The Politics and Purpose of Post-Branding / Ideas

Branding is rampant. From nation states to livestreaming teenagers, it has settled like fallout dust, stifling the entire landscape. Or, if that metaphor isn’t apocalyptic enough, maybe branding is a rouge virus, spawning delirious, market-addicted zombies. But it’s not just a colourful conspiracy theory – while branding fronts as neutral, there is little it doesn’t frame and distort. For a designer that believes design can be anything and go anywhere – that it should inspire, inform and enhance human agency – branding is a real problem.

There is a perverse logic to exploitative companies employing exploitative communication methods. Predatory branding dogma is a perfect fit for the mercenary corporation profiting from the debasement of social relations and the natural environment. It actually makes a sick kind of sense.

But what if you’re a non-corporate entity committed to the common good? How do you communicate collectively if you’re a non-profit, civic, or oppositional activist entity and the adoption of branding just undermines your mission and distorts your ethos? Branding infiltrates and reconstitutes non-corporate entities as market-tamed subordinates. Non-corporate entities still need to connect with an audience. They have a valid and sometimes urgent need to create visibility and recognition. These organisations don’t want their public communication to merely reproduce the self-defeating power relations embedded in capitalism.

Left page: Amnesty International posters by various designers, before the Wolff Olins global rebrand of 2008.

Right page: Amnesty International posters post-2008 Wolff Olins’ global rebrand. Various designers.

I wrote a book with design sociologist Oliver Vodeb, What is Post-Branding?, that attempts to tackle this problem. We hope the ideas will find an audience amongst designers looking for other, better ways to engage a public and connect as humans. The book’s veracity aside, even progressive design critics are highly sceptical of any challenge to branding’s supremacy, some even wondering what there would be left for designers to do if they’re not branding. To paraphrase Fredric Jameson: “It is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to branding.”

It’s also really hard to get conservative design thinkers to engage directly, in good faith, with these issues. For example, recently, a self-described “self-taught designer” and “design critic” left a comment online, oddly (to me at least) criticising the book as “purpose driven”. They described themselves as a “design essentialist”, by which they mean design criticism should “focus first on the craft of design.” In their online commentary they also present as anti-trans, anti-Palestine, evasively homophobic and upfront macho working class. Even so, I hoped two working class designers with different politics could discuss this stuff, and suggested we thrash it out. They equivocated then declined. It got a little heated when I realised they hadn’t even read the book.

In spite of the hostility, I appreciate that they were actually very usefully saying the quiet bits out loud – confessing a conservative design industry’s masked ideology. Of course, that is the inverse of the accusation often aimed at radical critical discourse by the right: “the seemingly all-pervasive shoe-horning of political ideology into design practice, discourse and criticism.” (The “design essentialist” again.) This, over and over, as if design is intrinsically ideologically unbound.

Left page: In 1787 “Potter to the Queen” and Society for the Suppression of the Slave Trade member Josiah Wedgewood, created what some consider to be the first ‘activist brand campaign’ when he asked staff to design the ‘supplicant slave’ wax seal. The anti-slavery logo was applied to everything from pamphlets and cufflinks to table-ware and jewellery, However the pleading, passive pose of the figure and its erasure of enslaved Africans’ resistance and struggle, as well as the nature of the image’s production and circulation, enforced the dominant abolitionist narrative as the triumph of white abolitionists. Photo picturinghistory.gc.cuny.edu.

Right page: The emergence of ‘political corporate social responsibility’ has seen corporations reinvent themselves as justice-trumpeting activists. Nike’s endorsement of American footballer Colin Kaepernick (who initiated kneeling during the U.S. national anthem as a protest against police brutality and racism), reportedly boosted the company’s brand value by US$6bn. While calling for racial equality, the Nike campaign is also inevitably framed by the inequality-promoting neoliberal myth of self-made American individualism. Image @Kaepernick7, 2018.

Everywhere some people look they see designers embracing left-wing causes and notions, even if the actual practice is as conservative as ever. And in wider reality, any remote threat of real structural change is being met with ferocious reactionary counter forces. Misogyny is rising against feminism, authoritarianism against democracy, white nationalism against multiculturalism, populist corporatism against socialism. To me, it seems like these anxieties are accumulating insecurities, demonstrating the idea that from a position of power and privilege, advancing equality feels like loss. To a designer like “the essentialist”, and for much of the design industry, ‘design is design, and politics is politics’ is a veil for an unexamined ideology.

