In a perverse way, an economic downturn can be a good thing for the creative industry.  Clients are reluctant to green light jobs and more design agencies are battling for fewer accounts.  Therefore, agencies need to raise their game and deliver stand-out creatives to win or retain clients…and enhance their reputation in the eyes of prospective clients.

More specifically, branding tends to be better placed to ride out recessions than advertising.  Advertising is often, lazily, classified as an expensive luxury.  However, an organisation cannot afford to disregard the basic marketing materials that communicate its brand identity altogether.

With financial services, the situation is slightly different to most other organisations as it’s ‘that lot that got us in the mess in the first place with their excess and recklessness’ (or words to that effect, minus expletives).  Even relatively innocent parties such as insurers, for example, tend to be lumped in with the investment bankers as part of a greedy and irresponsible whole.  More than ever, customers need to believe in and trust an organisation to handle its money prudently.

With regard to financial services clients’ reputations (or their brand image) branding designers can play a critical part.  People are especially astute nowadays and will sieve through superfluous ‘nice’ graphics to get to the necessary information – i.e. is an organisation to be trusted, what can it guarantee and especially pertinent today, will it even be here next year!

Indeed, trust and belief are possibly the two most crucial messages in financial services brands today.  Of course, we will always want to be attracted visually to a brand, but this has taken a back seat in the current climate.  Straightforward, incisive and more spartan brand identities may well become the order of the day.  Or put another way, cut out the fluff and cut to the chase.

This already seems to be happening across the pond with creative heavy weights Landor Associates observing more modest and restrained branding already starting to emerge in America and expecting it to follow suit in the UK.  Fears about the economy mean flaunting excess and luxury has become bad taste.  Echoes of more simple, bold 1940s and 50s-style branding could well be on their way.

On the subject of 50s design, here’s a YouTube homage to one of the heroes of that era, Saul Bass, famous for classic film posters and title sequences (such as Vertigo, Psycho, West Side Story) and international corporate identities (including AT&AT & United Airlines).  Here’s how the Star Wars title sequence could have panned out if it had been commissioned from Saul Bass in the 50s…

Written by Nick Patchitt

As 2009 finally gets up to full speed and Christmas dwindles to a fond yet distant memory, we’re launching our brand spanking new blog. On this page over the days and weeks ahead, you’ll be hearing from different members of the FWD team, learning something about them and sharing some of our highs and lows as the year progresses.

Why a blog? Because there’s so much we see and hear going on in the market that we want to tell you about; and there are so many new ideas and concepts we encounter in our disciplines of marketing, public relations and market research that we’d like to share with you. Some of the things we come across are valuable as pieces of information – knols as Google is now calling them; some throw a new light on what we do, while others just make us smile.

Why Future Tense? Because we claim to be all about forward thinking communication, so this is our shop window to display some of that forward thinking to you. There are times we encounter ideas that are fascinating or radical but may not be directly relevant to our work in the financial services sector: this blog gives us the opportunity tell you about them.

If you’re familiar with blogs, then you’ll know all about how to subscribe to Future Tense and what a feedreader is; if you’re not, click here for a short video guide to subscribing – or simply visit this page when you feel the urge.

To kick off, I’d like to share this short video with you which entertainingly describes the changes in commercial advertising over the last few decades. It was made by a German marketing firm but the concepts are universal. I hope you enjoy it.

Written by Michael Gaughan