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by Mark Tungate (@MarkTungate) Tristan Macherel, executive creative director of Landor Paris, talks about Landor’s extraordinary history, his own career journey, and the relationship between creativity and strategy.

The collapse of silos across the creative industries doesn’t alarm Macherel; he embraces it. Given his enthusiasm for the increasing blurring of borders between creative disciplines, perhaps it’s appropriate that he didn’t start out as a designer. He initially studied photography in his native Switzerland. “But I quickly began to realise that I wasn’t a real photographer,” he says. “I didn’t feel compelled to photograph the world. In fact, photography was a tool I could use to visualise my ideas.”

Other visualisation tools

So he began to add other tools: graphic design, typography and montage, to name but three. “I liked the idea that, whatever idea you were working on at the time, you had an entire tool kit at your disposal.”

At the age of just 22, he co-founded a studio in Switzerland with another designer. He worked there for seven years, yet over time he developed the feeling that they were picking up “crumbs” from the multinationals that were based in Switzerland for financial reasons, while the real work was going on elsewhere. He accepted an invitation to join Dragon Rouge in Paris for a year, on the understanding that he’d return to Switzerland to open a branch of the agency there. “The problem was that, after one year in Paris, I didn’t at all want to go back.” Like many before him, he’d fallen in love both with the city, and with a woman who lived there. “And of course there was the creative stimulus I found here. Even today, I’ve no desire to return.”

By now, he was developing his own ideas about how the design sector would evolve in the future, particularly in terms of taking a more-holistic approach to branding. This made him an ideal candidate for Landor.

The Landor touch

KlamathRather like Macherel, Walter Landor (1913–1995) was born in one place and fell in love with another. He was brought up in Munich — the Bauhaus and Werkbund design movements were an influence — but later settled in San Francisco. There, he ran Landor Associates with his wife, Josephine, from a former riverboat called the Klamath, combining research, design and consulting in a way that essentially created the modern branding industry.

Many years later, when Macherel met Luc Speisser, managing director of Landor France and Switzerland, it felt like the perfect fit: “He’d taken charge of the agency a short time before. It was previously a packaging-focused agency, but he had started a corporate department and planned to give it a more-strategic positioning, based on value rather than quantity.”

Holistic thinking

After four years, what does Macherel see as the agency’s positioning now? “I think we have an approach to branding that is not traditional in France,” he says. “The brand is at the heart of everything we do. We think holistically: we don’t concentrate on one point of contact, but on all the elements that form the identity of a brand.”
He adds that, while in traditional agencies a strategic planner might brief a creative, at Landor the two skills are inseparable. “A brand platform that’s not creatively inspiring is next to useless. The two sides have to work in symbiosis. In fact, I’d say that our work is driven by the strategic idea.”

If that sounds more like the positioning of a creative advertising agency, he confirms: “We’re a little of both — somewhere between design agency and advertising agency. Unlike many design agencies, we don’t come up with a graphic code and then try to post-rationalise the idea behind it. We have an idea and the work grows out of that.”

Images of movement

One example might be an award-winning campaign for Fedora, a European federation supporting ballet and opera. The brand identity had to reflect the magic of performance. So the F of Fedora became the steps leading to the stage, while posters and promotional materials were created by the strokes of a ballet dancer’s feet, which had been dipped in paint. The result was a new visual language.

Macherel says Landor is constantly trying to push the borders of what “design” actually means. “How we can reinvent a logo so that it becomes a media in its own right? How can we create a bridge between the analogue world of packaging and the digital world? We’re constantly striving to evolve.”

Design and technology

For one client, the agency is working on an identity inspired by algorithms; it is also open to the idea of using artificial intelligence. It seems as though “advertising” and “design” agencies might soon cease to exist — there will just be agencies.

“Well, for both sides the brand is central. We may not buy media space or shoot TV ads, but the experiences that surround a brand have become so diverse that there’s bound to be some overlap.”

A brand strategy might easily originate at a design agency and be used to brief an advertising agency: he points out that Landor is part of the Young & Rubicam group, and that the pair often work hand-in-hand on projects. “For a client, the coherence that can be achieved at every touch point is extremely valuable.”

Since Landor is a pioneer in branding, what are the brands that Macherel admires? He mentions Uber, for having identified a customer need and satisfying it seamlessly, as well as Airbnb. He adds: “For me, a brand is a promise. But, more than that, a great brand is a promise kept.”

 

Mark TungateMark Tungate (@MarkTungate) is the editorial director of the Epica Awards (@EpicaAwards), the only global creative prize judged by the specialist press. In this series of articles called Design Plus, Epica highlights creativity in the design field.

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