Hans Domizlaff, inventor of brand technique

Comment by the Editor-in-Chief | Johannes Frederik Christensen

The Business of Brand Management sheds light on brand management in the context of the present and history. This article is part of a series of republications of selected texts by Olaf Leu and Bodo Rieger from the years 1987 to 2018. What was thought, written and advocated back then is worth re-reading - not out of nostalgia, but because it reflects questions that have not been resolved even today.

Historically speaking, the whole thing is nothing new. Even at the beginning of our century, Walter Rathenau and his artistic advisor, Peter Behrens, developed concepts for AEG that corresponded in many aspects to what we understand today as corporate identity and corporate culture. They not only understood how to give the uniqueness of their products an appropriate appearance in the design, but also thought about the people who manufactured and used these products. Prime examples of functional industrial design ("Form Follows Function") were created for graphic coherence, and housing estates were built in green areas where workers and their families could live in light, air and sunshine in a dignified manner - in contrast to the stinking backyards of poor tenement blocks in the north and east of large cities.

Even then, the entrepreneurial art of making a name for oneself had a threefold equivalent: in product and communication design, in the underlying product philosophy ("People are not there for technology, but technology is there for people") and in the inclusion of employee and user needs in the holistically oriented corporate policy.

It was not until a generation later, in the 1930s, that Hans Domizlaff was able to formulate and practice this thinking as the founder of brand technique and creator of such brand phenomena as R6, ERNTE 23, APPOLINARIS, the SIEMENS signets and the corporate design, to name just a few examples. He was concerned with a synthesis of commercial ethos in the attitude expressed in a brand appearance and artistic sensitivity in the design of a new brand product. The entrepreneur "who cannot summon himself to the slightest special achievement has no right to the power of a great brand". He anticipated the psychological benefits long before Rosser Reeves: "The decisive factor here is to achieve a monopoly position in the consumer's psyche more than any technical or material improvement." He spoke of "natural branding", by which he meant the contrast to branded products that were only held together by a conglomerate of name, features, mediocre quality and advertising promises. For him, a brand lived holistically from its idea, from its invention, which for him was a "brand-technical process". In other words, technology was understood as a creative transformation process in which the idea shapes the material.

Today, we distinguish this brand technique, applied to a company, as corporate identity with its instrument of corporate communications in contrast to brand identity, the prerequisite for creating a brand product image through brand advertising in the minds of consumers. In a sense, brand identity is the strategic extension of corporate identity using the means of marketing to establish preferences among target groups. Domizlaff's branding work for Siemens was corporate identity work. And Domizlaff's brand design for cigarettes was brand identity work. (You can read about this in his two volumes on natural branding "Winning public trust").

So should a trade fair expert know Domizlaff? He should; in order to understand the plain text in today's conceptual fog from knowledge of the historical sources.

Present the product as a fetish or idea carrier

For Domizlaff, a new brand product embodied the underlying brand idea, which was more than a sum of product features, something unique and completely new. Packaging and advertising were the carriers of these ideas. When we turn to the subject of exhibition stands and exhibition stand design, we are dealing with communication media that are intended to fulfill certain communicative functions. Enough has been said and written about this. What is important, however, is the basic understanding that the trade fair stand must be a carrier of ideas and not, for example, take on a life of its own in the hands of a trade fair architect as an egomaniacal sculpture that plays its own dominant role and thus displaces the achievements of the company and product ideas.

We repeatedly encounter this vampire effect when the trade fair stand designer uses his ego to overpower the company or its representative in the form of the person responsible for the trade fair. The exhibition stand impresses, the name of the designer or architect is on everyone's lips, the product and the company remain redundant. The entrepreneur, who allows this to happen with his money, thus slips into the role of involuntary patron.

The other kind of misunderstanding is produced by those experts who don't seem to really trust the intellectual and functional quality of their products and believe they have to represent the value of the goods through potentiation, usually only in quantitative terms. Packaging is blown up to gigantic proportions, gigantic towers are built from packaging units, the world is overwhelmed with gigantic lettering and superlatives or monstrous dramatizations that convey neither idea nor message, but only the "fetish character of the product". This understanding of trade fair theater is still very popular in the automotive industry, but also in the consumer goods industry.

Trade fair design today offers a wide selection of "silent servants" that, organized as a system, willingly serve the idea of a product or company with unobtrusive aesthetics.

This functional design with its grid anatomy naturally has limits in terms of variability, due to the constructive right angle and the fact that these systems are all confusingly similar and, although they only want to be skeletons and not bodies, they are still part of the overall body of an exhibition stand. Many a fresh, lively idea suffocated in the grid. At BRAUN, the grid was part of the philosophy of marketing by design. Here, the grid became the identity. In the continuation of this ideology, LEITNER raised its systems to the highest possible level of functionality and aesthetics and thus made the exhibition stand system socially acceptable as a carrier of ideas in the first place. But a residue of dissatisfaction remained. What was one to do with a communication idea that wanted more leeway, a freer environment and a focus on the one effective form of the idea that conveys a corporate or product message in a way that is strikingly brand-typical and astonishing in its effectiveness? There are examples of this.

It was decades ago when DOYLE, DANE, BERNBACH designed the advertisement for LÖWENBRÄU: "If they run out of LÖWENBRÄU please order Champagne", and staged a LÖWENBRÄU trade fair stand in New York with the pre-programmed event that the beer ran out and the most expensive champagne was served just at the time when the press had been ordered. This is indeed the combination of brand idea and dramaturgically effective staging.

Ettore Palmiotta, owner and idea generator of MARKTEX, has demonstrated in his own way how to ignore the trade fair hall environment in order to present his materialized ideas in a unique way. In order to realize this at HEIMTEX in Frankfurt, he set up a large, dark brown linen square tent with only a relatively small entrance, in front of which the curious jammed. Those who were finally rewarded for their patience and allowed to take a look inside experienced a unique theatrical effect. In the darkness, two spotlights set a small selection of precious textiles and decorative fabrics ablaze with color. Nowhere else at the entire trade fair could the amazed visitor experience colors and patterns in the richness of their ideas and imagination in such a glowing elemental force as through this staging. The idea of light has simply been consistently applied to the presentation of the material in a meaningful way and realized with courage to the last consequence. This is the attribute that corresponds to a CI-compliant trade fair design: conveying the living form of an idea.

Or the other, much-cited example of the VORWERK carpet and flooring manufacturers, who had the audacity to set up a huge yellow field of primroses on a sky-blue background instead of an exhibition stand around a small pavilion with chairs. No product fetishism, no trade fair stand sculpture, "away from the product - towards the idea". Everyone else has carpets. VORWERK has ideas. This company has thus revealed its creative self, its creative ambition and its ability to present this credibly.

Or the well-known Catalan architect Alfredo Arribas, who promoted Spanish literature at the 1991 FRANKFURTER BUCHMESE with a bullfighting arena made up of thousands of books and monitors. No folklore, but creativity with the courage to be self-ironic.

If the astonished trade fair visitor and contemporary now wonders where the trade fair stand as such would remain and whether this is not already a perfect communication theater and why the whole thing would not take place distributed on the arsenal of municipal stages, which would not be in the sense of the MESSE AG but would also have the side effect of serving the needy art and culture promotion? Although this question is not so far-fetched, it would still fail due to the law of large numbers. But the line of thought is right. And the trade fair would do well to understand and learn this. MESSE FRANKFURT at least has done pioneering work in terms of communicative and creative openness. But as we all know, nothing withers faster than the laurel on which it sits, and we have seen that the trade fair stand has emancipated itself:

From hodgepodge and curiosity to brand metaphor.

This leads us to the final question of what the success factors are that are valid for successfully applied brand technology at the trade fair stand.

There are four of them, and we can learn them from none other than Winston Churchill. In terms of his personal identity, he exemplified what it means to prove substance, acceptance, conciseness and presence time and again, especially in times of crisis. Substance: the extraordinary achievement, the special idea, the unique deed and the courage to do it. W.C. proved it again and again in the Boer War and at the outbreak of the Second World War. And the acceptance of his voters confirmed him. His visual sign language was as consistent and concise as his verbal rhetoric. He was not a man of big words, but a great man of words. A man of conciseness, of clear punctuation: we all know the typical finger position for the Victory "V" and the unforgettable cigar in the circular face with the bowler hat above it, a living "Q". And finally his omnipresence, always being there where there was a fire, where he was needed. These four outstanding character traits are our four success factors when it comes to evaluating the quality of an exhibition stand, especially with regard to the crucial question of the extent to which it is a compliant idea carrier for the idea and concept of the company or product in question.

He would have deserved the "golden cigar" as the emblem of the award for successful trade fair CI work. When was the last time you received a cigar like this from your boss?

*The publication rights for this article are owned by Prof. em. Olaf Leu.