Polishing for old brands
Alexander Haldemann and Bruno Schmidt want to make their mark on the Swiss brand landscape with MetaDesign.
Alexander Haldemann and Bruno Schmidt want to make their mark on the Swiss brand landscape with MetaDesign.
Swiss Life, Raiffeisen, Ascom, Bucher Industries, Rieter: The agency has caused quite a stir in recent years with the design of brand appearances. MetaDesign is responsible for the rebranding from A to Z - from the definition of the brand strategy to the visual implementation. The agency works on such large-scale projects over a period of up to three years. MetaHaus also implements individual communication materials: This year, it has already designed six annual reports, the website for ZKB and, most recently, bossi magazine, the new culinary world of Betty Bossi. Who is behind this successful agency? The Zurich office of the international network for branding and corporate identity was founded in 2000. The managing directors and owners are Bruno Schmidt from Germany and Alexander Haldemann from Switzerland.
Haldemann studied international management in St. Gallen. Even back then, he was fascinated by media and brands. For his dissertation, he deliberately looked for a topic that revolved "around a disruption". At the time, the Internet was one such development, where something completely new was happening. What are the traditional daily newspapers doing in this situation? What strategic changes is this triggering in the publishing houses?
As Haldemann grew up in Ticino with the future Internet pioneer Bruno Giussani, this friendly relationship gave the young researcher the opportunity to carry out his investigations in the USA at leading newspapers such as the New York Times and Wall Street Journal. He compared his findings with publishers in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. The dissertation, which is still interesting today, opened another door for him to Asia. At the lifestyle and specialist publisher First Asia Publishing in Singapore, Haldemann became project manager for the planned entry into the Internet business.
When the publishing house was sold to China.com in 1999, the expatriate returned to Switzerland via Australia. In Zurich, Haldemann switched to the agency side at Digivision, which was making quite a splash at the time of the Internet hype and also had offices in Milan and Lugano. Haldemann then saw more concrete opportunities in 2001 at the MetaDesign agency in Zurich, which had recently been opened by Bruno Schmidt.
Schmidt, who describes his biography with a smile as an "eventful life", trained as an advertising salesman at the then leading Swiss advertising agency Gisler & Gisler in Düsseldorf after graduating from high school. He worked as a junior consultant for three years and then wanted to leave "to do something socially useful". He studied German, Romance languages and literature and geography in Berlin and worked as a teacher for five years. Another exciting move brought him to Cornelsen, Germany's largest textbook publisher, where he came full circle to advertising: Bruno Schmidt was advertising manager for the last three years and in this role also realized a major project with MetaDesign. Because he was impressed by the company, the client switched to the agency in 1992.
In Berlin, Bruno Schmidt became project manager at MetaDesign for clients such as Audi and Berliner Verkehrsbetriebe, later becoming a member of the management team before accepting the challenge of opening a branch in Zurich.
MetaDesign was founded in Berlin in 1990. This was followed in 1992 by a branch in San Francisco, where clients such as Hewlett Packard were served in Silicon Valley. Audi became another important client in 1994. Today, MetaDesign is still the lead agency for this car manufacturer's brand identity. MetaDesign employs around 250 people, 30 of whom are based in Zurich Seefeld. A fourth branch has just been opened in Dubai.
MetaDesign came to Zurich because it wanted to support the newly acquired clients Bluewin and Novartis directly on site. At the time, the Swisscom subsidiary was to be floated on the stock exchange. "There was steam in the pot," Schmidt remembers those wild times of the dotcom bubble. The difficult market environment was not always easy for MetaDesign. However, a much-praised piece of work for the Lucerne International Music Festival, which the brand specialists succinctly turned into the Lucerne Festival, also aroused the interest of Rentenanstalt.
At the time, "pension" was associated with "pension theft". And "nobody wants to work in an institution anymore," says Haldemann, summarizing the strategy that transformed the traditional insurer into Swiss Life. The completely new and positive positioning of a brand was the decisive breakthrough for MetaDesign Zurich. Raiffeisen's redesign a year ago was similarly revolutionary. Whereby "revolutionary" is only true in terms of success, but not in terms of the work.
Schmidt and Haldemann see their approach to redesigning a brand as "evolutionary". As Switzerland's third-largest bank, Raiffeisen moved more and more from the countryside to the city and to modern private and business customers. This new strategy made the honeycomb and ears of corn in the logo look old. The unique name was transformed into a red lettering and the entire brand identity took a big step forward. As with all its work, MetaDesign didn't want to "just pretty it up". For Schmidt and Haldemann, it is part of the concept that they are involved in the entire strategy process at the highest management level. "We are a kind of heart surgeon operating on a brand," says Haldemann, describing the idea. Schmidt says that you could perhaps also call us "obstetricians". MetaDesign does not impose a new image on a brand, but rather brings out "what holds the company together at its core and makes it special".
This explains what sets MetaDesign apart from an advertising agency. "We don't do individual campaigns, but define the holistic appearance." MetaDesign provides everything so that the advertising agency can take action. "We give them a toolbox that they can use," says Schmidt.
Both Alexander Haldemann - who also works as a lecturer in St. Gallen and Salzburg - and Bruno Schmidt particularly enjoy the fact that their agency often comes into play when a brand is "due for a huge change". In such situations, management needs to be convinced that the time has come to invest in the brand. Trust in the employees must be restored. Ultimately, it is about finding the right role for a brand in the market. When this "leaves its mark", it is "a really great feeling", says Haldemann. And Schmidt appreciates the fact that his work allows him to "look very deeply into a wide variety of companies".
