CLOSE-UP: ON THE CAMPAIGN COUCH ... WITH JB.

Q: I have just been taken on as an account director. I discover my client is launching a financial services brand in September, and the name that has been chosen is ... well, it's a numeral. And my great fear is that despite the pounds 250,000 worth of logo design and pounds 5 million worth of advertising, people will not recognise this as a brand name, only as a numeral. Marketing seems to be littered with brand names such as five, 3 and Ford Ka which look fine when art directed but they never work as brands. Any ideas for an opening conversation with the client?

A: For many hundreds of years, it was perfectly evident to everyone that personal and corporate authority could most easily be established and maintained through the use of visual clues.

Judges wore wigs, policemen wore uniforms, schoolmasters wore gowns, banks built marble palaces, churches built cathedrals - and Important Objects, Important People and Important Institutions unthinkingly employed the use of Capital Letters. When you were seven, who did you stand in awe of? Not the head mistress, but The Head Mistress. Today, which would cause you the greater trepidation: to be summonsed to the bar of the house of commons or to be summonsed to the bar of The House of Commons?

Many hundreds of years later, a few illiterate design consultants unilaterally decide to ignore many hundreds of years of experience. capital letters are suddenly out. A new, cool banking experience, as evidence of being a new, cool banking experience, calls itself egg. Its name dies on the page. Almost at once, if only to be comprehensible, financial journalists are forced to refer to it as Egg. go as the name for an airline was insubstantial from the start. it soon went.

Tell your client that your name is four; then ask him why he doesn't seem to respect you.

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