Ritson is right about WPP — but he is using the wrong map
The model that has governed brand architecture thinking since 1996 is no longer relevant, argues Nathan Birch, founder of Strategic Brand Partners. The friction of cost that forced hard choices made this previous model useful, but this has been engineered out of existence. And nobody has updated the framework since.
Nathan Birch - author
I’ve never met Mark Ritson, though we’re from the same part of the world — that flat, forthright stretch of England were calling out balderdash is considered a civic duty. He levelled his acerbic wit at Interbrand a few years ago when I was CEO in Australia and we published a thought piece on the “end of positioning.”
He responded with a line I have been dining out on ever since: “Why do they insist on tearing down the cathedrals of marketing and replacing them with bouncy castles that smell of piss.”
RELATED: WPP: A case study in how not to do brand architecture
I think you’ve conflating the costs of creating vs costs of building. The thing you can generate in an afternoon is a brand identity. The true cost is (and always has been) building equity in that brand (vs. sharing the equity already created from an existing brand)
You can ‘create’ a brand logo in minutes – that’s not the same as creating and building an actual brand that means something to anyone, or is worth anything.