Andreas Panzeri
Swiss Life, Raiffeisen, Ascom, Bucher Industries, Rieter: The agency has caused quite a stir in recent years with the design of brand appearances. MetaDesign is responsible for the rebranding from A to Z - from the definition of the brand strategy to the visual implementation. The agency works on such large-scale projects over a period of up to three years. MetaHaus also implements individual communication materials: This year, it has already designed six annual reports, the website for ZKB and, most recently, bossi magazine, the new culinary world of Betty Bossi. Who is behind this successful agency? The Zurich office of the international network for branding and corporate identity was founded in 2000. The managing directors and owners are Bruno Schmidt from Germany and Alexander Haldemann from Switzerland.
Haldemann studied international management in St. Gallen. Even back then, he was fascinated by media and brands. For his dissertation, he deliberately looked for a topic that revolved "around a disruption". At the time, the Internet was one such development, where something completely new was happening. What are the traditional daily newspapers doing in this situation? What strategic changes is this triggering in the publishing houses?
As Haldemann grew up in Ticino with the future Internet pioneer Bruno Giussani, this friendly relationship gave the young researcher the opportunity to carry out his investigations in the USA at leading newspapers such as the New York Times and Wall Street Journal. He compared his findings with publishers in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. The dissertation, which is still interesting today, opened another door for him to Asia. At the lifestyle and specialist publisher First Asia Publishing in Singapore, Haldemann became project manager for the planned entry into the Internet business.
When the publishing house was sold to China.com in 1999, the expatriate returned to Switzerland via Australia. In Zurich, Haldemann switched to the agency side at Digivision, which was making quite a splash at the time of the Internet hype and also had offices in Milan and Lugano. Haldemann then saw more concrete opportunities in 2001 at the MetaDesign agency in Zurich, which had recently been opened by Bruno Schmidt.
Schmidt, who describes his biography with a smile as an "eventful life", trained as an advertising salesman at the then leading Swiss advertising agency Gisler & Gisler in Düsseldorf after graduating from high school. He worked as a junior consultant for three years and then wanted to leave "to do something socially useful". He studied German, Romance languages and literature and geography in Berlin and worked as a teacher for five years. Another exciting move brought him to Cornelsen, Germany's largest textbook publisher, where he came full circle to advertising: Bruno Schmidt was advertising manager for the last three years and in this role also realized a major project with MetaDesign. Because he was impressed by the company, the client switched to the agency in 1992.
In Berlin, Bruno Schmidt became project manager at MetaDesign for clients such as Audi and Berliner Verkehrsbetriebe, later becoming a member of the management team before accepting the challenge of opening a branch in Zurich.
MetaDesign was founded in Berlin in 1990. This was followed in 1992 by a branch in San Francisco, where clients such as Hewlett Packard were served in Silicon Valley. Audi became another important client in 1994. Today, MetaDesign is still the lead agency for this car manufacturer's brand identity. MetaDesign employs around 250 people, 30 of whom are based in Zurich Seefeld. A fourth branch has just been opened in Dubai.
MetaDesign came to Zurich because it wanted to support the newly acquired clients Bluewin and Novartis directly on site. At the time, the Swisscom subsidiary was to be floated on the stock exchange. "There was steam in the pot," Schmidt remembers those wild times of the dotcom bubble. The difficult market environment was not always easy for MetaDesign. However, a much-praised piece of work for the Lucerne International Music Festival, which the brand specialists succinctly turned into the Lucerne Festival, also aroused the interest of Rentenanstalt.
At the time, "pension" was associated with "pension theft". And "nobody wants to work in an institution anymore," says Haldemann, summarizing the strategy that transformed the traditional insurer into Swiss Life. The completely new and positive positioning of a brand was the decisive breakthrough for MetaDesign Zurich. Raiffeisen's redesign a year ago was similarly revolutionary. Whereby "revolutionary" is only true in terms of success, but not in terms of the work.
Schmidt and Haldemann see their approach to redesigning a brand as "evolutionary". As Switzerland's third-largest bank, Raiffeisen moved more and more from the countryside to the city and to modern private and business customers. This new strategy made the honeycomb and ears of corn in the logo look old. The unique name was transformed into a red lettering and the entire brand identity took a big step forward. As with all its work, MetaDesign didn't want to "just pretty it up". For Schmidt and Haldemann, it is part of the concept that they are involved in the entire strategy process at the highest management level. "We are a kind of heart surgeon operating on a brand," says Haldemann, describing the idea. Schmidt says that you could perhaps also call us "obstetricians". MetaDesign does not impose a new image on a brand, but rather brings out "what holds the company together at its core and makes it special".
This explains what sets MetaDesign apart from an advertising agency. "We don't do individual campaigns, but define the holistic appearance." MetaDesign provides everything so that the advertising agency can take action. "We give them a toolbox that they can use," says Schmidt.
Both Alexander Haldemann - who also works as a lecturer in St. Gallen and Salzburg - and Bruno Schmidt particularly enjoy the fact that their agency often comes into play when a brand is "due for a huge change". In such situations, management needs to be convinced that the time has come to invest in the brand. Trust in the employees must be restored. Ultimately, it is about finding the right role for a brand in the market. When this "leaves its mark", it is "a really great feeling", says Haldemann. And Schmidt appreciates the fact that his work allows him to "look very deeply into a wide variety of companies".
Andreas Panzeri
