How well did the brands in Back to the Future predict their own future?

Not least because one of the things BTTF2 was most famous for was the amount of product placement in the film. Global brands, such as Nike and Pepsi, were given the chance to showcase their logos and their products in the movie as they imagined they might exist in the future. A wonderful opportunity but a tough ask: a tongue-in-cheek test too see which brands could best predict their own future.

Robert Zemeckis, the director of BTTF2, has said that he wanted to create a vision that was the opposite of most other cinematic depictions of the future: humorous (lawyers have been abolished!), colourful and optimistic, as compared to the cold, dark dystopia of a film like Blade Runner. The graphic design of the future, depicted in cinema, tends to be quite mechanical. This may well have been inspired by the NASA ‘worm’ logo created in 1975 with it’s ‘square’ uppercase characters and simplified, geometric linework. We can see it’s influence in the Star Wars logo, Bladerunner, Tron, and The Terminator.

So what’s behind this geometric type trend? Most future-based films have Orwellian ‘slants’ to the story. Corporations are in control and are authority figures, to be obeyed. Take a look at fictional ‘villain’ corporations Omnicorp and Skynet: there is nothing human and engaging in their identities. This could easily have been the future imagined by someone in the rampant corporate capitalism of the 1980s and not surprisingly this type trend made its way into the BTTF2 movie as the typeface for the Hill Valley police.

How did the brands invited into the BTTF2 world do when it came to their own future representations? Inevitably it’s a mixed bag, but there are some interesting things to be found.

Let’s start with logos. USA Today, Texaco, 7-Eleven, Pizza Hut and Pepsi all reimagined their logos, suggesting that they would consist of that textbook futuristic type and/or a more geometric mark. Texaco did it and USA Today added a go-faster (Blade Runner) stripe, while Pizza Hut did away with the beautiful curves from their wordmark and used a sharp, blocky type locked up to their famous (straight-edged) red roof.

Meanwhile, 7-Eleven straightened out its ‘7’, giving it a sharp point, and bought in a white circle instead of the white trapezoid that usually contains the lockup. Pepsi went the other way, constructing most of its letterforms from a circle – a play on their logo holding shape perhaps?

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Some notable brands – Nike, provider of those sneakers, and Mattel who ‘made’ that iconic hoverboard – left their marks untouched, as they have done in real life. Indeed, in Nike’s case, its fame has only increased since the film, to the point where it felt confident enough to de-brand, ie to drop the wordmark, from its logo in 1995, the first company to do so.

The ‘swoosh’ is the thing, with the associations it cultivates in fashion and pop culture as important as those it does in sport. By wearing Nike you can play like a pro and gain instant street cred – it’s more than a logo, it’s an experience. And this means that the brand is loved too, so much so that in 2011 when 1,500 pairs of a limited edition BTTF2 replica Nike Air Mag were released and attracted bids of thousands of dollars – even if they lacked the self-tying laces.

In terms of products and experiences, there were definitely some great ideas in the film which the brands associated with them didn’t manage to make real. Black & Decker had never produced a product for the kitchen but foresaw that a food re-hydrator could be a possibility for them. This product allowed Lorraine McFly to provide a hot meal for her family in about three seconds which would be a blessing for us time-poor people in 2015 – but unfortunately Black & Decker never made the move into kitchenware.

Another was AT&T, which had the vision of a connected, smart home – the future McFly residence had thumb-pad operated doors, video conferencing with voice automation and… a fax machine. The brand has managed to follow through on some of that with its current Digital Life offering but it’s a pity it dropped the ball on the advent of the mobile phone – in the film Marty McFly Jnr uses an AT&T payphone instead.

Of course, some of the brands featured in the film have lost their way in the intervening 26 years, and aren’t quite the powerhouses they were. Pizza Hut was once the bastion of family restaurants but has been losing f(l)avour since the 90s. It's had four logo refreshes in the last 15 years to try to keep up with the times – but a new logo can’t save it: it needs to innovate its consumer offer.

Unfortunately it has changed its mind a lot over the years, from drive-thru only to smaller delivery focused stores The equity it put into the red-roofed restaurants has become a hindrance rather than a help, and we can see the shift it has made away from it in its latest logo refresh by keeping the shape of the roof, in white, on a red background. Its old logo represents the heydays of the restaurant and some of its staff wear it on T-shirts – is this an attempt to capitalise on a retro cool factor with those of us old enough to remember the good times?

Sure BTTF2 was a bit of fun for these brands, rather than an attempt to predict the future. But it’s impossible to not make comparisons with the real-life present. What this quick analysis suggests to me is that there is no way to guarantee that your brand identity can be future-proofed. Rather, the best thing to do is to ensure that the brand experiences you provide are consistently relevant and engaging. In that way an identity can be timeless through association.

However for old times’ sake, I think I’ll re-watch the film now with a Pepsi… and possibly even order in from Pizza Hut.

Natasha Chance is creative director at BrandPie