Left page: Coin displaying the logo of the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Companie). Conceived in 1602, it is likely the world’s first ever multinational company logo, and became a hated symbol of violent colonisation as the Dutch ruthlessly pursued a global spice trade monopoly.

Right page: Replica of a slave branding iron originally used in the Atlantic slave trade. Displayed at the Museum of Liverpool, England.

So let’s get into some shoe-horning.

As a designer working with community, culture and politics, my experience is that many organisations, despite often intuitively sensing branding is a problem, feel compelled to use it. Branding blurs the line between persuasion and coercion, for both the sender and receiver. They understand branding is a commercial form of communication that conflicts with their values, but just don’t see an alternative. They are persuaded with a kind of moral appeal to their potential, the promise of shining more brightly in a galaxy of already brilliantly shining stars. But if they don’t play, they won’t shine, and they’ll be punished with darkness – with obscurity, market defeat, or precarity. The more intense the atmosphere of social and economic anxiety, the more they feel compelled to play the game. And the more the game is played, the more harm is done and the higher the social and economic tensions. It’s a destructive feedback loop that pulls them further away from their mission and values, and deeper into market ideology. The naturalisation of branding therefore hinders our ability to imagine and practice alternatives.

Left page: Trader on the floor at the New York Stock Exchange praying to his God. Photo by Bryan R. Smith/AFP via Getty Images

Right page: Wally Olins, co-founder of Wolff Olins, is known as a pioneer of branding consultancy, advocating that branding encompass the world beyond corporations, such as not-for-profits, charities, and nations. Photo famousgraphicdesigners.org/wally-olins.

So what are the alternatives to branding as a practical communications methodology? My studio, Inkahoots, regularly designs visual identities for non-corporate clients while trying to avoid branding’s dictatorial, totalising influence, but we had never fully developed a feasible critical substitute. In 2020 we were commissioned by Greenpeace International to co-create their global identity system. This presented a stark dilemma, if we applied the default method at hand – corporate branding – wouldn’t we embed in the activist organisation a way of relating to the world that is responsible for the very harm it exists to fight?

With the aim of avoiding this contradiction, with our friend, Oliver Vodeb, we began more methodically trying to understand branding, and imagine a creative counter to its neoliberal orthodoxy.

We wondered how to explain the shift from terms like ‘identity design’ and ‘corporate identity’ towards the end of the first decade of the new millennium, when design practices began calling themselves ‘branding agencies’, universities stopped teaching ‘visual identity’, and writers like Wally Olins stopped writing about ‘corporate identity’, and they all eventually switched to ‘branding’.

One fascinating explanation for the industry exploding during this period is the economic and ideological conditions around the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. European and United States economic data shows that for the first time in history, the world’s largest companies, after 2008, transitioned from majority tangible to non-tangible investments. Multi-national companies like Coca Cola, whose majority value had traditionally been in physical products, services and infrastructure, were now deriving most of their value from non-tangle assets like formulas, algorithms and branding. The GFC eroded a previously unshakable faith in free-market superiority. This newfound ideological insecurity combining with rapidly developing digital technologies was the perfect impetus for the growth of less tangible and more abstract forms of capitalism. Branding was now on the balance sheet.

Left page: American cowboy riding a rodeo bull. Photo source unknown.

Right page: Charging Bull bronze sculpture symbolising Wall Street in the Financial District of New York City. Photo by c_savill.

The ways in which we create social meaning and economic value are shifting. The relationship between production and consumption is changing. With neoliberal capitalism, the old forms of value creation in traditional workplaces are being replaced with a mediated process of social interaction and communication, converted into economic value via the brand. Instead of exploited labour under industrial capitalism, now any act of communication (especially on monopolised digital platforms – a Google review, a tweet, an Instagram post) has the potential to become free labour that is brandable and transformable into economic value. This labour is also part of brand management's coercive strategies of regulating consumer 'freedoms', shaping the context in which real freedom is exercised.

