Smart phones. Dumb brands?
Watching the football recently, I realised something… I can sit through thirty seconds of a smartphone advert without knowing who's advertising until the logo appears at the end.
The most common recipe features an upbeat pop track, a shiny phone slowly rotating in soft light, attractive people doing attractive people things, a feature slightly different from the one they sold me last year, described as if it will change the world. Then the logo. End advert.
Thanks Apple, or was it Samsung? No, I'm pretty sure that was the Google logo at the end.
Twenty years ago, the best Apple adverts felt different from everyone else's. The pacing, the humour, the confidence. You knew what you were watching before a word was spoken. Today I sit through slick visuals and then wait to be told who paid for them.
The logo used to be a signature. Increasingly, it feels like an explanation. And I don't think that's just an advertising problem. It's a branding problem. If you look at the visual identities of the major brands, they've all moved towards the same style: simpler logos, cleaner layouts, muted colours and minimalist design. They are still different, but they increasingly feel like variations of the same idea.
Then there's the products. Similar-sized glass rectangles. Annual launches built around small improvements. Even the pricing follows a familiar pattern. For many people, the price rises are easier to notice than the year-on-year upgrades.
None of this is accidental. It's what happens when markets mature. The bigger a company becomes, the broader the audience it wants to reach. And the broader the audience, the more tempting it becomes to smooth off the rough edges. The result is branding that is polished, safe and unlikely to offend anyone.
The logo used to be a signature. Increasingly, it feels like an explanation.
The problem is that safe brands are often less memorable. When every brand in a category is trying to speak to everyone, they inevitably start to sound similar. And when that happens, the logo has to do more of the work.
This creates an opportunity for challenger brands to stand out. When the biggest brands in a category start looking and sounding alike, the gap is no longer just in the technology. It's in the branding.
The opportunity isn't to build a better phone. It's to build a more distinctive brand. And that is hard. It means having a point of view. It means accepting that some people will love what you stand for and others won't. That is much harder than another pop track and a slow-motion phone render.
The biggest brands can afford to rely on their logos. Everyone else has to be remembered for something else.
— Scott McNamara