Issue 114: A Bulletin for Big Ideas and Better Business
What builds the most valuable brands? The power of coherence - with System1's Orlando Wood.
ISSUE 114/
A BULLETIN FOR
BIG IDEAS AND
BETTER BUSINESS.
OPINION / Creativity
Telling The Whole Story
💬 Orlando Wood on what really builds valuable brands…
When people encounter a brand – and when they later think about it – they don’t merely catalogue its component parts. They meet it as a whole.
Stephen King, the inventor of account planning, understood this fifty years ago. Writing in 1974, he observed that brands, rather like people, have physical attributes, styles, moods and idiosyncrasies – and that just as we have no difficulty thinking of a person as an individual, despite the complexity of everything that makes them up, we normally think of a brand as a single entity too. Brand personality, he argued, depends not on any one distinctive appeal, but on the particular blend of appeals to the senses, to reason and to the emotions.
The strength of this view is perhaps not so much that you need to see brands as 'people' but that the most powerful and attractive brands are best built and understood as a coherent, emotional, social 'whole'.
The most powerful and attractive brands are best built and understood as a coherent, emotional, social 'whole'.
The dominant frame in our industry has become scientific and componential – break the brand into its parts, identify its distinctive assets and optimise for recognition. That framework is valuable and has produced real insight. Distinctive assets, after all, play an important role in how brands are noticed and remembered. But taken to its extreme, it nudges us towards thinking about brands as assemblages rather than as living wholes. And this quietly devalues one of the most powerful concepts in brand-building: coherence.
Not consistency for its own sake, but a deep coherence of character, narrative and tone, sustained and evolved over time. I think this is what King and his colleague Jeremy Bullmore meant: that a brand is shaped and nurtured over the years, with an identity beyond its logo. And it is coherence that brings a brand quickly and easily to mind. It is coherence that creates value.
It is coherence that brings a brand quickly and easily to mind. It is coherence that creates value.
The brands that endure tend to be those with a clear sense of what and who they are at heart, and the conviction to express that with freshness and honesty in every context. Red Bull has animated a single idea for over thirty years. It shows up differently every time, and yet it is always unmistakably itself. That’s something more than consistency. That’s character. |  |
In a world that has fragmented fast, coherence is perhaps the most helpful thing any of us can be reaching for. Thinking about brands as whole entities is an idea whose time has come again. And perhaps the most fundamental question a marketer or creative can ask themselves now is, “do we know, deeply and honestly, who our brand is?”
Brands can be analysed as fragments. But they cannot be built that way. They must be built whole.
‘Coherence’ is a territory I explore further in a.p.e. – my course on advertising and effectiveness – which returns for a new cohort on 11 May. If you’d like to think more carefully about what makes brands genuinely famous, I’d love to have you along.
 | Interested in learning a little more about the course? Sign up for the Open Day on the 16th of April here. |
We asked Orlando a couple of questions on how he personally relates to creativity, here’s what he had to say…
TBOC: What is your Creative Philosophy?
If you want to grow, you have to put on a show. And your show needs to be more arresting, more interesting, more entertaining than anything that surrounds you.
TBOC: What has inspired you lately?
A visit to Waddesdon Manor: a complete brand world that draws you in entirely through its art, architecture, landscape, history and curation. Not a collection of catalogued museum pieces but a single, coherent, orchestrated experience of beauty and surprise, designed to be felt first and remembered later.
Orlando Wood is Chief Creative Officer at System1 Group, IPA Honorary Fellow, and author of Lemon (2019) and Look Out (2021). He is also course leader of Advertising Principles Explained - a masterclass in making brands famous again. |  Orlando Wood |
More stories. More ideas. More Creativity. From top voices in the industry.
Head to instagram for the latest news on creativity.
One can often trace the sources of a brand personality - here it is the advertising, there the pack, somewhere else some physical element of the product. Of course, the personality is clearest and strongest when all the elements are consistent.
Unlock your creativity.
Has this newsletter
been forwarded to you by a friend?
Sign up to The Business of Creativity
to receive your own weekly dose
of creativity news.