In this volatile present moment, as anxious electorates drift towards fascism, it’s worth noting that the success of Hitler’s Nazis was bolstered by a potent template for modern branding. If we really want to understand branding, we need to consider that the disciplined intensity of party propaganda in Germany’s pre-war public domain foreshadowed contemporary commercial communication systems.

As design historian Steven Heller has pointed out, other totalitarian states were using propaganda in similar ways (in Stalinist Russia and Maoist China, for example). But rather than see this insidious public messaging as the regimes’ using “new branding strategies to sell their political messages”, as Heller claimed, we propose it’s more the other way around: the Nazi’s especially, were helping pioneer a new form of mass communication that would leave Germany and travel the world via the United States as post-war corporate culture migrated globally (the very same path charted by one of fascism’s then ideological adversaries, modernism). That’s not to say there wasn’t of course a two-way influence between emerging fascist nativism, and cosmopolitan corporate cultures: famously, US carmaker Henry Ford, AEG designer Peter Behrens, and others, were all greatly admired by Hitler.

Left page: Pages from the Organisationsbuch der NSDAP (Organizational Handbook of the National Socialist Party), a manual covering many aspects of Nazi public communication and organisation, 1936.

Right page: Pages from IBM’s Graphic Design Guide by Paul Rand, 1981. Images oa.letterformarchive.org

Like fascism, branding moulds the subject to fit the myth. To be clear though, this isn’t a claim that branding is wholly fascist, but that it absolutely has fascist tendencies and genealogy. While the industry likes to ‘envitabilise’ branding by claiming it has literally been around forever, (a 2015 Lippincott curated show at London’s Design Museum claimed that cave paintings “are an important demonstration of how our Homo Sapien ancestors were hard-wired to brand”), it is in reality a contemporary neoliberal phenomenon. So while not exactly the same as the Nazi’s obscene image management innovations, to write a history of brand manuals, for example, while ignoring or dismissing the link, just launders the ideological roots of a dehumanising communications methodology, and creates a vacuum for a revisionist communications mythology: the branding of branding.

It really struck me that with the resurgent interest in historical design guidelines and branding manuals, one of the primary foundational texts is rarely mentioned – unless to dismiss it as safely outside the category. The Nazi’s Organisationsbuch der NSDAP was published in 1936, likely predating all but perhaps Coca Cola’s tentative 1928 attempt at a style guide. Though different in many ways to the average contemporary example, it was however one of the first attempts at publishing a systematised, integrated manual of public communication. Steven Heller (whose excellent book Swastika: Symbol Beyond Redemption? is worth tracking down) disagrees, claiming: “The Nazi guide was not a corporate manual but it came close. It was a handbook for all operations and party leadership.” It’s true that as well as policing the application of swastikas and related nationalist regalia, it primarily focuses on party-organisational matters.

Left page: Soldiers stand at attention in Nuremberg, Germany, listening to a speech by the German Führer, Adolf Hitler during the Nazi Party rally of 1936. Photo Shutterstock.

Right page: Bottles of Coca-Cola come off the production line. Photo by aapsky.

But aren't external branding and internal organisational culture now seen as interrelated? In fact, the increasingly prevalent idea that organisational operations and culture are now part of branding, puts the Nazis’ handbook well ahead of its time. In the 1920s and 1930’s, the regime’s brutal populism caught the world off guard, but we now know the playbook and recognise it on the rise again around the world. Can we appreciate that the script includes an extreme form of disempowering managerialism combined with systematic dehumanising public communication? Fascism needs to be fought wherever we find it. Post-branding proposes that one way to resist authoritarianism is to defy branding’s bullying intolerance of all values beyond its grasp, and to insist on more open, more human ways of connecting and communicating.

Branding is of course already being subverted, resisted, even legislated against.

Left page: Australia completely banned tobacco advertising in 1989, and the tobacco industry’s decade long legal fight with the country’s plain packaging laws were defeated when the final WTO appeals were dismissed in 2020. Image shows fully branded pack of Marlboro Cigarettes, made by Philip Morris, in markets without enforced health warnings, 2018. Photo by Oleg Golovnev / Shutterstock.

