, the big brands are multivocal, with enough constancy to supply a homing beacon for the consumer, and enough diversity and freshness…um, to be diverse and refreshing. And then there is that focus group problem, that great herd animal that tramples all creativity in its path. Thanks! Grant