This week I spoke at the M-Pavilion and I got a little carried away talking about branding in relation to the Apple Store and Federation Square in Melbourne controversy. I will write more about that in coming weeks. But in the meantime, here is my first take at thinking about branding and architects.
Intro
In the wonderful world of digital advertising. The subject, tone and style of a campaign needs to be delivered to a customer within the first 9 seconds of a digital advertisement. But architectural branding is a different kind of beast. Architectural services are not a fast moving consumer good (FMCG), like a Mars, Bar, or a product that requires a simple pay wave transaction. Branding and the elements that constitute an architectural brand are a little more complicated.
The Problem: How to change your architectural brand
The lead times in running an architectural practice are quite long. Sometimes it may take a practice up to 10 years to achieve stable and less volatile income stream. But in my experience the branding of a firm is often set very quickly within the first few years.
Late last year a friend of mine said there were two types of larger architectural practices those with “family” brands and those with “corporate” brands. She wondered how do you change an architectural brand once it has been established? This made me think about what the elements of branding is for an architectural firms. Once that branding is set how might you then change it? In other words how do you change the branding of a firm that has been going for 10 years or more.
The Elements of Architectural Branding
In my framework the three elements that make up an architectural brand are Knowledge Creation, Knowledge Delivery and Knowledge Style.
This is because I think a Knowledge Management approach is the best way to approach thinking about branding in architectural firms. Forget about the focus on designed objects. It is better to think about:
- What design knowledge is being created?
- Then, how is that design knowledge then delivered to clients and others?
- Finally, and in doing the above, how is that design knowledge expressed in terms of an expression or style?
Knowledge Creation: What knowledge is created
You can see from the diagram that elements of this include the kind of architectural types your firm works, on or the size or scale of projects, the regions that you work in and create knowledge about, or the different kinds of expertise your firm is known for.
This may also be a proportion or mix of different elements.
Knowledge Pathways: How is knowledge delivered?
How you deliver this knowledge also contributes to your brand. Is your firm only interested in time or cost outcomes. Or maybe your firm is focused don generating concepts or iconic architecture. Or maybe it’s just about getting awards.
Knowledge Expression: How is knowledge expressed?
How your brand is expressed is also another aspect of this framework. Part of this is how an architectural firm creates knowledge that helps to brand its own clients.
- Is it focused on informal styles where the firm does not have to structure the expression or aesthetics of design knowledge.
- Or is design knowledge expressed somewhere in between. This is when the firm employs a mix of formal and informal signifiers and design knowledge to help brand groups or communities.
- Or is the style of the brand, what I have termed high style, where the firm is focused on Iconic Symbolic Capital at a National or International Level? Where design knowledge is highly structure and bound by aesthetics.
Family vs. Corporate brands.
Family brands are common in architectural practice. These are architectural firms that employ or hope to employ family members as leaders within the firm.
This has a number of advantages:
- The value created by hard won financial stability over a long period of time stays within the firm.
- Personal networks and connections vital to business can be maintained.
- Succession problems are easily solved
- Directors have more control, and incentive, over design decisions rather than giving these design decisions to managers.
- In practice a “family” architectural brand might have this kind of mix.
The corporate branded architecture firm is different:
- The brand may not be determined by a name associated with familiar and long standing networks or particular design approach.
- Corporate style architects rely on the portfolio of projects within the firm.
- The project portfolio, as whole then partly determines how the form is branded.
- Managers, including designers, have more incentives to get projects which in turn determine the brand.
Rebranding: the all important question.
So if you need to change your brand or even rebrand your firm you can then look at this framework and decide which things you need to shift to achieve this. For example, a family brand wanting to be a corporate brand can see which elements to change.
In other words, the framework helps architects to decide which elements to change or transform and it also suggests that changing or rebranding necessitates changing more than just one element. Many architects fall into the trap of getting in a few new designers and fresh design ideas in the hope this will change the brand or how the firm is perceived. Or they think they can do it by, going after a new types of projects they havent done before, or by developing new types expertise.
It doesn’t really work like that because too often the other elements in the mix are not changed.
This is the first real post of 2018 and I would like to thank those of you who read and visited the site over January. Quite a few of the greatest hits posts from previous years were more popular than when they were first posted! The site has had a bit of a makeover and I am hoping to renovate it a little more in coming weeks.
Peter Raisbeck: surviving the design studio 