Right page: Australia became the first country in the world to implement plain cigarette packaging in 2012. The legislation’s positive health outcomes have inspired many more countries to begin adopting de-branded tobacco packaging. Photo globaltobaccocontrol.org/tpackss/marlboro-australia-4375.

With post-branding, we propose an oppositional methodology, a creative framework that catalogues and counters branding’s harms, outlining three critical dimensions:

1) transparency & open source principles; 2) participatory design approaches; and 3) diversity & commoning.

With the transparency & open source dimension we have principles of: transparency not secrecy; openness not control; revelation not distortion.

In participatory design approaches we include principles of: participation not exclusion; collaboration not competition; social engagement not consumption.

The principles of diversity & commoning include: cohesion not homogeneity; dialogue not publicity; criticality and imagination not commodification.

In the book, we illustrate these principles with case studies from around the world. They are evidence that although the ideas themselves are not new, using them to replace branding’s extractive tactics can be radical. The following examples are real-world illustrations of a post-branding principle from each of the framework’s three main dimensions.

Openness not control
(from transparency & open source)

Extinction Rebellion’s tactics to overcome the limitations of established forms of protest are supported by open and decentralised communication methods.

Part of making the organisation inclusive and accessible has been the free availability of their protest graphics to download from their website. Clive Russell notes: “XR is a do-it-together movement. All our design and artwork can be used non-commercially for the purpose of planet saving.” Not guarding and hiding communication processes and outputs has allowed people to take a sense of ownership over the rebellion, while encouraging the making and sharing of their own protest materials. It also helps inspire a public sense of collective responsibility.

Extinction Rebellion protest. Photo Extinction Rebellion.

Social engagement not consumption
(from participatory design approaches)

image-shift’s right to the city campaign has developed a rich form of community participation. Since 2010 the struggle has achieved significant victories, such as a rentstop for all Berlin social housing flats, the remunicipalisation of the privatised social housing flats in Kreuzberg and beyond, and a Berlin wide referendum to democratize communal housing companies. The referendum on the expropriation of profit/stock market-run big housing companies also started at Kottbusser Tor.

In collaboration with the local tenant initiative, Kotti & Co, image shift developed and designed communication for a diverse range of related protest activities – demonstrations, concerts, reading sessions, discussion rounds and parties – successfully resisting a disempowering culture of consumptive gentrification.

Augen-Blicke, an exhibition of Kottbusser Tor tenant eye-portraits in collaboration with Kotti-Shop. Photo Image-Shift, 2017.

Cohesion not Homogeneity
(from diversity & commoning)

New Delhi-based Lopez Design created an identity with a dynamic common visual and conceptual foundation for 150,000 community health centres across India.

Rather than ignoring and flattening cultural difference, the Ayushman Bharat identity visually celebrates diversity, without limiting identification and recognition.

The flexible yet modular identity enables the expression of unique regional character for each site, its implementation employing local craftspeople and promoting indigenous crafts. Each centre is painted with locally specific cultural motifs, chosen by the community, and rendered on facades around prominent architectural features, reinforcing the buildings themselves as one of the program’s main communication mediums.

The design demonstrates how even agencies with a conventional corporate design focus can create solutions that promote recognition with diversity while resisting branding’s compulsive regimented cultural and visual standardisations.

Example of local motifs applied to existing building features at PHC Rajnagar, Chhatarpur District. Photo ab-hwc.nhp.gov.in, 2019-20.

These brief examples demonstrate just a few of the ways designers can avoid branding’s harms. Not every strategic principle can be applied to every project. Nor are these the only strategies that can beat back branding. We propose post-branding as ‘practical theory’, as exploratory and questioning. It is not intended as a final answer to the problem of branding, rather a pathway to new possibilities. The point of post-branding is that human expression, manifested as visual mass communication, needs to rouse its potentialities to reflect the rich complexities, contradictions and interdependencies of human experience – not bully it into a cynical system of exclusive property rights enforcement.

Because post-branding sees the public sphere as inherently open, participatory and democratic, our role as designers is to guard these principles through our work. Designing identities is seen as a collective articulation of issues, needs and futures, and our work needs to focus on building these emancipatory alternative worlds.

Jason Grant 2024