About Brands as Patterns
Brands as Patterns, a white paper written by Marc Shillum for ‘10x10’ a publication series by Experience Design Company Method Inc, laid the foundation for coherent brand building in the digital age. It was first published in March of 2011, it has since been republished by FastCompany and Contagious Magazine, became a keynote at PSFK and two back-to-back panels at SXSW, with co-panelists, Robin Lanahan, Greg Johnson and Walter Werzowa.
Brands as Patterns attempted to challenge consistency, the core measurement of Brand effectiveness, positing the idea that relevance would be an equal measure if the access point to a Brand was through an interactive interface. The premise of the paper; Brands are no longer definitive, they are temporal. It stated that Brands are informed by multiple voices, and they exist in multiple mediums and through multiple contexts. It surmised that the media that a brand inhabits is no longer fixed or linear, it is iterative, with no beginning, no end, and little permanency. Adherence to a big idea and endless repetition of centralized, fixed rules can make a brand seem unresponsive, mechanized, inhuman, and out of step with its audience. The key question that Brands as Patterns posed — Without repetition, how does a brand create consistency? And without consistency, how does abrand maintain value?
As a celebration of a decade since publication, Marc created two follow up papers. The Speed of the Market and Orchestrating a Business. This will be followed by seven other chapters of the thinking throughout the year, culminating in a book. The papers are free to the community, acknowledging that achieving a more cohesive future will need many minds.
Six books and two research papers have already leveraged the thinking in Brands as Patterns 1.0, it is the hope that the full set of thinking inspires further research. Much credit for supporting this has to go to Kevin Farnham, Patrick Newbery, Lindsay Liu and the founding team at Method Inc, their support and the space they gave Marc allowed him to condense six years worth of thinking into a single paper
About the Author
Marc Shillum formed his career at the cusp of massive change within digital animation, then digital publishing, digital marketing, user experience design, logistics and autonomous vehicles, additive design and manufacturing all underscored by an intuitive mind for Brand Development within the digital age.
Marc’s knack for discovering the hidden potential within people, brands and their products and services and his ability to see patterns between Business, Product Experience, Technology and Marketing has benefited some of the worlds most well known companies like Lego, Nike, Adobe, Disney, RH, HBO, EA, Discovery, eBay, Aston Martin and Barnes & Noble. His ability to see the potential within people has led to positions on the Bill Moggridge Awards Sustaining Committee, the RSA student Awards, an inaugural judge on the One Club’s Next Creative Leaders as well as contributing to the Biography’s of his mentors and former employers Tibor Kalman and Gert Dumbar.
If you’d like to learn more, you can email him at marc@chiefcreativeoffice.com
