Scale, Speed & Stratification
In his 2023 book Humanise, Thomas Heatherwick talks about the need for buildings to hold the attention of someone for length of time it takes to pass by it. In order to pass this test, he suggests a building must be interesting from three distances:
At ‘City’ distance of over 40 meters
At ‘Street’ distance of around 20 meters
At ‘Door’ distance of around 2 meters
One of the buildings he uses as a reference to demonstrate this point is London department store, Liberty. At ‘city’ distance - standing at the Oxford Street end of Argyll Street say, you are struck by the incongruence of the building’s Tudor styling against the backdrop of glass and concrete around it. As you get closer, this detailing becomes more profound. At door distance, you are able to admire the splendour of the door frames, which are adorned with highly detailed and decorative woodwork.
I read the book back in October and had placed little tabs in my copy around this section. At the time it felt like it might become a useful lens through which you might think about communications planning too. In the last week I’ve had the opportunity to apply it to some work I’ve been doing with a creative agency on a client project. I transposed Heatherwick’s three levels to the creative idea on the table, providing the team the means by which we could think about how the idea will be expressed through media: The ‘level’ of zoom employed at each of these distances becomes a frame to start to prescribe and organise the types of channels, the formats within those channels, the creative assets and messages that should be used.
A simple example being the way that a 96 sheet, consumed at ‘city distance’ should be treated differently to a digital 6 sheet consumed at ‘street distance’, which in turn is different to the way a consumer would interact with a video on their mobile phone at ‘door distance’.
Heatherwick’s thinking can be applied to brands more generally too, not just advertising. Does a brand have the ability to attract attention when consumed from afar at ‘city’ level by a customer yet to buy, for instance? Does it have enough distinctiveness at ‘street’ level when fighting for consideration at times of more direct, factual and functional comparison with other brands with which it competes for share of market? And lastly, at ‘door level’ - is there enough fine detail on offer to assist, reassure and retain those who are scrutinising your brand, product or company at proximity?
The examples of buildings which Heatherwick uses to illustrate his three levels are interesting - something new about the building is revealed at each distance. In the past, I’ve leant on the analogy of brands as fractals. Endlessly repeating structures which are identical at every level of magnification. Heatherwick rages against the boring buildings of bad modernist architecture. Big boxes with rows and rows of windows, devoid of texture, detail and above all humanity. Maybe, at a time when there is lots of discussion about the ‘cost of dull’ in advertising and marketing, a brand as fractal metaphor may encourage a sort of bland, consistency which is theoretically effective but actually and practically boring and lifeless to potential customers.
“Matching luggage” is of course, only one way to think about integrated brand experience. Cohesion is perhaps a better frame through which to think about building complimentary experiences. Each level or proximity of experience of the brand can look and feel and communicate slightly differently, but in order to build an overaching brand narrative they must be cohesive. Heatherwick also advises that architects and designers prioritise ‘door level’ experience - and in the modern communication landscape - this feels like good advice to brand builders too. It’s products and packaging (as it always has been) and websites and store fronts and apps and socials which create and substantiate brand effect now, rather than primarily through advertising and purchase as they might have been during the time before the internet.
Appropriation of Heatherwick’s thinking and applying it to how we should think about brands working at different distances helps to dimensionalise brand thinking.
In a past blog post I’ve talked about how Stewart Brand’s Pace Layers can be adopted into communications planning. The work of Binet and Field has popularised an appreciation of the temporal component to advertising and communication effort - we now think about activity regularly through the lens of long and short term time frames. Pace Layering provides a useful lens through which we can ask ourselves questions about the specific qualities of different types of media and communication and how they are consumed by audiences based on the pace they work at: For instance: How are we delivering our long term, ‘slow’ moving messaging and how does this correspond to our ‘fast’ media and messaging choices? Are the components of your plan balanced or biased disproportionately to a specific ‘speed’? How do the different channels and messages we’re deploying work together in the communications plan to deliver either information (which might need to work faster) or emotional connection (which is slow, steady and cumulative by comparison)?
Layers not channels: a mental model for thinking about communications planning
Brand’s model for speed and Heatherwick’s model for scale sit alonside a model of my own: one which thinks about stratification: the idea that modern communications ideas don’t live across a series of channels, but instead need to work acrpss as a series of layers. Inspired by Brand’s thinking about pace, I’ve started to use a model based around layers when working on projects. Driven by the observation that each new media technology that comes along is treated tactically rather than strategically, this was an attempt to both change the way a brand might think about things like Search (e.g. it’s a consumer behaviour, not Google) or DCO (e.g. it’s about adapting to context, not eeking out CTR on banners) but also to describe the way that the best communications thinking increasingly works. How can you build ideas which live coherently through as many of these strategic stratas as possible?
Starting to think about new developments in martech in the broadest way possible (rather than just the functional) is a route toward more integrated and effective solutions. At the time I wrote the original blog post I used the example of Drake and his Nocta partnership with Nike. Perhaps a better, more recent example might be The Sidemen’s Charity Football match at Wembley last week - an idea which lived seemlessly across a number of the layers above involving the Sidemen’s brand, content and advertising in the build up, a ‘physical’ experience with Youtube as a distribution partner, the integration of fellow creators, brand partners and sponsors and a goal of driving charitable donations for Children in Need. There is a highlights video below which shows you the breadth of layers that this activation involved in it’s execution.
I appreciate that many of the brand-as-shape metaphors we use (brand onions, brand keys, branded house, brand temples…) are all too reductive and often ineffective tools within the process of brand management. Brands don’t live in powerpoint charts in the way these models encourage us to think about them.
However, having said that some metaphors such as the three i’ve outlined above: which allow us to think about a brand and it’s how it is experienced in the real world across the dimensions of scale, speed and stratification are useful in helping communications planning practitioners explore how ideas will be delivered to consumers. Whilst I believe them to be complimentary to one another, articulating as they do different dimensions of brand experience, we should never be dogmatic in our choice of tools and instead pick the right one for the task at hand balancing and blending the tools and frameworks we use in our thinking to best effect.
