August 21, 2008
Our Better Place Story

Shai Agassi, CEO & Founder, Better Place (Left) and Gavin Jennings, Minister, Environment, Climate Change and Innovation for the Victorian Government (Right)

We are enormously proud to be a part of creating this historic brand. I drank the Kool-Aid on Shai Agassi’s ambitious plan to rid the world of its dependence on oil long before the company’s October 2007 launch. When I took a survey of others with whom Shai shared the plan, their biggest objections focused not on the plan’s virtue but on the ability to get it done. The only thing standing in Shai’s way was inertia and a blanket acceptance of the status quo, which was a very telling sign. Everyone knew that our dependence on oil was an evil, but they had resigned themselves to the notion that all other alternatives were mere folly; moving such an entrenched infrastructure was too daunting to become a reality.

But, to know Shai is to know that it can get done. As Shimon Peres describes it, "we need a boy like in the fairy tales." It takes a purity of intent, an unstoppable drive, and a canny vision to see how existing elements can be rearranged to form a remarkably simple solution. While the end solution is simple, getting there is complicated and rife with obstacles. And telling the story of the second chapter of the automotive industry (the first chapter has lasted 100 years) before even a single electric car is available to purchase, is equally challenging.

Shai asked us to join his team and, together with Hill & Knowlton, to tell the story of a post-petroleum future. In possibly the most collaborative experience of my career, Better Place, Hill & Knowlton, and Addis Creson worked through the obstacles, stigmas, myths, and biases swirling around the discussion of our collective transportation future.

And the brand we were about to create needed to begin not with a product, but with a movement. It will be a couple of years before the infrastructure for electric cars is in place. The challenge of our brand is to elevate the entire electric car category long before it will actually morph into a consumer product.

With the mission to end our addiction to oil, we landed on the construct of four P's: People, Planet, Prosperity, and a fourth that triggers either a vicious cycle or a virtuous one. Today, that trigger is the Pump. The gas pump is the addict's syringe, where we administer our weekly fix. And it is the pump that so negatively affects our people, our planet, and our prosperity. We depict this relationship as a black spot of oil with four equal sections: Pump, People, Planet, and Prosperity.

But, if that trigger is flipped in a new direction, to the electric Plug, we can reverse the effects for people, planet, and prosperity. Visually, we depict this as moving from the black spot to the blue "Switch," our symbol that embodies the Earth and our optimistic path to the future.

The vision for the identity system is to depict the idea of integrating the pieces of the puzzle in new ways to achieve new solutions. Each symbol starts with a quarter circle that is transformed into a part of a living visual vernacular.

As the brand strategy evolves, we are building out the corporate identity to all branded touchpoints. We're also using short videos as the primary channel to convey the brand's message globally. The goal is to conceive a brand that connects disparate audiences from its beginning.

By Steven Addis | Posted in Latest Work, Social Change

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