(Half thought out post number 2).
There is a medium sized debate going on at the moment in the brand-o-blog-o-sphere about simplicity vs complexity in brands.
Russell (here and here), Stuart Smith, John Grant, Faris and a few others are all down on the side of complexity.
Maurice Saatchi was recently awoken from his slumber to defend simplicity in the FT. (Did you read that article in the FT? Complete bollocks.)
If you'd asked me about this 12 months ago I'd have gone for simplicity. But I think I was misunderstanding the question a little bit. So, am I now on the complexity side of the argument? Hell no, I've invented my own theory. (Yeah, check me out, running round inventing my own theories... I'll be writing a book next.)
My theory is called The Diversity of Ideas. You see to be a successful brand or creative agency, I think you need a healthy diversity of ideas.
I went to a lecture at the RSA in 2004 where Shell talked about how their diversity policy had affected the bottom line. (Oh and by the way, diversity does not just mean ethnicity. It means class, ability, culture, background, education and everything else.) It was fascinating talk and has had me thinking about diversity ever since.
So by Diversity of Ideas I mean good ideas and bad ideas. I mean big ideas and I mean tiny ideas. Web ideas, paper ideas. Ideas from ideas people and ideas from non ideas people (users, consumers etc). I mean expensive ideas and cheap ideas. But it means doing lots of ideas and it means actually doing them, and it means doing them with out knowing for sure if they're gonna work or not. It means letting go.
You already see this in action in people with a true entrepreneurial spirit, Branson is the obvious example. Most successful small companies (say 5-25 people) do this out of necessity. A small company may spend all it's marketing budget on a trade show and hold a small bbq in the factory for suppliers every summer. It's all selling, it's all building the brand.
Good brands already do this, probably by accident and by the nature of the marketing industry meaning they have lots of marketing people and agencies who don't know what the other one is doing.
Google have started doing it, Volkswagen have always done it and Nike do it (no pun intended).
Google, Volkswagen, Nike - all have really simple messages (search, affordable engineering excellence and Just Do It) that a diverse framework can be built around. So they're still communicating a simple message but in a diverse way.
Diversity of Ideas means that brands have to have a strong, distinct character. Someone like Innocent could probably pull this off, because the story they're building is interesting enough to handle diverse ideas. We'll see.
The last two paragraphs explain why I think diversity is different from complexity. I worry that people will take complexity and use it as an excuse to make things hideously over laboured. Whereas diversity means that brands can have a simple message (or messages) and it means we can experiment, we can play, we can remix, we can let go and allow users to play with the brand. It means we can have some fun and it means we can be surprised. And that's a good thing.
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