“Not better, just different” - The battle to enforce brand guidelines

This week we have Franki Goodwin from BAFTA award winning Franki&Jonny discussing brand guidelines within film.

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A large portion of my client base is made up by the UK film industry. An industry that has produced some of the biggest entertainment brands in the world (Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, James Bond etc) but that is also notoriously bad at creating consistent brands within its independent titles. Film has the opposite communication problems to most sectors (who are good at building brands but lack content for them) it has lots of great content but regularly fails to create a consistent brand from inception to release without the rigour of a studio/broadcast channel that creates all its assets from one source.

To challenge this behaviour, last year we set about introducing some traditional corporate discipline to an independent title by creating a set of brand guidelines for it. An attempt to bring together the disparate elements of a movie - titles, trailer, poster, website etc, all created by different companies over the course of a year. We created a simple, useable, set of creative elements and principles that could be applied across all media. This is pretty unusual in this area (the first and last set of film guidelines I ever saw were in the Saul Bass exhibition at the Design Museum!) and we saw it as a bit of an experiment.

I won’t go into details (client bashing is a spurious pastime indulged in by far too many designers) but as we are 5 weeks from release and looking at our third inception of The Title Treatment (currently Poster, Website and Film all have different typographic styles) regardless of some minor victories in consistency I think it’s fair to say it has not been as effective as we’d hoped!

This consistency problem appears not to be about the lack of guidelines, as I had previously assumed, but a lack of commitment to them. Whilst everyone signed off on them, did they really sign up to them? Did they understand the commitment they were making? “For richer, for poorer, for better or worse.. even if I get really really bored.”

I guess the inconvenient truth is that good, consistent corporate branding principles ARE a bit boring. Working with the same logo and the same colours over and over again is kind of tedious. Having the discipline and confidence to not get tired and therefore doubtful of the choices you have made and be seduced into change is really hard. Something that feels ‘better’ and worth undermining the existing visual style for most probably isn’t better, it’s just different, but for that reason feels more exciting. It's an interesting lesson to learn - even if your client paid you to make the rules doesn’t mean they wont ask you to break them, regardless of the bigger picture.

I think this tradition will continue whilst independent movies are sold as short-term products with a the focus on cinema releases country by country. But as the international territories break down and the independent market benefits from single, global digital release strategies with much longer lead times, the need for a more carefully and consistently branded indies will become more clear and discipline will prevail.

Until then I think we have to cherish the design gems that come out of the chaos. We only have to look at this year's Oscar contenders (Movie Marketing) to compare the consistency of Avatar with the mixed bags of Hurt Locker and Precious. But we can equally question whether more original (or dare I say 'better') work would have come out of the Avatar franchise with a free reign in each territory as much as we can how much 'bigger' Hurt Locker/Precious could have felt with more consistent branding. Independent film is an interesting un-branded anomaly in these globalised times.

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