BRANDING:Admired and despised in equal measure, Chris Bangle has revolutionised carmaker BMW's fortunes through redesigning and rebranding

CHRIS BANGLE, A FIFTY-SOMEthing hip-talking car designer from Ravenna, Ohio, has over the past 20 years become one of the most controversial practitioners of his art.

Chief of design at the BMW group, Bangle has simultaneously conspired to alienate loyal customers, who still call for his resignation on websites set up specifically to protest at his car designs, and contributed to a growth in the BMW customer base so substantial that the company is now the world's number one premium brand with profits nearing €3 billion a year.

Bangle the manager has liberated his co-designers from what he calls an "excel type" process where each euro of investment has a known return at a given date: the micro-milestone approach where predictability is preferred to inspiration.

Twice in his 15 years at BMW he has sent collaborative teams of strategists, designers, marketeers and engineers on six month forays into the world beyond the confines of BMW, to let them live and breathe customer values and lifestyles.

The first of these, Deep Blue, saw his team take up residence in a beach house in Malibu to live the Californian dream, and understand better the expectations of the American market. Its first major output is due to launch in the autumn of 2007 in the shape of a new cross over sports utility/coupé, in effect a category busting off-road sports car.

Yet he is also the man who introduced '86,400', the efficiency programme that forces BMW designers to account for every second of their day; and in case you don't do quick mental maths, yes there are 86,400 seconds in a day.

Bangle also endorsed the purchase by BMW of Design Works, an independent design house that takes on contracts for clients in the cell phone, boat, train and computing businesses, effectively creating competition for his own department.

He is also, ironically as the chief designer at the world's biggest premium brand, part of a generation untrained in branding. "When I was in school at the end of the 1970s, it was just at the beginning of the time when a class would begin: this is a brand, and what does the design need to do to be correct to the brand, etc," he says. "But before it wasn't like that, it was: solve a design problem in a particular aesthetic direction."

Bangle still describes himself as a problem solver and chooses to skirt the subject of brand values. "My generation of designers is a generation of problem solvers," he says. But he also points out that: "A name like a 3, a name like a 5, a 6. It is a guideline to allow you to try and do your best on the same playing field as great designers of the past."

His working methods are complex, but so too is the BMW phenomenon, a premium brand that flirts with artists like Andy Warhol (each year BMW gives a premium car over to an artist to redesign as they wish). It's a premium brand that is also a fleet car, a premium brand that outsells mass produced competitors in important markets like the UK.

Bangle's BMW raises the question: do we really understand brands that well? The idea that a brand engages our emotions and allows us to express elements of our desires and aspirations has a strong hold in the marketing literature, as does the discipline of brand consistency.

But those ideas and disciplines emerged in the 1970s, a time when global wealth distribution was very different from today.

"Premium brands like Armani and Gucci are now within the reach of an increasing number of people," says John Fanning, author of The Importance of Being Branded: an Irish perspective. He could have added BMW, Mercedes, Chanel, Burberry, Dolce and Gabbana or any number of brands that evoke images of luxury but also have mass currency. "Because of increases in wealth, people are going for brands that express the identities they want to express," says Fanning. But is that really so?

Consumers are also mixing luxury brands with their Top Shop staples; and the formerly down market Top Shop recently called in the iconic Kate Moss to bring more of the catwalk to their high street stores.

Spanish fashion brand Zara has honed its design, production and distribution techniques so that it can now take catwalk trends and have them in its 1,000 stores with two to five weeks of a major fashion show, playing the local market for precisely what its worth.

Chanel, one of history's enduring luxury brands is rapidly redirecting its strategy around more exclusivity under the guidance of new chief Maureen Chiquet, who has sanctioned the design and sale of a $26,000 (€19,264) handbag. At the same time you'll find Chanel No 5 perfume in the inflight shopping inventory of the average budget airline.

The truth is perhaps that the idea of brand is losing its exclusive meaning at the same time that consumers are taking an ever more creative approach to self-expression.

