CANNES, FRANCE — In June 2024, the Milan Symphony Orchestra debuted “Growing Uptempo,” a rebrand inspired by the company’s musical core and brought to life through synesthesia. As a percussionist strikes her drums, the orchestra’s logo reverberates along with the beat. A conductor brings his music to a soft swelling, and the logo obliges in perfect harmony. A trumpeter plays a rousing tune, and the screen fills with the song’s dynamics.
“Growing Uptempo” was the fruit of painstaking work by brand consultancy Landor, which created not only the video series that launched the rebrand but also the custom fonts and overall design identity that allowed audiences to “see” the sound of the Milan Symphony Orchestra.
In an exclusive interview at the 2024 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, adobo Magazine caught up with Landor Global Chief Creative Officer Teemu Suviala and picked his brain on how he and his team manage to come up with such creative ideas — especially for brands.
“[Your] brand is not one thing,” he explained. “Your brand launch is not the brand. Your brand is years of work to create moments of interaction with your audience. In the end, it’s the summary of all those moments and events that formulate the brand in the consumer’s head.”
From this perspective, the Orchestra’s rebrand built its foundation; by creating meaningful moments of interaction — both through the design itself and through the flexibility of its application — Teemu and his team were able to build multiple touchpoints in the audience’s mind.
However, building these touchpoints alone isn’t enough. To truly resonate with the audience, the message needs to have what Teemu identifies as three crucial components of creativity: empathy, curiosity, and play.
“You need to be empathetic. You need to be able to jump into other people’s shoes and understand them,” he said. “This applies to the audiences you are doing the work for, but also your collaborators, your partners, your vendors, and so on. You have to be highly empathetic.”
“The second is you need to be ultimately curious,” Teemu continued. “You have to be curious about everything. And when you’re in your audience’s shoes and if you’re curious, you can see beyond the horizon. You can see where the future could be going and be constantly asking, ‘What if?,’ and be optimistic about those what-ifs and where they can take you.”
“The last piece that is needed is playfulness, that sense of play in everything we do. Play is creativity at its best. It’s no rules, everything is allowed. You’re testing, you’re prototyping, seeing where things go. You’re making mistakes. You just have to watch kids play and take inspiration from there.”
That deep understanding of what makes creativity resonate is exactly what makes efforts like “Growing Uptempo” work. In a marketing landscape where branding needs to be more multisensorial than ever, it’s this trifecta of empathy, curiosity, and play that will help brands continue to surprise and delight audiences.
Or, as Teemu put it: “Good ideas either make you uncomfortable, or they make you smile. And great ideas do both.”
