Communication designers were traditional the "bridge" between corporations and consumers. We are the ones that give brands their visual voice. Designer's are employed by companies to design advertising material, visual identifiers (logo's) and corporate identities. And we are asked to create scenarios, construct concepts, promises and characters, around products and services; we create the visual and conceptual elements of brands, using new products and services ready for consumption, as a starting point.
(As corporations want to ensure profits and get their products sold to the consumer public, they have to connect themselves with their customers. Designers have to find solutions to real problems, drawing from real people and their experiences.)
Financial recession has created a new consumer "breed". Unlimited consumption of the 1990's is starting to become mindful consumption. The consumer is in power, he can have access to all the necessary information and communicate with brands through consumer communities (72% is the recent count of corporate consumerism). Consumers can customize their brands and services, and have complete knowledge between what they really need. Accumulation of knowledge is higher than never before, with 68% of Americans being library card owners.
Brands, in order to survive and to maintain long term popularity with the excellently informed consumer, they have to focus on quality and not quantity. "Better", instead of "more". Lately, over-consumerism has become "un-fashionable", not classy at all. Sustainability, "Green Design", social causes, corporate ethics and human rights, is what companies are trying to communicate, under the "umbrella" of their powerful logos.
A brand's visual communication will become more about ambiquitous feelings and emotional states, rather then constantly evolving consumer goods. A brand's content will not be of physical substance but of invisible feelings and values of its consumers. The designer's role will be to transform the "dry" and old-fashioned "brand" to a "movement" formed by the consumer communities' "voices. Consumers will be the movement's advocates and designer the movement's editors, the ones who filter and organize the brand's content.
These movements will not have a fixed, consistent logo and visual identity. They will have a consistent value, emotional state and beliefs.
