As part of ‘Love What Could Be’ we are beginning to bring guest speakers into the agency from all kinds of creative disciplines and recently we were treated to a lunchtime chat by the inspirational designer and typographer, Bruno Maag.

Bruno studied in Switzerland at the Basel School of Design (instantly making him über-cool) and is proud to call himself a ‘disciple of Gutenberg’. Gutenberg, the global creator of the printing press, is truly the godfather of type. His invention had a tremendous impact on the passing of knowledge and led to the Reformation, better education and higher rates of literacy.

Bruno cut his professional teeth working for Monotype both in London and Chicago and in 1991, established Dalton Maag with his partner Liz Dalton. Dalton Maag now employ the cream of the crop when it comes to type design and create fonts and logos for many impressive brands including Vodafone, Tesco, Toyota, Puma, BMW and Guinness.

Bruno chatted to us animatedly about the history of type and its power as the bricks and mortar of a brand.

Driven by the strong human desire to record information and share it with a wider community, type (and the art of typography) have always existed. Just take a moment to think about the beauty of hieroglyphics and cave drawings! Gradually, as society became more sophisticated, so did type, evolving into a branding tool as early as Roman times. Our continued use of the Roman alphabet today is proof of the power of this branding.

We went on to learn the skills and crafting techniques employed in creating type throughout history and in our current digital age where the latest challenges lie.

Bruno’s passion and enthusiasm for type design was infectious and inspiring for everyone who attended. He truly is an evangelist for type design, comparing fonts to movie stars, in that they are everywhere and every font has its own personality. A good designer will take the time to cast the correct font because like any great movie, a great design can hang on the right choice of font.

A big thank you to the ‘Love What Could Be’ team for organizing, and we look forward to the next guest speaker. If you could choose your dream speaker, who would it be?

Written by Heather van der Merwe, Senior Account Manager.

With facebook having recently changed its fan pages to ‘like’ pages - part of an ongoing process to make interactions across the network consistent but also part of their strategy to extend social connections across the www - the more cynical of us (not me guv), might also wonder about another underlying motivation.

Most brands don’t have that many fans and the fans they have are often hard won, acquired through in-site advertising. Not many brands are loved, that’s not to do them a disservice, because you don’t need to love all things, but you equally need many things as part of daily life.

Facebook exists to make money, they’re a business with a dominance gameplan, but they also want to increase their worth as an advertising platform. As such it’s much more likely for a customer to say they like a product, service or thing than to say they are a fan. That helps the bottom-line for a brand wishing to invest campaign money there. Like is a broader, more inclusive, but also a more superficial, ephemeral expression of sentinment. Clicking ‘like’ might just mean your customers are never going to look at your brand’s page ever again.

I still think being a ‘fan’ of something has value. It’s not right for everything, but it suggests deeper engagement with a product, a cause or a topic. As such, ‘like’ just feels like a flattening of positive customer response to the lowest common denominator.

A great editorial article from Brand Republic in response to Mckinsey’s recent “A new way to measure word-of-mouth marketing” piece. If nothing else, proof that it is possible to pick apart any WoM measurement methodology.

Measurement based on such disparate discussions is a necessity of our marketing world, but it will never be perfect. It’s an approach that tries to add control to the uncontrollable. I mean, we’ve been OK with the fuzzy logic of brand tracking and TV ads for decades, and yet marketers now have to be held accountable for tracking sentiment? They might as well say “measure society” and look at the mess governments make of that!

So, instead of continuing to approach word-of-mouth with some kind of control as our raison d’etre, which leads trying to measure and quantify impacts, do we acknowledge that in an open setting, meaningful participation is our raison d’etre? After all, that’s what customers ultimately appreciate.