Aesthetic consistency is not branding
Hi friend,
Under neither oath nor threat of death could I recall for you the sleepy, still-in-bed sequence of taps and swipes this rainy Monday morning that led me to this one-hour video of a 60-year-old Rolex being repaired and serviced. (Go ahead and put it on while you read the rest of this.)
But watch it I did. (Eh, eh?) At one point, the repairer—who narrates the whole process in the playful and confident baritone of an AM radio talk show host—remarked that Rolex clearly designed their watches to be serviced. He was delighted several times in the process by choices and details that made his job of repairing this thing easier. These choices made him felt seen, and appreciated.
I don't expect I'll ever own a Rolex—I'm not sure I've even held one—but I do know that they are good. How do I know that they are good? Branding, of course.
None of the choices that made the watch in the video easier and more pleasant to repair helped Rolex sell a second watch (or a service package, or any other nonsense) to the original purchaser. In fact, those choices prevented a sale, as the original owner's grandson had inherited it and was having it serviced for his own use, rather than buying his own.
What those kinds of choices have done, however, is turn Rolex into one of the most valuable fashion brands and one of the strongest-rated brands overall, according to some websites I just skimmed. (I'm not digging into the details because that's not my vibe and also because the brand is so strong I suspect I don't have to convince you, dear reader, of its value.)
Rolex has a reputation. That reputation is represented by a brand. The brand is primarily evoked via a name and crown icon—and probably many other design details apparent to watch nerds, but not to me.
The Rolex brand means something inasmuch as any brand can because their design is rooted in a point of view you can not only articulate but touch and feel. It has come to stand for actual attributes we associate with Rolex watches like quality, reliability, and craftsmanship. It stands for these attributes in part because people who are qualified to assess them, like watch repairers, literally experience them. (Ahem.)
A thing gets made, and the thing is good or not so good. (It does or does not have Pirsig's Quality, perhaps.) If the things made are good, and continue to be good for quite some time, and are made under the same name, we the consumers collectively come to understand that they are good. In Rolex's case, we trust that even though this particular watch is new, or a new design, Rolex still means quality, reliability, and craftsmanship. Their reputation, evoked by a brand, precedes them.
When people talk about branding in that way, I think: Yes, exactly. That is right and good, and makes sense.
But there's another activity, also generally described as branding, that makes less sense to me. It aspires to that same reputational power, but will likely never achieve it because the thing being branded is so intangible, commoditized, and devoid of perspective it can barely be said to exist at all.
That thing is software as a service.
No no, not all SaaS apps, sweetie, I'm sure yours is great. But on balance, the “branding” that happens for subscription software is less about reifying a point-of-view so much as it is about maintaining an aesthetic consistency with the nominal aims of reducing consumer confusion and accelerating delivery. Hardly ignoble, but they don't really have cluck-all to do with what the thing is, why it exists, or why it was made the way it was made.
In my design workshop on change communication, I use the anti-pattern filled nothingburger that was the HBO Max to Max rebrand as my primary case study, because it is a doozy. Our family didn't get HBO, and I only occasionally experienced it at a friend or cousin's house. Watching recently released films uninterrupted and uncensored in their original aspect ratio was a far different experience than the commercial-laden Sunday afternoon slop I had to eat from the over-the-air broadcasters. (Movies on broadcast TV did give us You see what happens when you find a stranger in the alps?!, so it wasn't all bad.) Any day I got to watch HBO (or MTV, for that matter) was a good day.
Our younger readers might not know that HBO actually stands for something: Home Box Office. As in: going to the movies, but you're at home. HBO was something you picked a motel because of, or a luxury perk enjoyed by your wealthier friends to make use of their big-screen, cinema-like rear-projection TVs. To me, though, HBO just meant movies, and that was a good thing. It felt like a brand that cared about movies (and later TV) and wanted them to be good. And sure, perhaps they got confused along the way and thought that swear words and topless women made movies and shows good, but their overall point-of-view felt quite near to my own: we love movies, man.
Fast forward and not that long ago and HBO was muddling through the cable+streaming age with a soup of barely-differentiated sub-brands that left everyone confused, including long-time customers. To try to fix this mess, they decided to take the HBO-ness out of the branding for their primary SaaS streaming product, now just called Max, which was possibly derived in part from Cinemax that was also part of the HBO Max offerings and...well, let's just say that Cinemax had a different reputation when I was growing up, and getting to watch it was also a good day, though for different, uh, different reasons.
