COOLBRANDS
I wrote the following piece about cool-tech brands for the UK Coolbrands book.
The nerd archetype is always a bit of a techie. Tech is almost by definition not cool. Cool is drinking beer, doing drugs and burning your homework to the delight of attractive leather-clad onlookers. Tech is staying in because you’re too spotty and socially inept to hang out and because there’s too much maths homework to conquer. In fact why hang out at all “it’s illogical.”
Technology brands are disadvantaged so to achieve cool status at all is a minor miracle. Even mega fashion brands afford the dalliances of short run productions, statements and talk pieces that maintain their high status, whilst in tech-land minimum production numbers run into hundreds of thousands. As investment rises so does risk and with risk brands soon lose their appetite for adventure. They then anchor in the safe waters of mediocrity and the illusive and volatile cool disappears in a whisper.
Tech’s Achilles heel is the contradiction at the heart of its being. As close cousin to science it is in the bloodline of logic, the binary building blocks that gel all these complex systems, pipes, bits and bytes together into an intuitive narrative. If you make a radio it has to work and its’ functions must be apparent and easy to use. But cool isn’t about logic or what you get when you boil everything down to constituent parts, instead it bubbles off idiosyncrasy and emphatic invidualism, the guy who makes his own rules versus the one who learnt them from a book or worse, a teacher. So how can you make something that works, performs a desired function, that is usable and practical and yet has that easy air of that rare desirable distinction?
Floating to the surface of the grand meritocracy of brands are a handful of technology companies that aren’t led by logic and yet still manage to provide the user with the functions they desire. The difference is that they aren’t defined by function, rather something more illusive, grander, something almost holy. If the Coolbrands book existed twenty five years ago Bang & Olufsen would have been in there for sure. This was when I met my first B&O at my uncles beach house in Denmark. Sleek, long and low, it had no discernable knobs or controllers just subtle dips and grooves as cues for magician like interventions, a hand passing over to control volume, causing previously hidden hairline LEDs to expose themselves only to softly dim back behind the hard dark gloss façade. The form, materials and interaction with these devices were unnecessary or even absurd, yet the poetry of these elegant operations invoked previously unknown dimensions of desire, an experience almost erotic in nature. B&O were making much more than music centers, they were making shrines to contemporary culture, (and Jean-Michel Jar) objects which elevated us from the humdrum to the hip. These manifestations of a richer philosophy than we’d been previously accustomed still echo through technology today, particularly in mobile phone design where the hard definitions of buttons and borders are melting into blobs and blocks that look like polished semi-precious stones. Interaction design draws from the same language of smooth gestures of scrolls and soft-touch screens compared to the ploddy point and click inputs of recent times.
B&O are still on our list today, still guarding and evolving a rock solid brand in an industry rife with quick sand. The few brands that keep hold of cool never allow themselves to be compared or commodified, always staying out of reach to competitors who might have all the same buttons but none of the soul. Leica, also on our list, shares many of these attributes, its’ confidence and precision deeply apparent in every turn and hard edged furrow of these weighty, hansom machines. Even the shutter mechanics seem to sing a song of artfulness. This isn’t just taking pictures.
Some technology brands have an easier access to coolness. Like fizzy drinks that win favour with fickle teenagers by associating with flavour-of-the-month-pop-princesses, tech brands are sometimes lucky enough to get some beneficial rub off from things already centre stage. The R&D department of Marshall amplifiers still need dorky doctorates from Imperial to finesse the circuits in these rock boxes, but because these amps sat on stage behind every music making legend over past decades they have secured the brand a god like status. The right place at the right time still stands for a lot. Technology that mediates music has this advantage over pedestrian tasks like satellite navigation (although Tom Tom made it into the top 500, Well done!). Sennheiser because the music connoisseur broadcasts their choice wherever they’re brandishing their oversized cans. Bose with their branded boxes in every sleek bar and club and more recently adorning every boutique hotel suit from New York to Knysner. Djs are cool and so are their tools, so Technics make it in again and are unlikely to exit until all the world’s vinyl is melted down.
