But the generic beer and cigarettes experiment hasn't converted most brand-name shoppers, even those who complain about the prices of their favorite products. Despite steep discounts in price, "B-E-E-R" and "Cigarettes" have never really been embraced by the mainstream buying public. Certainly the reasons generic beer and nameless smokes never caught on is primarily quality--"B-E-E-R" is barely good enough to use for killing garden slugs--but the lack of branding, the simple act of a company signing its name to the product, also has played a role.

Branding is a system of visuals and words that combine to represent a product, service, or organization in the mind of a consumer. A brand is something like a flag, you see the flag of a familiar nation and you immediately associate it with that nation. The same happens with brand markings; every time you see the familiar symbols and words that make up the brand identities of Coca-Cola, McDonald's, Apple, Sony, IBM, etc., they trigger responses based on all the experiences you have had with the products and companies that display these marks.

Perhaps that's why branding is one of the most lucrative and demanding specializations for graphic designers. A visual brand is currency; it's a shortcut to communication. A well-known brand is a hieroglyphic that summons so much feeling and so many meanings for the viewer on so many levels, both conscious and subconscious, that it could keep a semiotics researcher busy for a lifetime. 

Branding and identity have long been one of the key business concerns of graphic designers, but in recent years the role the designer plays in branding has expanded to the point that some design firms seem more like marketing consultants. This is in stark contrast to the popular conception that a design firm's job is to create pretty visuals and hand them over to the in-house marketing department in the form of a branding manual.

Gregory Thomas, president of a Santa Monica, CA-based design firm and acting chair of the graphic design department at Art Center College of Design, says clients are now in tune to the idea that designers have much more to offer than just decorations. "The last two ID programs we've done have not been so much about, 'This is your logo book. This is how you use your logo,'" he says. "We hide those now, now they're almost like a supplement. Now it's about the importance of the brand. What we're really doing is reinforcing what the company is about."

Traditional Branding manuals are becoming obsolete, but the more creative ones that serve a dual purpose (like this one for Baskin-Robbins) give the client a tangible edge in brand definitoin. And clients still like the feel of the tangible book. This manual was created spread by spread like a collage without any computers and photographed by Gregory Thomas Associates.

There are two reasons clients hire branding and identity designers: to launch a new brand or company or to reposition an existing one.

In either case, all brands are built on four pillars: differentiation, relevance, esteem, and awareness. Put simply, an effective brand has to be distinctive so that it establishes a relevant identity for the product that doesn't blur with other products in the category. And consumers have to be made aware of that brand in a manner that they will make a positive association with it.

The process of creating visual branding materials for products, services, and organizations also tends to follow a formula.

The foundation of solid branding is research. In order to create trade dress or identity materials for a product, service, or organization, you have to do your homework. Research includes surveys of advertising from the client and the client's competitors; studying the reports of financial analysts who write about the client and the client's market sector; comparing and contrasting the Web sites of the client and the competitors; and poring over the client's in-house research. In addition to analyzing existing research materials, some branding projects require the design consultants to conduct their own original studies.

At this level the research phase of a branding design project is often a long and hard process. And although the companies that do this kind of work are ostensibly design firms, it's not unusual for them to work six months on a design project without creating a visual. "We just did a project for a company with $300 million to $350 million in revenues, and we went through a year-long brand study and didn't create a comp," says Ted Leonhardt, president of the Seattle-based design consultancy The Leonhardt Group.

Research by itself is worthless. So the next phase of a branding project is strategic analysis. It's here that the branding firm with buy-in from the client creates positioning for a new product or repositions an existing one.

All this research culminates in a detailed analysis of the market and how the new or repositioned product or service fits in that market. Leonhardt says the key to successful branding is that the positioning be truthful to the company, product, or service and how consumers perceive it. "You have to look for a way of positioning the company that's authentic, that actually is them," he says. "You're not trying to invent something, you're trying to create a powerful position that is believable, that knowledgeable insiders will not discount."

Leonhardt's recent work for Federated Department Stores is an example of how research and analysis drive the visuals of a successful branding project. Senior management at Federated wanted to strengthen the individual brands of the stores in the chain, which includes Macy's, Rich's, Bloomingdale's, and Bon Marché, just to name a few.

Seattle-based Leonhardt was hired by Federated to rejuvenate Bon Marché, a chain of 42 mid-level stores in the Northwest. Research on the project led the Leonhardt team to a study of newspaper advertising placed by Bon Marché and its competitors. The research revealed that department stores were so item and price conscious in their ads that the ads were almost interchangeable. "One of the studies we did, we actually clipped the logos off five or six department store ads that were advertising similar merchandise," recalls Leonhardt. "Then we asked senior management [at Bon Marché] to identify which stores they were, and they could not tell them apart,"

Based on their research, Leonhardt recommended that Bon Marché play to its strengths. The company has a powerful regional identity in the Northwest and it has a distinctive sounding French name that roughly translates as "good deal." 

Leonhardt built a branding campaign that emphasized the active, outdoor life of Northwesterners and the French word bon. "We told them, 'Let's celebrate the Bon name, you own the name. Let's remind people that Bon means good.' So we created Bon Life or the 'Good Life.' The concept is basically to remind people what it is to be a Bon customer." 

The "Bon Life" campaign is a good example of how graphic design firms are starting to edge into the territory of other disciplines, including advertising creative and market research.

