Re-reading ‘The Corporate Personality’

The Corporate Personality is a much-used book on Branding from the industry-leader Wally Olins. Written in the 1970s it has become a basis for a lot of thinking around branding now, with much of what you hear from leading brand consultancies certainly being heavily influenced from here.

Re-reading The Corporate Personality(1) is an analysis of the book, it’s claims and it’s assumptions about the field of corporate identity and branding. Coming from a design background myself before moving into brand, I have been very aware of Wally Olins, and the brand consultancy he founded Wolff Olins. His thoughts on branding seem to very much make up the mainstream of brand designers thinking and so this essay which questions some of his claims is a good counter, or spur to question what many designers take as gospel.

The main proposition of the essay is that the book contains a number of glaring inconsistencies and actual contradictions. It questions the claims Olins makes for corporate identity work, in both what informs it and the impacts it can have.

One of the major questions it raises is that of the corporate identity being something which is designed to reflect the current offering of the company in a visual form. A kind of aesthetic veneer reflecting what is already there. Is the designers/brand consultant’s role or change they advise and enact actual change in the brand which affects the actual personality and offering of that brand?

An important question, which was raised by Olins himself, is are designers actually trained to go beyond the visual, do they have the required knowledge to advise as essentially management consultants?

The author then breaks the book down in to two elements, those of System and Selfhood. The system is an interesting one as a current discussion topic in the design world is the argument of the logo, or brand identity. The argument being that is the logo a powerful symbol any more or are the other brand elements more important now. Is it now more about the visual system, the overall brand experience, than a logo? The author points out that at times Olins is very much of the opinion that a corporate identity’s “real significance is in the emphasis on the non-visual, or at least the non-pictoral” (Steve Baker) whereas at other times he is championing the visual identity.

The second element is Selfhood, and I found this even more interesting. The author assess the move towards companies being considered single entities (people) , citing David Bernstein’s Company Image and Reality “corporate advertising should treat the company as if it were a person”. The most interesting thought from the author on this was in regard to the inner-self.

Essentially a corporate personality is aiming to give a company an ‘inner-self’ or a ‘soul’ but the author points out that we are taking the concept of the inner-self as fact. The idea of a non-physical, soul of a person, seen in religions through the ages, has been taken as fact.

This was something that I had never considered before and is certainly something I would be interested in looking in to further.

Anyway, the essay is well worth a read, especially for designers who take everything Wally Olins says as scripture and never question his theories. In fact, his theories on branding have become so engrained in the industry I wonder if anyone can question his writings. The fact that one of the leading figures in branding and design should have so many inconsistencies in his book, on both how corporate identity works and what it can achieve, should give all designers out there some comfort as they struggle with an increasingly complex industry and field.

I’d recommend getting your hands on a copy of this essay, it will open your eyes to what you have taken as fact.

Reference:

(1) ‘Re-reading The Corporate Personality’ was published in the Journal of Design History, Vol 2. No 4 (1989) pp. 275-292