So now if you go to HBO.com they invite you to sign up for Max, which no longer has anything to do with HBO except for all of the HBO shows and also it's what HBO wants you to sign up for. No, I don't get it either. But for our purposes, it's illustrative of the main point I am finally about to make: Who gives a fuck what any of this stuff is called, anyway?
Take Spotify, for instance. What reputation does the Spotify brand evoke? What qualities and attributes of the Spotify product come to mind when you see the unnamed-colors Spotify green and Spotify white (literally #FFFFFF) and Spotify black (#121212—saucy!) together?
Personally, I think about the absurd amount of money they gave to friend-to-fascists Joe Rogan, and also about the posts I see from very popular bands who nevertheless have to crowdfund medical care and repairs for their tour van. I'm biased by my radical sympathies, of course, but I suspect that for most people, the Spotify brand evokes...what, music? Streaming? Music streaming? If upon waking tomorrow, the mysterious-to-me taps and swipes of my morning phone routine leads me to a news article that says Spotify has rebranded as Dotify, or Spotbook, or Sharon (Sharin'?), or literally whatever...would anyone care? Would any actual value have been lost? And if not...why?
There's some value in the labor, of course, in a sunk-cost sort of way. A great deal of effort would have to be expanded to rebrand everything, to replace Sp- with D- in all the strings, to upload new logos, to replace the old Spotify green with the new Dotify purple. But the fact that it might be costly to change the brand is not the same as saying that the brand itself has value.
I'm sure I'm being an absolute idiot right now. I'm sure there are any number of charts and graphs and studies and formulas that very smart marketing and business people can show me that proves how much value is in that name. But I would still ask those very smart people: What, precisely, does the Spotify brand represent? What reputation does it evoke and protect?
What does Mailchimp—sorry, Intuit Mailchimp—represent? What does Salesforce stand for?
Slack was anti-email, quirky and informal, until it kinda wasn't. Dropbox stands for: uh, files?
Spendesk and Zendesk are apparently different things, and back-to-back on a list of top SaaS apps I'm scrolling through for this bit.
I chuckle when I see small businesses with both "just" and "and more" in their name. Just Mufflers and More! Just Muffins and More! But the big brands, with all of the big brand money, would never, of course...
Uber is ridesharing...and scooters, and grocery delivery, and...freight, now? Christ.
Stripe, I have long imagined and refuse to now look up, refers to the magnetic stripe on the back of a credit card. But if we woke up tomorrow and Stripe was Slack and Slack was Stripe and Zendesk was Qualtrics and...like, who cares?
At this point you might be asking: who cares who cares, Scott? Brands are gonna brand. Well, sure. I care in part because I think this is an instructive perspective for people and teams who want their brand to actually mean something. In my VMT framework, and in my content strategy and UX writing classes, I teach that an organization or product's voice—the foundation of their brand—is necessarily connected to the organization or product's vision. Vision is the world you want, and voice is your opinion and perspective on why that vision matters and what it will take to achieve it; voice is your point-of-view.
Most of these SaaS apps have shitty, interchangeable brands because they do not have a real voice. They do not have a real voice because the only logical point-of-view you can form around a vision wherein your shareholders become as rich as possible is “capitalism good, make number go up”.
To me, this means that it's all very silly to take inspiration from brands to whom branding really just means the logo police. Picking colors and typefaces and policing their use creates a brand in the way that bringing home flowers creates love.
All that said, there are opinionated, vision- and point-of-view-driven SaaS brands. DuckDuckGo comes to mind. Wikipedia. Regrettably, I must count X and Facebook among them as well, though what their brands stand for is, to me, abhorrent. YouTube and TikTok feel like they mean something, maybe? They have an advantage in that they completely dominate their respective categories of long-form horizontal and short-form vertical videos...though I'm not sure that either has a vision beyond a world where people never put their phones down.
Okay, it’s 11:59 am and I should probably start my day now. Perhaps this is Part I of...something? I don’t know, you tell me.
Part I, in summary: Branding is hard, you have to believe in something to say something, and capitalism is bad, actually.
Have a good one, friend.
- Scott