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Wally Olins believed branding was about culture.
Wally Olins believed branding was about culture. Photograph: Saffron Brand Consultants
Wally Olins believed branding was about culture. Photograph: Saffron Brand Consultants

Wally Olins obituary

This article is more than 9 years old
One of the world's most successful corporate identity and branding gurus

From the 1960s onwards, Wally Olins, who has died aged 83, was Britain's most articulate and effective proselytiser for the new commercial religion of branding, and for the profession of branding consultant, something to be distinguished from the familiar "marketing communications" trades such as advertising, PR and even design.

Branding, as Olins argued it, was an altogether higher-order, more holistic concern, nothing less than an organising principle for practically everything a business or organisation did. Brands, as he pointed out, were far more than memorable names for modest little things in tins and packets, advertised in traditional mass media. Brand thinking and reputation management could be applied to companies, NGOs, arts institutions, countries – and individuals.

Olins's achievement was to argue for branding as a kind of long-term strategic thinking, rather than a series of actions: television ads, corporate identity programmes, parties and press releases that outside specialists could organise on a check-list basis and then send in big bills for. He argued that branding was so much more than messaging and cosmetics. He said that it was about culture – how the people behind the brand were organised and how they behaved – and the reality of products over time. Attractive advertising would not save dull products made by complacent companies that did not have a culture of innovation. And he said that outsiders could not do it all, while the company just got on with whatever it did. They had to be involved and committed. The chief executive had to champion the change.

The essence of his case was that brands, not technologies, are the organising principles of global business now and that brands answer increasingly important human needs, for belonging and emotional reward. Globalisation and new technologies, he said, made brands more central than ever.

In his first book, The Corporate Personality: An Inquiry Into the Nature of Corporate Identity (1978), Olins set out his arguments for the primacy of brand thinking for a wider audience than that in the boardroom and on the conference platform. It was gloriously wide-ranging, touching upon subjects from the symbolism of ancient world armies to culture contrasts in status-markers in Africa or suburban America. Its learning was lightly worn; and blissfully jargon-free. No MBA language or easy adland anecdotes.

Over the years, Olins's books became primers for a generation of admen, PRs, and graphic and product designers, anyone who wanted to sound credible in the ideology of branding. And not only in Britain – Olins was translated into 18 languages.

Olins was not a designer by background – the familiar route in to brand consultancy businesses – nor indeed any kind of "creative". He was a former advertising agency "suit", an Oxford history graduate recruited in the 50s when London establishment ad agencies recruited those kinds of people.

Born in London, son of Rachel (nee Muscovitch) and Alfred Olins, he was educated at Highgate school and St Peter's College, Oxford. His first job, after national service with the army in Germany, was with SH Benson, one of the London agencies that backed Ogilvy & Mather, the US firm founded by the British adman David Ogilvy, and eventually became part of it. Soon after his marriage, in 1957, to Renate Steinert, whom he had met at Oxford, came his first overseas posting, to India, where he spent five years.

Returning from India in the early 60s as a young executive, Olins was increasingly unhappy in advertising's officer corps. He told me a few years ago that he found the work "very superficial and cosmetic and we didn't get to the heart of anything". He moved to the London agency Geers Gross (now long gone) and worked briefly in designland but his Damascene conversation came when he met Michael Wolff, the designer, whom he once described as "the most brilliant creative brain I ever met, and the most maddening human being".

Wolff had studied architecture and design and had been working in a small London design partnership when they met and started their groundbreaking brand consultancy Wolff Olins in 1965. Wolff was a creative who could talk persuasive, sensible-sounding RP English, too, not mockney. Olins was a thinker who could sell. From 1965 to 1983, when Wolff left, they developed Wolff Olins as the poster organisation and stalking horse of the big brand movement. Among their clients were London Weekend Television, the Beatles' company Apple, British Oxygen, Cunard, English Electric, British Telecom, 3i, Renault and the Metropolitan police.

At first, as Olins recalled, nobody understood the ideas. Advertising people were, he said recently, deeply condescending about the fledgling Wolff Olins business. They believed that adland was the only possible place to be and that Olins had gone down in the world. They saw his clever rhetoric as a bid for status. But he believed he had got closer to the long-term essentials of his clients' businesses. He was proved right. The status of traditional creative advertising agencies has declined; and a mass of new focused specialisms compete for companies' time and budgets.

The breakthrough exemplar business for Wolff Olins was American. "I think the man who kind of coined it for us was Walter Margulies of Lippincott & Margulies," Olins said. The original roots of the "corporate identity" business lay in design-led American companies which, from the 30s to the 50s, rationalised the look of great corporations through the application of massive design programmes. These programmes dictated the style of offices, shops, vans, writing-paper, staff uniforms and every instance where the company introduced or identified itself. Classic corporate identity programmes included a logo and a bible that laid down exactly how the identity should be applied. There was some elegant work done, but that approach looks authoritarian and obvious now.

Late 20th-century corporate and organisational branding practices – including Wolff Olins themselves – suffered with constant identity problems of their own. Whatever their rhetoric, much of their output seemed to be design: the design of logos for companies and organisations, the graphic design of practically everything the organisation did. When Wolff Olins launched new work for a client, journalists would review the squiggle rather than the thinking behind it, and were forever saying that an underwhelming bit of symbolism had cost organisations with more money than sense some hundreds of thousands. Those articles became particularly rancorous when high-profile public sector or charitable organisation clients were involved, and Wolff Olins did work for both.

In 1999 Olins was appointed CBE. In 2001 he sold Wolff Olins to Omnicom, the US-based global conglomerate, one of the world's three largest "marcoms" businesses. There was a general assumption that he might semi-retire, becoming a part-time academic and follow his interests of buying books, looking at architecture or travelling. Or just write some more books.

But soon afterwards he joined the Spanish-based international brand consultancy Saffron, started by a Wolff Olins alumnus, Jacob Benbunan, as a hands-on chairman. In his 70s and 80s he became branding's tireless global senior statesman, explaining and persuading from platforms around the world and taking on the exciting but controversial business of country branding. More books followed, including Brand New: The Shape of Brands to Come, which was published this month.

His first marriage ended in divorce. He is survived by his second wife, Dornie (nee Watts), whom he married in 1990, and their daughter, Harriet; two sons, Rufus and Ben, and a daughter, Edwina, of his first marriage; and three granddaughters, Ellie, Eliza and Clem.
Peter York

Mark Damazer writes: Any discussion, meeting or meal with Wally Olins was injected with ferocious energy and boundless charm. I met him only after I became master of St Peter's College, Oxford, but he had a palpable gift for friendship and within minutes of our first encounter he was coming up with schemes and plots to help the college. Wally fizzed. He would stride in, wearing his trademark bow tie, fedora in hand, sit down, reveal his always gaudily coloured socks and start talking – ideas tumbling over one another in excitement.

He was the youngest octogenarian I had met. He was relentlessly curious about buildings, objects, but above all people. He loved talking to anyone of any generation and when he reflected on the past, he did so shorn of any "good old days" rhetoric. He was a great performer too. When he came to give a talk at the college, the room was packed with business students of many nationalities who lapped up his observations on design and branding and bathed him in admiration and affection.

He was immensely proud of having been a student at Oxford and St Peter's in particular and he was in tears when I told him that he had been made an honorary fellow. He came to the college often (with his wife Dornie too) and loved it.

Wallace Olins, brand consultant, born 19 December 1930; died 14 April 2014

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