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Every
successful branding design firm has been forced to embrace the Web, not
just because they are now asked to create Web sites but also because they
are doing work for dot-com brands.
Branding for a dot-com
outfit is branding on an accelerated schedule. Clients tend to be entrepreneurial
types who can taste the rewards of a zillionaire IPO stock sale, and they
generally have an 18-month plan for foundation, execution, and stock offering.
"Brand speed for
tangible products is about time to market," explains Ken Gilliam, vice
president of the international branding and product design firm Fitch,
"but [for E-commerce] now it's about how the Street thinks, it's about
time to value. How fast can you become a ZIPO (zillionaire IPO)."
Pentagram's Kit
Hinrichs agrees that the speed of the branding business has accelerated
due to the dot-com factor. "We used to have a 20-year life on an identity.
Now companies are created and 18 months later they go public."
It's not just the
timeframe that makes branding for Web-based companies a challenge, it's
their names. Web-based companies are slaves to their domain names, and
as more and more of the good names get taken, new companies are founded
around nonsensical domain names that confound their branding firms.
"That's definitely
a challenge," says Hinrichs. "On a project like that, you have to spend
so much time countering what the name means, and then reestablishing what
its real meaning is for the company.
If establishing
a name for a dot-com company can be tricky, taking an existing brand and
transforming it into an E-commerce brand can be even more difficult. That
was the task that recently faced Santa Monica, CA-based Gregory Thomas
Associates when the well-established automotive publishing company Edmunds
wanted to create an E-division branded Edmunds.com.
Edmunds publishing's
identity was established some 30 years ago as an elegant script logo that
graced the covers of the company's automotive pricing guides. So, the first
dilemma that faced Thomas when creating the identity for Edmunds.com was
what to do with the existing logo. The Thomas team did a study and analysis
and determined that the script logo's brand equity did not extend past
print publishing. That decided, the designers had to come up with a visual
identity for Edmunds.com that was relevant to the company and its intended
audience.
Their solution
looks simple, after the fact, but it didn't come together until
Thomas developed the tagline "consumer driven" for the Edmunds.com
brand. With that tagline repeating in his head, the identity came
together almost seamlessly. "We wanted the dot-com to be something
other than just a Band-Aid," explains Thomas. "So we asked 'What
can we do with this?' and 'How can we make it fun?' So the headlights
and grill became the dot-com."--David E. Griffith
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