- Wolff Olins
Wolff Olins is a
brand consultancy , based in London and New York. It employs 180 people, a mix of designers, consultants and account managers, and since 2001 has been part of the marketing services groupOmnicom . Key figures are Bryan Boilan (chairman) and Karl Heiselman (chief executive officer).The company was founded in Camden Town, London, in 1965 by designer Michael Wolff and advertising executive
Wally Olins . Wolff left the business in 1983, and Olins in 2001, though both are still active in the field of branding.From 1965 to the early 1990s, Wolff Olins played a central part in developing the craft of
corporate identity in Europe, with Olins’s books "The Corporate Personality" (1978) and "Corporate Identity" (1989) widely influential. Olins defined corporate identity as ‘strategy made visible’, and the firm created well-known corporate identities for (among many others) BOC (1967),Apple Records (1968), Bovis (1971),3i (1983),Prudential (1986) andBT (1991).From the 1990s onwards, Wolff Olins focused more on branding, particularly corporate branding. Branding is seen as a tool for delivering an organisation’s strategy, rather than simply expressing it, and
brand as a central idea that influences an organisation’s products, skills and culture, as well as its image. The company’s branding work includesFirst Direct (1989), Orange (1994),Heathrow Express (1998),Tate (2000),GE (2004),Unilever (2004),Macmillan Cancer Support (2006),Product Red (2006),Sony Ericsson (2006) and the London2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games (2007).Throughout its history, Wolff Olins has been known for challenging and sometimes controversial work [http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2006/apr/05/marketingandpr.advertising] , [http://www.creativereview.co.uk/crblog/wolff-olins-expectations-confounded/] – its piper design for BT in 1989 attracted a great deal of opposition, and the launch of the
London 2012 brand in 2007 was met with widespread public disapproval in the UK, [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/06/04/nolympics104.xml] . The company was also responsible for the short-lived $110m (£75m) re-branding of PwC Consulting to "Monday".Most recently, Wolff Olins has proposed a view that the nature of brand is changing in the world of Web 2.0, where activist consumers are using brands as platforms for action, and where corporations need to become less controlling in their attitude to their brands. [http://www.wolffolins.com]
An oral history of Wolff Olins, made in 2002, is available in the British Library’s Sound Archive. [http://cadensa.bl.uk/uhtbin/cgisirsi/K9s6y7ha4j/52140030/123]
External links
* [http://www.wolffolins.com/ Wolff Olins]
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