Your Father's Light Orchestra

Talking Like Children

I couldn’t help noticing recently just how widespread ‘childlike Innocence’ in visuals and creative has become in UK advertising. This was brought home to me sharply last week when I collected a friend’s elderly mother at Gatwick. She’d flown to the UK from Bosnia, and seeing the billboards at the railway station, remarked with mild horror that ‘your banks even have advertising for children here!’. Looking again, it occurred to me just how much of today’s communication, stylistically,  might be thought at first glance to be aimed at the average 8 year old.

I’m talking about simple, bold colours.  Geometric shapes: circles and squares. A degree of studied low production and naivety too – some ads looking like screenprints or even potato prints.  Lots of cutesiness too, through cartoon and animated characters. Cutesy animals, bunnies and teddies scurrying everywhere.

This may be nothing more than a current fashion in print advertising, reaching across campaigns and agencies. Fashions come and go: an earlier one was ‘punter + message on cardboard sign’. Another is ‘subversion of everyday lettering’ (one of the thrills of Photoshop), where lettering on photo-real shopfronts / street signs / embroidery is altered to carry the message and force a double-take (last seen in UK anti-smoking advertising and still going strong).

For all the ubiquity of this style though, ‘childlike innocence’  clearly strikes a chord with consumers and chimes closely with several current trends. It reveals a lack of patience in consumers’ ‘stop go lives’ for complexity, heavy copy and detail. It also reflects a caginess about risk and uncertainty, particularly potent in the realm of financial services, which means that clarity, hypersimplicity and even innocence can reassure.  While this might seem to be a great opportunity for marketers and communicators grow up and ditch the bunnies, in recessionary times ‘talking to you like children’ begins to feel even more resonant. It’s a cosy bedtime story and a tucking in.

The return of the zombie brands

The world of brands has always had a lively lexicon (those ‘wheels’, ‘onions’, ‘keys’ and ‘prisms’), but I came across a new face recently when I was listening to BBC World Service’s ‘Global Business‘ – the evocatively named ‘zombie brand‘.

Zombie brands are dead and delisted brands which retain emotional value, decades after they’ve been buried – and can, with clever handling, be reanimated by adapting yesterday’s positioning to new trends while retaining core truths.

The example which the programme cites is ‘Brim’, a decaf coffee in the US with an unforgettable jingle (something about ‘goodness to the brim’) that has, apparently, been resurrected as a vitamin-enhanced coffee. Brim, it is claimed, had been retained in the American collective memory as an idea of a coffee ‘that you could drink and it would not be bad for you…even good actually’. The Ford Taurus and Coke Tab also fit the bill.

In Eastern Europe, countless decommissioned Communist-era favourites, many gradually returning, behave in similar ways. Back in the UK, I hear the wailing of our own brand zombies – and nostalgia websites are teeming with them. Can it be long indeed before the dream return to the shelves of Spangles, this time single source and fairtrade? My hopes are still alive; sorry, undead.

 A is for Apple, D is for Dieter

According to one of the so-called ‘ten commandments‘ of the German industrial designer Dieter Rams, “Good design is as little design as possible”, something that is clear from the retrospective running at the Design Museum in London. Rams has a cult following among design enthusiasts for his enduringly simple, elegant designs for Braun from the 1950s until the mid 1990s. For his fans, that exhibition space full of stereos, toasters and coffee grinders is, well: it’s what Heaven’s branch of Curry’s might look like, surely.

Two thoughts struck me as I left.

Firstly, if plagiarism is the sincerest form of flattery, is Dieter Rams the most flattered industrial designer alive today? Without his influence, it’s certain that much of modern product design would look very different – including Jonathan Ive’s celebrated work for Apple, up to and including this week’s iPad.

Secondly, how did it come to be that an iconic, widely emulated and now ‘cult’ brand today only really exists as a largely forgettable range of electric toothbrushes and vegetable steamers? In an age where brands hunger for authenticity and ‘cool’ credentials, the brand that ‘did Apple before Apple’ could surely be working harder and making more of its credentials.

As Rams’ fifth commandment says, good design is unobtrusive. But to my mind, Braun’s fate feels like unobtrusiveness to excess.