Systems Thinking

At How&How, we talk a lot about the importance of building brands that aren’t just recognized, but understood. It’s one thing for someone to spot a brand mid doom scroll (a difficult thing, to be sure), but if we’re really striving for the ideal, it’s our goal to create a brand that people ‘get’. Whether at a glance or up close, our intention is always for people to be exposed to a brand and leave with a general sense of what that brand is all about.

For one of our cleantech client's Amphico, it’s our hope that people who have been exposed to the brand will see it and remember it as a company making outdoor products recyclable. Maybe it simply reminds them that most rain jackets are made from multiple materials pressed together, therefore unrecyclable. Ideally, they remember Amphico’s solution to make everything from one thing.?

For the ETF platform TrackInsight, it’s our hope that people can glance at the brand and immediately get a sense that it's a calm environment for doing your own analysis. An island of clarity and data in a sea of Jim Cramers.??

For Freetree, it’s our hope that people quickly grasp that it’s a playful way to contribute to the climate; that it’s attempting to make the world a fuzzier place (literally and metaphorically) by planting a whole bunch of trees. Of course, we want people to be able to remember and recognize our logo – a tree that looks like a cursor – as well as our adorable tree illustrations, but what’s more important is the meaning and emotion those assets get across.?

For these meanings and associations to be felt, however, they first have to be properly attributed to the brand.??

In the past, this was a relatively easy task. A branding agency would deliver visual assets along with a guidelines document in the form of a 100-slide PDF. And, for the most part, marketing teams were able to work with it. But with the explosion of digital tapestries on which many brands need to exist, this is no longer feasible.

It’s why in our agency we offer clients a rigorous atomic design system with automations in place to ensure their brand is forever consistent and recognized, increasing the odds of understanding by increasing the odds of recognition.

Because our minds are better at creating ideas than storing them, we create adaptable toolkits that not only give brand teams everything they need to effectively manage their brand, but empower them to work autonomously.?

Centralising not only the core assets, but the key decisions, allows for a brand system that maintains consistency but also keeps pace with the ever growing demands on a modern brand.

Applying systems thinking to how we build brands liberates teams from granular detail, allowing them to focus on inspired work and ensures we’re creating more user-centered brands, equipped to handle this ever-changing world.

To learn more about how we’re deploying brands for a digital future, get in touch.