"Brand is becoming an over-used word," says Dublin-based Krishan De who worked formerly with Diageo and now runs her own brand consultancy. "You can argue everything is a brand. Own brand product, own labels. The Tesco Value brand is a brand and you have very strong brands like Ryanair." Brands, in other words, that are only tangentially associated with aspiration.

At the Pinokathek Der Moderne Design Museum in the elite Schwabing district of Munich, Bangle's BMW design team have installed an exhibit. Upstairs the Kandinsky's and Picassos hang on the concrete and spacious walls. Underground the auto-designers have created a moving wall. Behind the wall is a collage of old BMW parts. In front is a tribute to design.

Bangle of course emphasises that this foray into the art world took only two months from concept to completion. We are once again at the contradictory heart of the world's most successful premium brand.

BMW overtook Mercedes to that title in 2005 and has kept its lead since. In Ireland sales increased by 15 per cent in the year to May 2007 giving BMW nearly 30 per cent of the luxury market.

Amid the talk of brands and aspiration, the controversy over Bangle's designs has at its core a valid point. Bangle didn't set out to replicate BMW's past glories. His greatest achievement, he says, is putting together a harmonious and productive design team. Another evident achievement though is he has produced a generation of those ultimate driving machines that are beautiful, fussy and stylish.

While people talk about the power of the BMW brand they forget to mention the anger these design-fuelled cars have inspired in a loyal customer base. The designs are in a sense anti-brand and arguably that's why they work. They've moved BMW away from its utilitarian past, angered customers and yet increased sales.

"One question surely worth asking is whether they can now move us away from our over-simplistic view of what a brand is, how it interacts with design and what we, the customers, really want.

COMPANIES THAT BLUR THE IDEA OF BRAND

Brand theory . . . is it stuck in the past? Everyday, consumers demonstrate their desire to participate creatively in what they consume.

Here are five examples that blurred the line, in some cases because companies are challenging the accepted wisdom of brand theory, in others because consumers want to do things their way.

1 ZARA

The Spanish clothing chain Zara is a complete design, production and distribution system dedicated to satisfying customers through rapid-fire designs.

Sources in the industry say they release between 10,000 and 40,000 new products a year through a production system that is instantly adaptable to trends.

Copying catwalk fashions or simply ditching designs that don't work within days of them arriving in shops Zara redefines the relationship between customer and product.

2 NEWCASTLE BROWN ALE

Newcastle Brown Ale is a traditional drink of the majority of men in northeast England, yet it is also currently the number one performing alcohol brand in the US (Guinness draught only managed eigth place in this year's industry rankings) where it has become a fashionable tipple for wealthy career women in chic San Diego bars.

Far from its English roots, sun-kissed California is now the beer's core overseas market.

3 WAGAMAMA

The noodle chain Wagamama is an example of what brand specialist John Fanning describes as well-off people looking for street credibility.

Launched as a healthy eating option for students, Wagamama queues from Dublin to London are a case study in democratisation, their austere interiors adorned with the sound of a healthy and wide mix of people all enjoying cheap, fast food at communal tables.

Wagamama is not luxury brand, niche or more mass market. It is one of a growing number of food solutions that defies easy labelling.

4 CHANEL

The fashion house Chanel is the epitome both of class and of a luxury brand that skirts around bling.

While nobody would deny the fashion side of its business, controlled now by designer Karl Lagerfeld, is anything other than haute, its accessibility is causing new chief executive, the American marketer from Gap Maureen Chiquet, concern.

The response is a move further upmarket with a new range of handbags in the super-luxury category with prices in the $20,000 plus range.

5 VIRGIN

The brand that is Virgin is thought by some to be the most perplexing, built around the persona of chief Richard Branson, a serial failure in his well publicised ballooning trips.

Virgin's airline brand Virgin Airways began as a cut-price transatlantic service but soon morphed into a door-to-door transport service utilising a fleet of Range Rovers to pick up and drop off business class customers.

The airline's enduring innovation was a mid-range price category, super-economy, proving that even a low-cost airline that plugs its luxury service has to compromise.