There’s a real ten­sion in Cor­po­rate Amer­ica between the indi­vid­u­al’s desire for cre­ative expres­sion — to make a mark — and the cor­po­ra­tion’s desire to cut costs.

When that indi­vid­ual hap­pens to be a prod­uct man­ager, a mar­ket­ing or brand man­ager, or a “cre­ative,” it’s not uncom­mon for them to drive new vari­a­tions in how the brand is expressed. These vari­a­tions tend to crop up in con­junc­tion with new prod­uct launches or line exten­sions. As a result logo treat­ments and other aspects of visual iden­tity can vary all over the place.

The Octo­ber 2007 issue of Fast Com­pany makes this point all too clearly. The story opens with HP’s new CEO, Mark Hurd, ask­ing his senior design team why they were both­er­ing to meet with him (so early in his reign…) The arti­cle goes on to say:

The pony­tailed Sam Lucente, who’d become HP’s first-ever vice pres­i­dent of design two years ear­lier, was in the hot seat. He flashed a slide that showed dozens of HP logos, each cre­ated by a dif­fer­ent team within the com­pany. The next slide was of a sin­gle logo, crafted by his cor­po­rate design crew, that could be used every­where. Lucente pre­dicted that when 500 mil­lion of the new “jewel” logos were shipped, the com­pany would have saved roughly $50 mil­lion in devel­op­ment and man­u­fac­tur­ing costs.

As the Fast Com­pany arti­cle goes on to say, orga­ni­za­tional dynam­ics and cul­ture can make it dif­fi­cult to achieve brand con­sis­tency, even when vari­a­tions are costly:

But it’s one thing to win back­ing for a big design ini­tia­tive from the CEO, who is think­ing about the entire com­pany. It’s some­thing else to get exec­u­tives and man­agers who run spe­cific busi­ness units to embrace cor­po­rate design edicts. HP has scores of busi­ness units orga­nized into three main divi­sions — per­sonal sys­tems such as desk­top and note­book PCs; imag­ing and print­ing; and soft­ware and servers — each with its own P&L. The com­pa­ny’s 250 design­ers report to the heads of their par­tic­u­lar busi­ness units, who are used to oper­at­ing inde­pen­dently. Lucente may want to cre­ate com­pa­ny­wide stan­dards, but he can’t nec­es­sar­ily enforce them.

Stay tuned. It will be inter­est­ing to see how effec­tive Lucente can be at rein­ing in HP’s inde­pen­dent thinkers and prod­uct man­agers.