The newest ideas often come from the intersections of different disciplines.  Here designer Marc Shillum crossed the lines between user experience, creative direction and strategic planning to solve for one of the big paradoxes in branding today: what holds a brand together in a more fragmented, fluid digital world?

Here’s the issue: when the main interface between a customer and a brand is digital, it has to become more iterative and responsive.  The more interface a brand has with its customers, the more nuanced and human it needs to become.  The customer’s power to inform a brand outstrips the company’s ability to control it.  And these forces fight the traditional view that a brand’s identity should be fixed. 

We need a new model for looking at what holds a brand together in the digital world.  Shillum suggests thinking about brands as patterns.

Patterns aren’t straight repetition: they’re the way that culture and nature hold different elements together in a coherent whole.  Likewise, brands need to create coherence between multiple, smaller ideas

Patterns are a good analogy for today’s brand behavior:

Patterns are adaptive and coherent.  Consider the Apple iPhone app grid.  It contains thousands of elements, held together by the curved tile design, so we can still recognize anything in it.

Patterns can hold one big idea and many small ideas.  Uniqlo doesn’t have a big brand message, it has unique projects that become tools for the user, from Mix Play to Color Tweet to the famous Uniqlock, each eagerly awaited by Uniqlo’s customers, each adding to the overall picture of the brand.

Patterns are the way people recognize new value.  Repetition builds recognition; variation builds interest.  It’s certainly true in music.  Also true in Ikea: in every store, the journey through the maze of products is always familiar, allowing Ikea to introduce new elements.

Patterns are foundational and transferrable.  Once you establish them, people can act on them and pass them on.  The ISO standard of paper sizes, Most Interesting Man lines, the basic design of an iPhone app.

Patterns create belief and trust.  They make brands seem, smarter, more responsive, more human.

Brands need to abandon some of their rigidity to thrive in the digital world.  By thinking of themselves as patterns, they’ll still keep the coherence they need.