Brand Talks Zurich: Brand Management in Dynamic Markets and Organizations

Jürgen Siebert, Marketing Director at Monotype, led the afternoon session, as he did last year (Photos: Thomas Häusermann/Advertising Week).

"After last year's 100 tickets sold out in just a few days, we doubled the room capacity for this year's event," said Brand Talks curator and presenter Jürgen Siebert, marketing director at Monotype. The event series, which was launched in Berlin in 2017 and is in the past year celebrated its Swiss premiere in Zurich's Kosmos, took place this year in the event venue and Impact Hub Kraftwerk.

Simon Betsch, Managing Partner KMS Team, summarized the current challenges for brands and organizations in his keynote speech on "Brand Management in Dynamic Organizations". The digital revolution is changing habits and perceptions and thus the communication of many companies. The journey is heading in the direction of simplicity, individualization and networking.

The exclusive finale was provided by U.S. writing expert Mary Catherine Pflug from Boston, who has been shedding light on trends in the writing world since 2017 with an extensive annual survey. This year, around 18,000 people took part in the survey, which ended just a few hours ago. At Brand Talks Zurich, Pflug presented the first results of the 2020 study and, among other things, shed light on the importance of font cloud services, the popularity of Google Fonts, and classify stylistic trends.

The energy transition and digitization are changing the industrial landscape. Physical and digital products are growing together. Lena Sattler, Head of Brand Design and Governance at ABB, and Alexandra Fukazawa, MetaDesign, showed how the technology company is repositioning itself to drive this change.

Representing the branding agency MetaDesign, CD Alexandra Fukazawa reported on the international brand relaunch of ABB. Together with Lena Sattler, who is responsible for brand design and governance at the technology company, Fukazawa recalled the beginning of the cooperation: A secret office was set up between the companies, and those involved had to pledge confidentiality.

Then they considered how ABB's new "business to people" approach could be implemented in terms of design. The MetaDesign CD: "We needed elements that conveyed a sense of corporate identity at all times - even without the communications department controlling everything." One of the solutions here was a typeface that was created especially for ABB and now makes a decisive mark on every document that leaves the company.

Zürcher Kantonalbank and KMS Team reported on the comprehensive rebranding of the Zurich bank. 

Zürcher Kantonalbank has also had to overcome a number of challenges in terms of brand development in the recent past: under pressure from traditional competitors, but increasingly also from banking apps, the financial institution prescribed itself a makeover. KMS Team from Munich was responsible for this - the agency relied, for example, on recurring color patterns that represent the ZKB brand even on small smartwatch displays. 

Felix van de Sand, co-founder of the agency Cobe, and Simon Biemer, Head of UX Design at Munich ReThink, used the example of the young finance app "Garden" to discuss how brand values become an integral part of a digital product through design and how the correspondence between user experience and brand experience is made measurable.

The hosts: Jürgen Siebert, Marketing Director at Monotype, and Berhard Prüger,Senior Manager, Revenue Marketing EMEA at Monotype.

All photos of the event can be found in the upcoming Advertising Week 11/12 2019.