March 1991 | Management Today

Making a clear impression

For the users of products or services, clarity is the important aspect of corporate identity

I found them in an old file. There, in one place, were all the papers on my membership of six airline ‘frequent flyer’ clubs. How many miles had I amassed? Could I carry my miles over from one year to the next? What would happen if and when Pan Am was taken over? Was there anybody I could call apart from 800 numbers in the USA? It was impossible to say. The bumf made no sense.

Now airlines, as everyone knows, are very keen on their corporate identity - on the liveries that cover their planes and refueling trucks, on the trays of food they bring you, on their lounges and their check-in desks and on the way their staff look and behave. When an airline unveils a new corporate identity the occasion tends to mark, as Alan Brew rightly observes, a fundamental turning-point in strategy, structure, internal culture and external communications. Mr Brew should know: his company, Landor Associates, was responsible for the identity of British Airways.

Yet more is at issue here even than fundamental turning-points. As Brew notes, what now matters is whether large, often arrogant companies want to be truly transparent to their varied audiences. For as my yellowed boarding passes now attest, to be transparent is, as far as users are concerned, all that corporate identity is really about.

You would not think so from January’s media furore on British Telecom’s new identity. Some said that what was leaked was bad, some said it too costly, and others confused these things with their feelings about BT service. There were questions about the durability of the logotype over passing years - and questions, too, over whether it properly expressed BT’s international ambitions. Here Tim King, of consultants Siegel & Gale (3M, Citicorp), had a special fear. BT’s pipes-of-Pan motif was, for him, somehow too British. Graphically, it lacked what King calls the ‘world class’ of IBM, Apple Computer, Ford, Sony and Shell.

As it happens, I agree with the need to debate these points. In particular, the international projection of nationally-headquartered firms’ corporate identity is a vexed issue: Siegel & Gale’s new survey of 50 leading Hungarian companies, for example, found that if all of them believed that a company’s image was important to building sales, most would also rather do business with Germany’s sharply-etched Volkswagen than with fuzzy French concerns. At Wolff Olins, creators of the BT look, chairman Wally Olins (Bovis, Prudential) is equally convinced that even longstanding identity specialists still have lots to learn about how to make users - and employees - feel that they ‘belong’ to, say, Mobil in Malawi.

All that is fair enough. But from where I stand, it is the wider issue of transparency that really counts. We can, for instance, endlessly discuss the need to maintain and reinforce brands, now that the service promise bound up with them has become so important. We can also talk about identity as a preface to acquisition, diversification and the hiring of high-value recruits (1980s themes), or as a signal of social responsibility and reliability in a crisis (1990s stuff). But my Mum, a reasonable representative of that vital retiree market we all hear about, cares little for brands: she worries about her tax form being opaque. And my employers Fitch (Groupe Bull, Southern Electric) lost more sleep over whether the colours in our new letterhead would allow it to make any sense coming off a client’s monochrome fax machine than they ever did about the evocation of caring values.

Recent research by McGill University’s Henry Mintzberg and the London Business School’s Angela Dumas has shown that a lot of people in any large company are active in design, even if they do not know it. Therefore the problem is not necessarily to install a new identity, but rather to find out which ‘corporate communications’ are unintelligible, and then to ask - in today’s cost-conscious times - whether it is worth putting them out at all. In short: identity may be more a province of information design than the other way round. If your frequent flyer brochures would outwit a genius, fix them… and worry about the logo you put on your tailfins at a later date.