RED SQUARE?

The vast majority of global brand and corporate imagery is designed in either Western Europe or North America, from a western cultural perspective and for largely western audiences. The symbols and environments of these global brands are then exported to other cultures with often little or no national modifications other than an understandable name or a phonetic resemblance to the original. The majority of design related research undertaken in this field is of a commercially sensitive nature and little exists within academic circles in design. This paper examines the results of pilot tests on various groups and establishes a basis for further development of the field, examining issues of cultural compatibility, clashes, and interpretation.

The paper seeks to examine how different cultural groups interpret and understand global brand design. It identifies and evaluates work undertaken in the related fields of marketing, branding, communications, semiotics and psychology. However the majority of the paper comprises an examination of the results of a series of experiments undertaken on differing cultural groups.

The experiment adopts a model of the required characteristics of successful brands (Alves), which hypothesises that successful brands possess a combination of three key characteristics: Expertise, Integrity and Charisma. There is overlap between the characteristics and successful brand leaders can achieve success through a combination of strengths that are individual to the brands concerned.

Three experiments have been devised, the first to gain insight on a basic level of response to simple colour and shape options by consumer groups from Western and Eastern cultures. The second and third to broaden the investigation into examination of responses to Eastern (Chinese) and Western typography. Establishing a number of variables: shape, colour, font and key brand characteristic, the experiments use a statistical model of comparative analysis developed by academics at Copenhagen Business School (Gabrielsen & Kristensen) to determine the nature of response and differences in response, within and between cultural groups. This is achieved by a series of web based ‘option comparisons’ undertaken by participants. This field of study is in its infancy, this paper attempts to establish a basis for further development.