People’s tendency to associate things is the marketeers key tool of persuasion. For camera brands, the connection to fashion is their low hanging fruit. The “gdssser gdssser gdssser” of motor-winds on high stress fashion shoots have long established the Nikons, Canons and Olympuses (all in the list) as names which share the limelight with supermodels and glossy feature spreads. Hard edged front line documentary imagery too relates these names back to us, black beaten Nikon F2s in the hands of “are they courageous or crazy” photographers against the backdrop of war torn grainy Vietnam.
Associations with music, fashion and the front line have woven a heritage for these brands that provide a platform, a right and a reason to exist and the genetics that ensure continual renewal and reinvention along the lines of their breeding. Heritage brands have a gravity that buffers short-lived falls from favour. They become reference points that are always fixed in the hearts and minds of the public so are always springboards for new thinking and new ideas, something that’s very hard to synthesise. Heritage embodies authenticity which is a cornerstone of cool.
But heritage alone is not enough to stay at the top. Great brands have frequently fallen from grace, toppled by their reluctance to reinvent or in the case of tech simply by being outmoded. The killer formula draws strength from heritage and from the fans and supporters loyal to their cause but uses this to amplify new ideas that respond to the times and to the new landscape of technical possibility. Motorola made some of the first car radios and put the first radios in space and yet of late they’re enjoying the spoils of the meteoric successes of the RazR that managed to appeal to both the adoring mainstream and the discerning, design aficionado. The same technical prowess applied against the same principles in a modern context ensured Motorola still came out on top.
Apple too have managed to continually reinvent themselves successfully whilst always sticking close to its guns on issues of simplicity, materiality and formal elegance and the same integration of object and experience as the first Macintosh delivered over 20 years ago. The iPod’s application of contemporary technologies and behaviours might betray the fact that it still has a lot in common with the company’s principles. It is this continuity that gives Apple the right to innovate in the way that it does, throwing down radical alternatives to interaction that still somehow makes a lot of sense to the user (the mouse back in the 80’s and more recently the iPod scroll wheel.) Other brands wouldn’t necessarily get consumer buy-in because these idiosyncratic interfaces would seem alien and impenetrable, whilst from Apple they are accepted as the expectation is there that it is there for good reason and will thus be better to use. So powerful is this platform that apple has created that the iPhone launch managed to generate the biggest product launch buzz so far this millennium, so much so that people were already contemplating the form and function of the iPhone long before Apple had even announced it was going into production.
In addition to Apple finding the perfect balance between form, materiality and function, it has also managed to straddle two usually distinct worlds, trendsetters and the mainstream. Rarely do mainstream brands also hold favour with the in-crowd, but Apple miraculously manage it.
This ability to cross from cool to mainstream is also shared by a new breed of web centred brands, names like Google that are so utterly generic and yet still have something special that puts them up there, slightly beyond mechanical definition, something that makes them truly iconic. And strangely they have none of the visual styling or cues that would invite a definition of cool, but even this somehow increases the effect as the friendly cartoon logo is a clear sign it’s not here to impress and we all know not trying makes you cool.
Youtube, Skype and Myspace also span the top rung of the marketeers hierarchy of opinion formation. These youthful, exuberant brands earn their status through creating cultures akin to the recreational social spaces of the physical world but in many ways have become bigger, better, truly multicultural and fully joined up experiences. Their atmosphere is a breath of fresh air set against formulaic and controlling broadcast channels and so they earn a place closer to the hearts of the participant.
As the web reaches total ubiquity not only is it home to these rampant emerging brands but also an increasingly influential fabric of opinion formation and the maker and breaker of reputations. What would the iPhone have been without those billion conversations before its launch?
So technology brands we might expect will become more numerous in our list as years pass. In a way all brands are to a greater or lesser extent technologies these days anyway.