'Playing with your branding shows a high level of confidence and maturity'

As part of Creative Salon's look into the trend of minimalism in advertising, creative agency chiefs gave their takes on the allure of the strategy. Offering her insight is Jess Lovell, chief strategy officer for Wonderhood Studios.

Why is minimalism a popular strategy for major brands and creatives?

Campaigns without branding seem, at first, to be a crazy notion. But for brands that have spent decades establishing themselves in culture, it can be a powerful tool of the trade too – leaning on familiar brand assets and potentially creating an IYKYK connection with consumers.

Posters without copy and logos - why, perhaps, is it a strategy best suited to OOH as a medium?

Let’s face it, the whole point of a brand in the first place was about creating distinctiveness and memory structures to help consumers to know what they were getting and to choose because it represented a set of values and quality. A brand by its very nature was designed to stand out and signify something.

The Coca-Cola bottle was designed in 1915. Based on a cocoa pod, it was specifically designed so that even if it was broken, you would know what it was. A simple, powerful branding device, and one that has endured (more or less) for over 100 years. So, whilst Byron Sharp and their influential 2010 'How Brands Grow' became a bible for marketeers and agencies alike, the focus they placed on ‘distinctive assets’ was hardly new thinking.

Great brand logos are a thing of genius. They tell you something about the brand, they immediately call to mind the associations that us advertisers work so hard to create, and if you get it right, they should see a brand through decades, and be something that consumers feel invested in. Likewise, messing with it and getting it wrong can lead to backlash. Pepsi’s 2009 design which claimed to take “inspiration from the exponential expansion of the universe on the basis of the positive and negative definite matrices and optimisation theorem” was widely ridiculed and they quietly moved it back to something closer to the original.

Getting to the point where you can start to play with your distinctive assets and branding shows a high level of confidence and maturity for a brand. It implies a cultural status and a relationship of being in the know with a consumer.

In a world where we are oversaturated with distraction and messaging, it can also be a confident way of creating connection and captivating your audience. Whispering and winking rather than shouting and screaming at the audience. This is why minimalism is often something that luxury brands play with.

But distinctive assets aren’t just about logos. Really confident brands are about products, sounds, colours, endlines.

The more interesting recent examples of branding minimalism have played with more, and brought the audience in by responding to consumers relationship to the brand. KFC’s brilliant 'FCK' work when they ran out of chicken, the 'Finger Lickin’' campaign that broke just at the start of COVID when we were urged not to put our hands anywhere near our mouths without washing them strenuously, the COVID ads which blacked out the Finger Lickin’ bit.

And then finally, their ‘We’ll take it from here’ ads when they reopened their stores which featured recreations of KFC haphazardly created at home brought to life with their wonky hand drawn and dodgy homemade fried chicken. All of this was a master class in using distinctive assets, but the real genius was the social listening which framed the distinctive assets in the consumers world.

McDonald's too used consumer insight to get to their eyebrows work – bringing to life the social and infectious nature of a McDonald's. They have also done some brilliant product ads recently which tempt and tease consumers in.

It is interesting to note the backlash to minimalist branding going on in social media. People bored of it and calling it out as lazy. The Muller Corner OOH that featured just the product sparked a hot debate in a strategy awards I judged, with some arguing it was bold confident and genius and others wondering what the fuss was all about. But the examples that are receiving the drubbing as those that are complacent, assume a relationship with the audience that doesn’t exist, or don’t have an idea.

To do a minimalist campaign well and enter the hall of fame rather than shame, you have to remember the craft. Great insight, great design and a creative idea.

Jess Lovell is chief strategy officer at Wonderhood Studios