Northwestern department store chain Bon Marché hired Seattle-based designers The Leonhardt Group to reposition the brand. Leonhardt changed the company's promotions to focus less on price and more on the Northwest lifestyle.

But just because graphic design firms that specialize in branding and identity perform many additional functions for their clients, that doesn't mean that the visual aspects of branding are getting short shrift. These multifaceted firms are very aware that design is the execution of all the branding strategy. 

"Graphic design is one of the touch points (consumer interfaces) of how a brand building model occurs," says Ken Gilliam, vice president of the international branding firm Fitch. "The goal is to create ultimately a brand language, which is the tone, feel, and manner in which the brand communicates to the world."

Leonhardt agrees that visuals are the driving force behind the marketing power of branding. "It's easier to talk about strategy and research, than it is to talk about design," he says. "But design is where the rubber hits the road. Consumers don't respond to strategy, they respond to shopping bags. You can have fabulous strategy, but if it is not represented by truly powerful design and messaging, it just doesn't work."

And conceptual design is not the only concern for branding firms. Clients like to see quality execution, and they want every detail of any mark associated with their company or their product to be absolutely perfect, so prepress and print quality are make-or-break issues for branding and identity designers. "The craftsmanship of the work we do is absolutely critical to our success," says Leonhardt, who is a big advocate of hiring in-house production managers. "We try to control that quality as closely as we can. Quality of the work is what delivers the brand message."

The brand message is also delivered by consistency. There's a reason why every can of Coca-Cola is red.

Consistency in branding and identity used to be maintained by a book the designer produced for the client. This branding manual showed all the approved iterations for the brand visuals and told how to reproduce the exact colors so that if another designer needed to duplicate the materials for, say, the Buenos Aires office, he could. About five years ago, brand manuals started to include CD-ROMs, and now, with the advent of digital asset management systems over the Internet and intranets, brand manuals are rapidly becoming obsolete. If the company has embraced digital asset management, all our fictional Argentinian artist has to do is download the digital file off the company's asset server, and there's no chance of incorrect colors or sizing. At least that's the theory. But human error can always be introduced by the well meaning or the sloppy.

That's why Kit Hinrichs, a partner in the well-respected branding firm Pentagram, says a designer's best tool for maintaining the integrity of an identity or a brand is not technology but follow-through. "In many cases, we do something and once it has left our hands, then it is in the hands of our clients," he explains. "If we have not done a thorough enough job to have them buy into the way the thing works and the way in which it should express itself, then it starts to fall apart. That's why we usually have relatively long-term consultancies with clients and we go back and look at things three months, six months, a year, two years."

Another way to build longevity into a brand or identity is to make it flexible enough to accommodate some guided tweaking by the users. "It's important to understand that just like people change, companies also change," says Hinrichs. "If you don't give people the flexibility to choose how they may express themselves, they will just change the system. So we try and build as many pieces that make up the whole and allow people to choose those pieces."

For example, Pentagram's identity for The Nature Company anchors on an illustrated rabbit. However, the brand manual permits substitution of existing illustrations of dinosaurs, fish, and butterflies. "We built it so that when there is a specific need for something to identify a specific activity, then they can substitute a number of other elements for the bunny, and we gave them the choices," explains Hinrichs.

Pentagram, a union of 18 partners with offices in London, New York City, Austin, and San Francisco is illustrative of how design firms that specialize in branding and identity become involved in much more than just the graphic representation of the client's image. The company's partners come from a variety of disciplines, including architecture, product design, industrial engineering, and graphic design.

Other high-end branding companies are similarly multifaceted, so much so that describing them as graphic design firms is a gross understatement. "We're a design consultancy, but we're not really in the design business," says Fitch's Gilliam. "We're really in the transformation of brand business. We are creating, positioning, launching, and repositioning brands."

A few years back, when Iomega wanted to launch its now-flagship product, the Zip drive, Fitch was called on to research consumer interest in such a high-capacity removable storage drive, engineer the product, create the user interface, design the packaging, and produce the marketing collateral. Such a comprehensive role is a natural for Fitch, whose U.S. headquarters was originally established as the product design and engineering firm Richardson Smith.

Thomas believes Pentagram, Fitch, and other multifaceted branding firms are part of the natural evolution of design firms. "Before, it was always about wearing hats, and now we're taking the hats off," he says. "In the old scenario, the product designers would develop a beautiful new product then they would hand it to us and say put this in a package, so we used to come in only at the end. What we are promoting now is that [graphic designers] must work on the project from the beginning. We breathe life into it, and nowhere along the line do we want the fact that we belong to a specific group or not [to impede input]."

But while multifaceted design firms may be the wave of the future, even the Pentagram partners are beginning to wonder if they can do everything that their clients want them to do. For example, Hinrichs says he would prefer not to be in the naming business.

Hinrichs, who works out of Pentagram's San Francisco office, believes designers are spreading themselves too thin, and he shows no hesitancy to include Pentagram in that statement. "What I worry about is at some point do [graphic designers] become management consultants to companies for all of these things, and as a result do we cease to do any of them well.

"As we become more like business consultants--and believe me, I think designers can be very good business consultants--I think that sometimes we've lost our primary role, which is creating things that communicate well that are in many cases quite beautiful," he says. 

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