MAKE IT SO

The recent launch of the Mercury brand reminds us that the road to rebranding is much longer and tougher than many organisations realise, writes Brian Slade.

This is a story about what comes after the focus groups, the Post-it notes, the creative inspiration, the major presentation and the ultimate decision to go ahead. We’ll cover that story briefly here, but it is one that has been told many times before and ends with “… and the rest is detail.”

Which is literally true: implementing a new brand is about the detail. When you move from the virtual perfection of the design studio to the messy actuality of the real world, things get complicated.

By now, you’ll have seen the new branding. Mercury chief executive, Fraser Whineray, says, “We chose the bee to symbolise all the wonderful things we want to be and do for New Zealanders. It’s optimistic, energetic and quietly busy making the world a better place.” Mercury wants New Zealanders to think positively about energy and what it makes possible for them.

The brand and identity decisions had been made (by others). Now, it was up to us to roll out the new identity in practice: to ‘make it so’. It helped that a few years earlier we had completed an extensive audit and refresh of the previous Mighty River Power brand. This meant we were starting with a thorough awareness of everywhere the branding appeared: from the client’s fourteen hydro and geothermal power plants, their corporate offices, vehicles, printed and electronic stationery, merchandise, apparel, promotional items and so on. Almost immediately, we scoped over 50 discrete projects that would require individual design solutions.

Which is the first learning from such projects. The creation of a new brand is an exercise in reduction: the challenge is to transcend complexity, distill the essence of an organisation; achieve a singularity. But the implementation phase changes from compression to expansion. You’re now working with the second law of thermodynamics: order dissolves into disorder, randomness and chaos. And so you have to be properly resourced. Our Mercury roll-out team had two project managers, four designers, three artworkers, a print production manager, and a full-time relationship with a signage and fit-out company. Without sufficient resource, you won’t manage the complexity and you won’t get the job done in the fixed time available.

The second learning follows and is this: