“The second was an article on Fast Company’s Co.Design by Marc Shillum entitled “Brands as Patterns.” Marc made the point that consistency does not mean repetition but rather an understanding and management of patterns” – David Aaker, Vice Chairman of Prophet Brands
“To succeed in a more agile world, as brand needs to think less about defining a fixed identity and more about creating coherent and flexible patterns,” says Marc Shillum.– Brand Now: How to Stand Out in a Crowded, Distracted World, by Nick Westergaard
In a social media world, brands have inherently less control over corporate image than even a decade ago. – On Beethoven and Brand Patterns, by Robert Macias
In 2011, Marc Shillum joined Method as a principal guiding our Brand practice. He was very interested in extending his thinking of Brands as patterns into our thinking around experience design. Shillum’s point of view was that people have a proclivity to see patterns as a way of making sense of the world, and as such, Brands should be considering how their actions are guided by intentional patterns of artifacts (objects), behaviors (experiences), and concepts (meaning) in order to produce coherent experiences over time that become recognizable by customers. Shillum had intuitively come to the same conclusion that we had reached about the upstream influence on brand that experience had, and it was not a huge leap of logic to see how a more intentional and systematic view would allow the business to better use the Brand in the downstream flow. Our belief is that this downstream flow is also where experience design and innovation intersect. – Experience Design: A Framework for Integrating Brand, Experience, and Value, by Patrick Newbery, Kevin Farnham
Concurrent with the upcoming need for a balanced simplicity lifestyle, the once traditional one-way communication from brands to customers turned into a perma- nent dialogue via different media channels. Brands have become flexible and reactive in their communication but remain essentially constant and recognizable in their interactions (Shillum, 2016). – User Experience Is Brand Experience, The Psychology Behind Successful Digital Products and Services, by Felix van de Sand, Anna-Katharina Frison, Pamela Zotz, Andreas Riener, Katharina Holl
Brand Experience: An jedem Touchpoint auf den Punkt begeistern, by Andreas Baetzgen
User Experience Identity, Mit Neuropsychologie digitale Produkte zu Markenbotschaftern machen, by Felix van de Sand
The Center for Design Research…facilitating the development of what Shillum (2011) call brand patterns, a process that focus on brand coherence. In this sense, it seems that the role of brand experience is much more about giving freedom to the brand to adapt to new situations and better communicate its values, than it is to restrict it. – The Brand Experience Manual, Addressing The Gap Between Brand Strategy And New Service Development, by Mauricy Alves Da Motta Filho
New thinking about branding and campaign design. – Eye Magaine
Experience design expert Marc Shillum has argued that branding is about ‘creating patterns, not repeating messages’. It’s an interplay of many small ideas, not one big idea. Starbucks has moved away from a formulaic approach to its coffee shops, preferring, it says, ‘identity to identical’. – Branding: A Very Short Introduction, by Robert Jones
RIT Scholar Works …Marc Shillum, who has helped shape some of the world’s most prestigious brands, and has received numerous awards as a designer, writer, creative director and strategist and as a principal at Method, describes brands as patterns in his article, “Branding Is About Creating Patterns, Not Repeating Messages” in Contagious Magazine:
Brands are no longer definitive. They are temporal. Brands are informed by multiple voices, and they exist in multiple mediums and through multiple contexts...we all know that brands are increasingly accessed digitally, but a less considered consequence is that the interface through which a brand is accessed has become a primary identity element.” (Shillum, 2012) – Pattern changing clothing, by Yong Kwon
The 'Brands as patterns' session on day two sparked plenty of discussion. It addressed the difficulty of brands telling a coherent story and maintaining consistency in new channels. Robin Lanahan, brand strategy director, start-up business group, Microsoft, cited Facebook Timelines as an example of digital disruption to storytelling, meaning brands now 'not only manage their future, but their past too'.. – Campaign Magazine, by Sarah Shearman
For its 10 year anniversary Method has commissioned a series of publications on thought-provoking issues. The latest in the run, Brands as Pattern, discusses how brand identities must adapt to interact in the increasingly agile – and less controllable -world of digital and social media. In the publication, which can be downloaded from the link about, Method argue that to succeed in a more agile world, a brand needs to think less about defining a fixed identity and more about creating coherent and flexible patterns. – Design Week
Textiles, Identity and Innovation: Design the Future: Proceedings of the 1st International Textile Design Conference, by Gianni Montagna, Cristina Carvalho
Building consistency is easy: take what you already did and do it again. Take what someone learned and use it without learning. Follow the leader and paint by numbers someone else laid. And if that’s all branding was, robots would take all our jobs. But it isn’t. In fact, great brands are about consistency, but about understanding the core elements within the brand experience and think of ways to re-apply them to other arts of the business. They don’t try to copy, they create patterns. – EP 132 – Make Patterns, Not Consistency, by James Ellis
Brands, products and services are so entwined that Shillum believes it makes no sense to talk about them separately, let alone build specific companies to serve just one discipline. Buckminster Fuller once said that one should ‘be a generalist not a specialist’. The architect and systems theorist believed that you shouldn’t be so blinkered in the discipline you work in. Within a company, you should see how all parts of the organisation tessellate and rely on each other for support. – Is rhythm the key to a consistent marketing experience? by Christopher Ratcliff
Knightfoundation …In a beautifully written piece, Marc Shillum describes brand as patterns of behavior in the marketplace. This turns the brand and product relationship on its head. Yes, brand can be a promise of a product experience. But, more important and powerful today, the product is proof of the brand purpose. But—and this is a huge BUT—product is only one instrument in an entire orchestra of available instruments that can increase the surface area of an organization. Lessons from the Knight News Challenge: Core concepts in brand building, by Peter Spear
Thinking through how we can deliver the brand in a more distinctive way is one of the biggest opportunities we have to break brands out of their commoditised sea of sameness. We need to think through the tempo of the experience, our posture, how we deliver the brand over time and across interactions. We need to understand when we should try to remove friction in the experience and when we should add it in. And we need to think about the overall system of the experience: as Marc Shillum from Chief Creative Office memorably puts it, "brands are patterns". – by Gareth Kay