Like a chameleon: the polychromatic virtue of dynamic brands
| Pages | 445-461 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/JPBM-10-2017-1621 |
| Published date | 15 July 2019 |
| Date | 15 July 2019 |
| Author | Catarina Lelis |
| Subject Matter | Marketing |
Like a chameleon: the polychromatic virtue of
dynamic brands
Catarina Lelis
London School of Film, Media and Design, University of West London, London, UK
Abstract
Purpose –The purpose of this paper is to identify the chromatic approaches in dynamic brand identities, describing and analysing new trends,
patterns or shared strategies which seem to be taking place and renunciating the consistent use of corporate colou rs in some brands.
Design/methodology/approach –The research consisted of a qualitative visual content analysis, based on the comparison and scrutiny of 50
dynamic visual identities, verifying the changes that their colours would undergo in their numerous forms of representation and the symbolic
associations these would carry. This analysis was performed using three different studies.
Findings –The results show that colour in dynamic brands does not follow any consistent pattern regarding its application and none of the most
common colour harmonies seem to be an obvious strategic preference.
Practical implications –This research provides insights for brand managers to look at how this dynamic positioning can be successfully
implemented without affecting recognition whilst establishing or maintaining customer loyalty, and for brand designers and marketers to clarify
how brand guidelines will explain the usage of such colourful approaches.
Originality/value –This paper is a contribution to the knowledge of how a traditional visual element such as colour is being combined,
deconstructed and reassembled in the context of modern visual identities. Three patterns are identified, and two of them draw attention to the
apparent unnecessity of colour consistency and the way this may affect the relevance of colour in transmitting certain meanings.
Keywords Colour, Logo design, Brand identity, Dynamic brands
Paper type Research paper
1. Introduction
For decades, visual identitieshave been structured around their
visual identity systems (VIS), which forms a unit extremely
important for brands to standardise their visual identity usage
and application, ensuring consistency and recognition.
However, the current info-communication environment –
which is defined by Passarelli et al. (2014) as the context
immersed in digital technologies that create, use and store the
information that will be used in the communication processes
for the exchange of messages –brought participation,
interaction, appropriation, motion, mutability and ubiquity to
many different aspects of human life, and is also changing the
way brands are used as communication instruments. Brands
now adapt to the context in which they operate, where they
know their audiences will be and, more than ever before,
brands are currently allowed a certain amount of flexibility to
develop, which is inherent to a constantly evolving process.
Grounded in this hypermodern perspective (Lipovetsky,
2007), the brand is assumedto be something that is much more
than a form of differentiation,and instead to be something that
is intrinsically part of an identity, liable to convey a massive
complexity of contextual meanings, many of them potentially
unexpected and dependingon pure serendipity.
Therefore, for the dynamic and social processes that brands
more recently became, the VIS can no longer be graphically
fixed: brands do change their visual elements over shorter or
longer periods of time and some behavein completely random
ways (Felsing, 2010;Van Nes, 2012). However, the different
levels of dynamism will obviously affect their tangible
characteristics and, more specifically, the visual elements of
such living brands.
For the purpose of this paper, that would be the case of the
visual element colour: corporate colours have long been one of
the most prominent vectors of any VIS, being symbolically
codified and meant to support certain meanings and allusions.
In fact, for many brands, colour has been pivotal in terms of
creating familiarity and supporting both consistency and
immediate recognition, through the development of colour
ownership throughoutthe brand’s life.
Despite the enormous amount of existing information in
colour theory, and the marketing research in the relevance of
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on
Emerald Insight at: www.emeraldinsight.com/1061-0421.htm
Journal of Product & Brand Management
28/4 (2019) 445–461
© Emerald Publishing Limited [ISSN 1061-0421]
[DOI 10.1108/JPBM-10-2017-1621]
The author would like to thank Swisscom and its Brand Team, who kindly
provided full access to their brand centre and all its documentation and
UAL, Pentagram and UnderConsideration, for providing some of the
imagery used in the research and presented in this paper. Moreover, a word
of gratitude to my colleagues Alison Hawkings and Michelle Henning for
the initial proof-readings, to the participants who generously contributed
to this research, and to the two anonymous reviewers for their pertinent,
constructive feedback.
Received 21 October 2017
Revised 17 May 2018
29 June 2018
17 July 2018
24 July 2018
Accepted 27 July 2018
445
carefully defining the right and consistent set of colours for a
brand, there is no research covering the rise of colourful brand
palettes. These are not necessarily determined by a specificor
prescriptive set of visual standards (Kreutz,2005;Leitão et al.,
2014) and have been implemented by several brands, mostly
during past 10 years, in response to a more open, global,
interactiveand flexible environment.
