Here’s a question for you – What’s happened to the confidence brands use to have in their marketing and design teams? Has it disappeared alongside our confidence in leaders, banks and that bloke that looks after Blackberry’s servers in Slough? Time was, the Head of Brand Marketing, a role notable for its balance of creative fulfilment with dogged resilience and 24/7 governance, was always willing to bleed on the flag rather than allow any disruption to an organisations visual or verbal perrogatives. And people listened. This guy or gal knows what’s best for us. That’s what we pay for. Keep up the good work.

But things seem to have changed. No longer do we look to a lead or team of specialists with demonstrable experience and a genuine reason to define, deliver and uphold the truth that shines forth from somebody’s bright corporate idea. We ask punters on Facebook what they think. As many as possible, ideally. Decent research used to mean controlled, joined-up qualitative thinking, in conjunction with business ideals, that professionals used to uncover the new territory a brand should sail into. It’s succumbed to something altogether less impressive. A quantitative, crowd-sourced noise that fails to assimilate the driving business principles that should define how an organisation iterates its competitive advantage. I’m reminded of the adage “Look around the parks of England; you will find no statues of Committees”.

Crowdsourcing design is an interesting and nascent model. I did some rooting around and there are a bunch of organizations that can crowd-source a brandmark for you, with minimum bids at around £150. The idea is that lots of talented designers around the globe that may or may not ‘do this thing for a living’ tinker away on their macs with no brief. And, in true Monkeys/Typewriters/Time/Shakespeare fashion, something workable may appear.

Of course, turning to the crowd for design assistance is one thing. But opinion on ‘what’s right’ for a brand is entirely different. Take Gap.

Last year, Gap’s longstanding graphic identity needed a shot in the arm. Badly. It needed to respond to the trends in brand design for simplicity, in the face of overwhelming channel options. Crucially, it need to kick-start some bigger, more far-reaching business goals beyond it’s US routes. It’s clear that the story behind the graphic shift would have helped debate. But, instead, the organization caved in to overwhelming whinging from ‘die-hard’ fans on Facebook. Sensing a story, Adage said that it was ‘something that a child could have designed using clip art’. I suspect that was the whole point. Reductive, simple, non-exclusive, of no fixed global abode. An embarrassing about-turn and a statement from the top explaingin that ‘This wasn’t the right project at the right time for crowd sourcing.’ You got that right. But when is?

Henry Ford was an enthusiastic champion of the customer. But never at the expense of innovation. When asked why he didn’t take his lead from customers, he simply stated “If I’d asked them what they wanted, they would have asked for a faster horse.”

There’s something really interesting about love-hate relationship that the general public has with big brand thinking. The fear of manipulation through the hands of marketeers that is so palpable, particularly in the UK. Through British Airways tailfins to the 2012 logo, us brits love an uproar over visual identity. But that’s just theatre. You see, I’m nowhere near being convinced that asking a million people for their thoughts on your brand with no commercial context. Just because, nowadays, you can. Instead, you’ve got to have faith in the specialist hands of your brand team and their partners. Don’t cave in because someone hashtags your new launch with #brandfail. Step up. Explain your thinking. Fight for your actions.