A few weeks ago the world’s most visible international
brand consultant, Wally Olins, passed away. Obituaries and tributes immediately
appeared in European papers and industry trade journals. Curiously, so far
nothing of substance has surfaced in major American media, who prominently
cover the deaths of actors and obscure Austrian documentary film-makers dead
from malaria, those whom I –as an international brand advisor- consider of
lesser interest and importance than Wally. Mr. Olins was a global presence,
whose work, writings and opinions made headlines over a career which spanned a
half century. The radio silence from American shores is deafening.
It can’t be because of his success or failure rate, both
considerable. Olins and partner Michael Wolff founded the formidable Wolff
Olins consultancy, the name and reputation of which still survive as a division
of Omnicom, though both of the principals long ago left the practice. In their
heyday Olins & Co. advised the Beatles on the Apple brand, turned an
obscure telecom into the phenomenon still called Orange, rebranded British
Telecom, renamed Guinness into Diageo, revamped Cunard, tried to repackage the
UK as Cool Brittanica, and endeavored to convince the world that Poland was a vital
place to do business. He proposed many of those strange-sounding and quickly
dated hybrid names (Invensys, Unison) that thankfully never took hold in the
popular mind. In his later years as CEO of Saffron he championed culture as the
essential aspect of a brand. His last great public act was a spirited defense
of the 2012 London Olympics logo which his namesake firm had created. Late in
the game he became an advocate for place branding which sometimes works, but
not always. His final book (he wrote seven, which were translated into 18
languages), “The Brand New – The Shape of Brands To Come”, released a month ago
by Thames & Hudson, is already ranked in the 28,000s on Amazon, no mean
feat for a nonfiction title.
Once upon a time branding was called ‘corporate identity’,
and referred to a rigid system of graphical standards which visually defined an
organization. That idea was expanded on by Wally Olins, who felt that brands
encompassed deeper and more dimensional values than veneer can effectively
suggest. But he never really left the visual idiom far behind, and he barely
engaged the philosophical questions that practitioners actively debate today. Though
his ultimate book is rich with machine-gun questions, it’s clear that Wally
never left the world of advertising, hype, and its ready engagement of
emotional manipulation. Brand people today ponder the implications of consumerism,
waste, climate change, sustainability, workforce contentment, community building,
ethics. Wally did champion authenticity in his last act, and that is a valid part
of the defense. But he never seriously challenged the bottom-line agenda or
short-horizon thinking that has got the world into such a confusion. Can
organizations do good at the same time as doing well? While he asked it, Olins
never answered that question.