Combined through different harmonies, colour seems to be
one of the most mutable visual elements. Hence, as an
exploratory foundation, the main goal for this paper was to
identify the most distinctive chromaticchoices of a selection of
dynamic visual identities, as a preliminary step for the
understanding of any patterns or shared strategies in these
adaptive visualapproaches. Hence, the research question is:
RQ. What colour patterns emerge in dynamic brand
identities?
2. Literature review
It is widely recognised that brands, which are one of the most
relevant manifestations of organisations and any other self-
promoting entity (either a group or a single individual), are
composed of several intangibles, such as the style of
management, the structure, the behaviour and procedures
(Lambert, 1989), values and culture, skills, assets and resources
(Davidson, 1997), personality and self-image (Kapferer, 1997),
but also of tangible, functional components that, altogether, form
the brand’s VIS, one of the strategic resources for brand’s identity
consistent use and systematisation: name, logo/symbol,
typography, colours, slogan, signage, language (Grossman, 1994;
Kapferer,1997, 2001;Mollerup, 1999;Aaker, 2004;Kreutz,
2005;Olins, 2008;Keller et al., 2008;Pe
on, 2009;Wheeler,
2012;Van Nes, 2012;Oliveira, 2013).
Lightfoot and Gerstman (1998) group colour, symbol, shape
and lettering as the main elements that contribute to what they
define as visual equity, which, in the context of brands,
contributes towards brand recognition (Bottomley and Doyle,
2006). However, more recently, a new wave of mutability entered
thevisuallanguageofsomebrandidentities,mostlyimpacting
their visual equity elements, combining colours and
implementing sophisticated effects, adapting their morphological
aspect, distorting or transforming the typographical resources,
and presenting multiple symbols, welcoming a multitude of
meanings.
2.1 Dynamic brands
Sääksjärvi et al. (2015, p. 737) state that certain brands opt not
to use a unique consistent logo throughout all their
communications and touchpoints, but instead they adopt a
flexible visual approach, “in which the main brand identifier is
present alongside variations of the brand logo either in a
continuous fashionor more temporally within a campaign”.
Such graphic mutability allows brands to fit within different
time-bound media, and mostly to keep in line with market
expectations. In fact, Merz et al. (2009) propose that, since
roughly 2000, brands have been increasingly focussedon their
stakeholders, which emphasisesthat all audiences are operating
resources in co-creating brand value, in a continuous and
interactivemanner (Cruz, 2014).
With these new approaches in mind, Kreutz (2005,2012)
identifies two main VIS, distinct in their strategies and
communication behaviours: a group of brands labelled as
conventional, which main characteristics are standardisation,
linear progress and fixedness, and another group that the
author categorises as non-conventional or mutant brands, and
that can be defined as being more flexible, dynamic, plural,
ephemeral, fragmented and heterogeneous. Later on, van Nes
(2012) presents a taxonomy for what was then being labelledas
“Dynamic Brands”by central Europe designschools (and that
would fall within the non-conventional group proposed by
Kreutz): organic brand identities withvariable visual elements,
taking advantage of the new available technologies, providing
the brand with more vivid and flexible communication
approaches.
One of these variable visualelements is colour. Colour is also
a highly complex resource, a domain and research field itself,
with multi- or even transdisciplinary touchpoints and a
powerful interfacefor many other scientific areas.
2.2 Colour, in theory and practice
Colour theory is mostly grounded in optics, the branch of
physics that studies the behaviour, properties and interactions
of light, but in practice, there are so many uses of colour that
the subject is touched on across a wide range of disciplines,
making it almost impossible to establish a unique domain and
taxonomy for colour.
However, in the early twentieth century, Albert Munsell
proposed a rational model to describe colour, based on polar
coordinates, and using a decimal notation instead of colour
names (Choudhury, 2010), focussing on the representation of
colour’s three visible qualities: hue, value/lightness and
saturation/chroma.
Hue is the quality we use to refer to a colour on the spectrum
and each hue corresponds to a singlewavelength (Figure 1); in
its simplest form, “hue”is the constructwe use to name colours
(blue, yellow, orange, etc. as individual hues), although the
traditional and common colournames are by no means enough
to list all the possible hues the human eye can detect. Value (or
Lightness) is the property that translates colour through its
relative lightness or darkness, dependingon its ability to reflect
more or less light, respectively;colour value is useful to classify
a hue’s brightness (e.g. dark blue, light pink). Finally,
saturation, also known as chroma, categorises colours by their
purity –saturated colours are vibrant (such as “electric”blue),
whereas desaturated colours are those in which two opposite
hues are mixed (such as “khaki green”, which is a result of
mixing green with red) (Hornung, 2012;Sherin, 2012;Opara
and Cantwell,2014;Triedman, 2015).
Figure 1 The visible spectrum
Like a chameleon: the polychromatic virtue of dynamic brands
Catarina Lelis
Journal of Product & Brand Management
Volume 28 · Number 4 · 2019 · 445–461
446
To continue reading
Request your trial