An electric shock
You Can’t Change the World with Brand Onions
You Can't Change the World with Brand Onions
We started Squad because we observed clients frustration at the disconnect between strategy and creative.
Strategists operate upstream often at boardroom, business or category level.
They gain a rich understanding of the market, competition, customer and client.
Through a mindset of relentless questioning, digging and exploring, they get to grips with the problem, which is often different to the problem the client thought they had.
This understanding gives birth to the solution.
The problem is that the outputs of the strategic process are too often PowerPoint slides, models, onions and pyramids.
These outputs do not speak to designers, copywriters, developers and content creators.
Too often, all the strategic effort gets misinterpreted, misunderstood and misused.
Thinking doesn't translate into action.
And without effective implementation, strategy is pointless.
We founded Squad because we wanted to bridge this gap.
We wanted to fuse strategy and creative.
To work with clients at a level we call before the brand.
To get to grips with the big issue, first and foremost.
To create a business where strategists and creatives work alongside each other in tandem, not in sequence.
To ensure the outputs of strategy are creative tools that can be understood and used to create change.
To treat every stage of the project as creative, so strategy becomes as imaginative as the advertising or branding.
We often talk to clients about finding their purpose or their why.
This is ours.
– DB & RG
Don’t Weep Make it Happen
Don't Weep Make it Happen
George was a talented guitarist.
Talented enough to impress a friend in the year above him at school.
And when you’re fifteen, its very hard to impress a sixteen-year-old.
Its even harder to get his eighteen-year-old pal to say you can join his band, The Quarrymen.
And George was fundamental to their sound.
He wasn’t a particularly fast, noisy or flashy showman.
But George truly understood his instrument.
Stretching not only the band, but also, eventually, musical boundaries.
He was a virtuoso player of numerous stringed instruments.
George didn’t draw attention to himself by belting out self-indulgent solos.
He simply made the right decisions, never playing a note out of place.
Not safe and predictable, but understated and sophisticated.
Drawing his influences from a huge array of sources: from jazz to rockabilly.
His structured chord vocabulary,versatile and tasteful.
Playing with clarity, feeling and an unmistakable tone.
He paved the way for the likes of The Smiths Johnny Marr, his signature style perfectly showcased Morrissey’s baritone, without the need for showboating solos.
So opposed to guitar heroics was George, that when he penned a song that was crying out for him to exhibit his own talents, he didn’t.
Because his problem was bigger than a guitar solo.
On the 25 July 1969, The Beatles (the band The Quarrymen became) began recording’While My Guitar Gently Weeps’.
But it wasn’t working.
John and Paul weren’t taking it seriously, because they were only interested in recording their own songs.
Being the third-best songwriter in the best band in the world was a difficult place to be.
But George knew the song was pretty good.
The next day, while driving into London with a friend, he asked him to play on it.
His friend was reluctant, because no one else ever played on a Beatles record.
George was persuasive.
So, on the evening of 6 September his friend joined them in the studio.
Using Harrison’s Gibson Les Paul, Eric Clapton performed his solo.
Harrison knew this would make them take his idea seriously.
Clapton’s presence put the band on their best behaviour.
They all tried that bit harder.
Georges problem wasn’t his songwriting or his guitar playing, it was finding a way to change the game.
Creatives need to understand that sometimes a great idea isn’t enough: you have to be able to make it happen.
Create the conditions for success.
Get the best people on the job.
And make collaboration a core part of your DNA, because brands built today need to be more multidimensional.
Like George, sometimes arm’s-length orchestration is more effective than being a flashy soloist.
– DB
Footnote: George Harrison’s first six studio albums released between 1968 and 1975 on the Beatles Apple label have been newly remastered as part of a box set. The Apple Years 1968-75 is available now. https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/theapple-years-1968-75/id913049423
That ol’ Razzle Dazzle of Different
That ol' Razzle Dazzle of Different
Norman Wilkinson was a talented, if conservative, marine painter and poster artist.
But he had a dazzling idea.
The open waters around the British Isles were a dangerous place for allied ships during the first world war.
Each vessel a sitting duck, unable to hide from the enemy submariners lurking below the surface.
Throughout 1917, merciless German U-boats decimated British and American vessels at an alarming rate.
Hundreds of ships per month lost to their deadly patrols.
At its worst, eight ships per day were consigned to watery graves.
Severing critical British trade and supply links.
Returning from submarine patrol and the dangers of the Gallipoli campaign, Norman Wilkinson began service on a British minesweeper.
It was here that he came up with his revolutionary and experimental approach to naval defence.
An audacious idea that played a vital role in the protection of British naval and trade vessels.
Wilkinson realised that the Admiralty were trying to solve the wrong problem.
It was impossible to find a way to sufficiently camouflage and hide away all ships, in all conditions, at sea.
The variations in sky colour, cloud cover and wave height were simply too many for any typical camouflage colours, such as black, grey or blue, to work.
So he did the opposite.
Wilkinson devised a fiendishly clever plan to draw attention to vessels rather than hide them away.
Favouring disturbance over disguise.
Optically distorting the appearance of each ship to confuse the enemy rather than conceal.
Suitably impressed, the Admiralty made Wilkinson the head of the new dazzle camouflage section.
Influenced by British avant garde painters like Wyndham Lewis and David Bomberg, Wilkinson assembled a team of artists and model makers from the Royal Academy.
Edward Wadsworth, founder of Vorticism the British artistic movement that grew out of Cubism supervised the patterns.
Consisting almost exclusively of women, the team of students from the RA set about the patternation of the ships.
Each side of every vessel a different design.
Every ship an absolute one-off.
Quite literally a work of art.
A cacophony of intersections and angles.
The contrasting geometric shapes and colours interlocked and dissected, creating optical illusions designed to disorientate.
Even the smokestacks were decorated to appear to be leaning in a different direction.
When the German periscopes broke through the waters they had only seconds to locate their target and calculate its speed and course.
Shooting not directly at the ship, but where the vessel would be by the time the torpedo got there.
The problem now facing the German submariners was that the manually operated coincidence rangefinders needed to adjust so that two half-images of the target aligned, completing the picture.
But it was hard to align two halves when what you were looking at didn't make sense: the bold shapes at the bow and the stern broke up the form of the ships.
Making it more difficult for the enemy to calculate an accurate angle of attack.
During the first world war, more than 2,000 Cubism-inspired dazzle ships were operational, and while never scientifically proven, it's safe to say that some patterns worked better than others, and that traveling speeds played a major part.
Recent tests indicate that similar patterns tested on military vehicles, such as Land Rovers, can cause an unguided rocket-propelled grenade, fired at a target traveling around 90km/h, to miss by a metre or more.
The difference between life and death.
Its often all too easy to work within the conventions of a category or situation, gravitating to like-minded ideas.
Take risks.
Iterate as you go, because it no longer takes 100 years to prove your theory.
When you do the polar opposite of what you'd normally do, new ideas, viewpoints and solutions open up in front of you.
The final answer may not end up being the exact opposite, but you'll have more variables on the table in the process.
And possibly a bit of that ol' razzle-dazzle.
– DB
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USS West Mahomet in dazzle camouflage, 1918
