It is (not) a humble product

The award-winning Israeli graphic designer and advertising maven Paddy Mergui took a detour from his day job to create a new exhibition, “Wheat Is Wheat Is Wheat,” set to open for a two-month run Saturday, April 12 at San Francisco’s Museum of Craft and Design. Such as “Yogurt,” a container branded with Tiffany & Co. and created with the jeweler’s iconic blue hue.

It reminds me of our professor Mark Passera, he used to let us make a ” brand monitoring”, to record the brands we used in our daily life, in order to see how we decided buying thing to represent ourselves.

The goal of this exhibition was creating everyday products, not special ones, that look very common in every household – ones that we would simply want, designed in a very seductive, high-end brand language. It raised the question to the audience: What are consumers truly obtaining when they purchase designer labeled and luxury products?

As the designer Mergui said:” I hope the exhibition takes our world one step ahead, and asks: Designer on the one hand and customers on the other hand- is it right? Isn’t it awkward? Grotesque? Wheat is wheat? Why does Apple milk suddenly seem appealing? Does it make us feel more valuable? If this exhibition succeeds in raising these questions, it has done its work.”

Mergui exaggerates the aesthetic and conceptual triggers that influence consumer trends and manipulate the relationship between an object and an ideal. Through the creation of supermarket environment vignettes, in which products are re-branded, Mergui presents basic grocery items with well-known luxury labels and aesthetics, effectively turning a viewer’s perception of quality on its head. Works in the series borrow their forms from the world of consumption and their concepts from the field of consumer ethics.  They expose the often arbitrary connection that a product has to its packaging, and the conditions in which a designer operates.

For me, the seduction of “brands” presents us with a mirror to ourselves, it’s like an invisible cloth we wear everyday, reflects the way we want to live and be seen, a consumer validation.

 

Ads: calling to your heart

It’s quite true about the saying – There’s no second chance at making a good first impression. Advertisement, if they don’t catch your attention within seconds they are considered failed. Especially in the era of information explosion, to stand out of the crowd, the idea has to be really out of the box, something that makes you touched, laugh, talks about it or at least make you look twice. According to Beaumont Corrine, an advertisement design should connect to the audience on emotional, physical and cognitive levels (EPC):

Emotional: Show why the product is fun, or relaxing or clever. Think about the personality of your company.

Physical: Show how it works.

Cognitive: Show why it makes sense to buy it or use it.
Then give details of how they can contact you to get what you are offering.

There is one of the best advertisements in 2013 i‘d like to share with you:

A forensic sketch artist draws sketches based on how people describe themselves, then draws the same people with strangers describing them.
The strangers’ descriptions were way closer to what the women really looked like. Many of them described themselves in very unflattering ways, leading to sketches that surprised them all.

Since Dove is a well-established brand,  the emotional and cognitive appealing becomes more vital, it’s a different level of advertisement that its no longer focus on the product, but to the humanity: “You are more beautiful than what you think”. It’s inspiring and encourage all women in the world to treat and view themselves better— which successfully relate to the image that Dove want to convey.

‘Hello my name is Paul Smith’

Presenting personal charisma become a mainstream in branding as we can see the [David Bowie is…] in V&A, [Richard Roger RA: Inside Out] and the most recently, [Hello my name is Paul Smith] in Design Museum. They all try to build the distance between the audience and the exhibited objects since it’s displayed in a “museum”, which has its authority and vilification as an art work, at the same time, destroy the distance by they way they present as a life style. Besides, there’s a smart strategy in naming the exhibition: “Hello my name is Paul Smith”, come on, everyone knows this brand, but, when “Paul Smith” the name transform from a fashion label to a cute, quirky designer who “come alive” standing in front of you saying “hello”, then it becomes a completely different story.

      

Therefore this is a very clever branding strategy not only for Mr. Smith ( everyone is crazy about him) and his fashion brand “Paul Smith” but also for the Design Museum which is almost promoting a “live show”, giving a whole new experience for the viewers, which is a win-win-win situation.

One of the most important thing about branding is it should be consistent, we can see Paul Smith’s office (in the museum) is filled to the rafters with a rambling hodgepodge of pop-cultural objects, It hovers somewhere between a junk shop and a high school art room. While Paul Smith himself might be eccentric and surrounded by an office full of chaotic miscellany, his clothes are not so wacky. They are typified by what Smith himself was wearing during our meeting: a lean, flattering navy suit in fine wool, with a swirly silk lining that would look just as good on an 18-year-old as it did on this 66-year-old. That’s a wide demographic range. It is conveying a spirit of his brand, a message that saying Paul smith as a brand is cool and artistic but wearable, as a person, his warm is remarkable. The power of the exhibition is it can condense an broad image into a picture, and apply one concept into the whole display.