The hard sell

I met Olins in his home, part of a 1930s mansion block in Marylebone, London. It looks like it's straight out of an Agatha Christie or PG Wodehouse novel: waist-high oak panelling, sound-deadening carpets and a pantry-sized kitchen just the right size for mixing cocktails. For the moment, it also doubles as the office of Olins' new firm, Saffron Consulting.

Live-work convenience? Not exactly. The block is being renovated, and the open windows necessary on the hottest afternoon of the year so far are letting in a head-pounding racket. The combination of heat and noise isn't doing much for Olins' mood: he's keen to get the interview over with, is fretting about the three colleagues banished to the kitchen, and is no more than functionally polite. As a professional communicator who specialises in addressing mass audiences, finding Olins to be a tetchy interviewee is rather unexpected.

At Wolff Olins, the firm he co-founded in 1965 and headed until a takeover led to an "amicable" parting of the ways last summer, Olins' finger on the national pulse gave us the ubiquitous slogan for Orange as well as the no-frills image of telephone bank First Direct.

But the man who has taken on the National Housing Federation's challenge of giving social housing a makeover isn't interested in catchy buzzwords, or creating a vision of social housing that will leap off the page. Olins' delivery is weighted and academic, his tone that of an outsider looking down a telescope. He sets out a series of "knotty paradoxes" that his work hopes to resolve: how housing associations provide housing, but also additional social services; how there is a single sector but 1400 separate member organisations; how the public-private sector line they straddle is in politically fashionable territory, but subject to red tape and constraints.

He is conscious of the divide between the high-demand South-east and the North's "overabundance", and the opportunities presented by stock transfer. He says: "The issue is to come up with a profile that enables the sector to speak collectively on certain issues, but also allows each member to speak personally. We need to create a sector with a national voice, but which is firmly rooted in regional and local affairs; a sector which is seen as powerful, influential, and proactive in terms of its influence, as its weight suggests."

But isn't a branding exercise, well, about creating a brand concept that Mr and Ms Average can discuss with their colleagues in the pub? About defining where we want to go, rather than the problems we want to leave behind? Olins delivers his reply down his nose: "Didn't I say that? I thought that was implicit in what I just said."

You can’t make social housing more accessible if it doesn’t exist in people’s minds. You have to make it exist

Olins' point, which he elucidates later on, is that the actual brand – "although we're pretty far removed from talking about Mars bars" – can only be constructed on the basis of a solid infrastructure. "You can't talk about making social housing more successful, available and accessible if it doesn't exist in the minds of most people. You first have to make it exist, then articulate it in lots of different ways."

He describes the second stage as "what things are called, and how things are related to other things. How can we demonstrate a range of activities, how can we reward those people who have achieved something." More concretely, he mentions the lack of "a single series of documents and websites. We've got a lot of bits and papers that explain various aspects, but nothing that says clearly what we're about."

Social housing isn't Olins' first foray outside the private sector. It follows work at Wolff Olins for the Metropolitan Police and the Department of Trade and Industry. He describes public sector work as "very complex and tricky, full of paradoxes and contradictions. Projects go slowly, they have to be consensual, and they rarely move as far as you want them to because there are so many political and cultural constraints."

He is quick to add a positive spin: "But they're also very important. A corporate project is important for the corporate, but this is important for the cultural, economic and in some senses political future of this country."

He took up the federation's challenge in April this year, after contacts made through a clutch of non-executive roles on not-for-profit bodies led him to chief executive Jim Coulter. At the time, he says, he was "dimly aware housing associations existed, but like anyone else I didn't really have a clue". He views it as a one-year project which could be extended into an "implementation" phase at the federation's discretion.

As well as creating a mission statement for the sector, then tuning voices to articulate it, there is the thorny question of names. Olins confirms there will be "a new terminology" to replace what he calls the "welfare and Cathy Come Home" connotations of social housing. Even the term "housing association" is under consideration. More details should be revealed at the federation's annual conference in September, which Olins hopes will sign off on Saffron's groundwork, and allow it to move ahead on the detail.