Noah has just created Brand Tags - a site that allows you to tag brands with whatever words you associate with the brand and then converts the brand into a weighted tag cloud of associations.
It nicely demonstrates the socially constructed nature of brands and their inherent multiplicity of meaning - putting the one word equity idea firmly to rest.
Noah said some good stuff on stage at PSFK that we've been talking about for a while [that he kindly, falsely attributes to me]: that brands need to act like people, especially in a digital context.
We naturally anthropomorphize everything. We can't help it - we're incredibly solipsistic. But it's also because most of our big ol' brains evolved to help us understand other people. It's really very complex. I have to model how you might respond to what I might say, and how it might influence them and so on.
So we see faces in everything and think computers are out to get us when they crash with that deck unsaved.
Stephen King picked up on this. Hence the idea of brand personality was born and agencies began to attempt to link specific personality attributes to products.
But they didn't act like people.
Now, if brands want to play in our social media spaces, if they want to come to our party, they have to act like people. By being nice. And charming. And polite. By asking our names, or getting us a drink. By being interesting. Or useful. Or flirtatious.
Not just shouting about how great they are the whole time.
My mate Nancy is involved with an ecard start up called someecards:
for when you care enough to hit send.
They have a panoply of wonderfully offensive electronic missive material for your delectation.
I chose this one because it references an interesting media behaviour that I keep noticing.
There's too much media. Too much content constantly crying out for attention. So we develop tools to manage the flow, allowing us to timeshift and placesshift how we consume content. But there are only so many hours in the day.
Content keeps building up, in the PVR, the RSS reader, the inboxes, the media streams.
And if you leave the stream for a couple days, there's this huge backlog of content that needs to be cleared.
I've got to go home tonight - I've got loads of stuff on Sky Plus I need to get through.
PVR pressure. Email overload. RSS distress.
I just delete everything in my inbox / feedreader.
Too much of a good thing and it becomes a chore. The signal to noise ratio gets confused, because, when there is too much signal, it becomes noise.
Which leads me to wonder. About brands and that.
Brands have grown up using content to communicate.
But do we really need more content? Or are we tense enough as it is?
Perhaps there are other things brands could do, rather than adding to the ever-expanding infinity, to be entertaining or useful. To earn some attention.
Someone has to help alleviate all this tension.
Could the future of brands be in collation, curation, aggregation, dissemination, navigation, catalysation (insert other words that end in -ation of your choice here) - rather than traditional creation?
[UPDATE: Mr. Sorrell doesn't agree.]
I love this logo.
It's everywhere in New York - on vans and shops - and every time I see it it makes me smile.
I point it out to people and each time they're surprised.
Can you see it?
Look closely.
Closer.
OK - look at the negative space between the E and X. This picture really highlights it.
Now what do you see?
The arrow is practically subliminal - you almost never notice it unless it's been pointed out - but once you see it you it jumps out every time.
It's a masterpiece of design - transforming a mundane and over used symbol, designed to communicate speed and precision, and elevating it into something beautiful and rewarding.
The designer, Lindon Leader, sums up the effect:
The power of the hidden arrow is simply that it is a “hidden bonus.” Importantly, not “getting the punch line” by not seeing the arrow, does not reduce the impact of the logo’s essential communication.
It's similar to the layered meanings that that Jason discussed here. The design rewards the viewer when they 'get it', but not 'getting it' doesn't detract from it's ability to communicate. Rather, it adds another layer to be appreciated.
What's more, the hidden device becomes a social object of sorts - a piece of social currency:
I can’t tell you how many people have told me how much fun they have asking others “if they can spot ‘something’ in the logo.”
Easter eggs have long been a feature of films and games - the hidden message or object rewards those who are more involved and digging them out triggers the formation of knowledge communities - it seems like a very sensible trope for brand communicators to embrace.
A hidden bonus is a great way to start conversations.
Modernista's new website has just gone up and it has heartily embraced its distributed identity.
Rather than aggregating the places it lives online like the Zeus Jones homepage, the site itself is only a navigation bar that guides you around the elements of agency on the web - its Wikipedia page and Facebook profile, with the work displayed on flickr and youtube.
As Gareth says:
It's an interweb thingy that uses the internet.
[Via Noah]
There's something oddly cute about this.
One of the differences I've noted between London and New York is scale.
Everything comes in larger sizes (restaurant meals are best left unfinished unless you also desire to come in a larger size) and there are many more options to chose from - especially on the supermarket shelf, which groan under a bewildering array of alternatives in every product category.
Choice is equated to freedom and freedom is a necessary condition to ensure the unalienable right to pursue your own individual flavour of happiness - more options mean more freedom, which means more happiness.
Except it doesn't work that way.
Barry Schwartz points out in the Paradox of Choice (which you can read most of here thanks to Google Books) having too many options tends to make you unhappy, which is why he argues that hypercapitalist economies, which sanctify individual autonomy and thus force decisions at every possible opportunity, tend to less happier overall.
This insight is incredibly compelling because it feels right and yet wrong - freedom underlies the cultural foundation of western society and has been thoroughly internalised as part of your Freudian superego - so people know that they love choice, but find they hate making decisions.
The book is full of good examples of people doing almost anything to avoid making difficult decisions - ones where there is no clear, obviously better option, but the one that best highlights the conflicted drivers of consumer behaviour, is the jam experiment.
A supermarket experiments with sampling - alternating between offering 6 and 24 different flavours of jam to try. The 24 jam table always attracts more people [we love choice - amongst all those options there must be the right jam for me] but, having been attracted, they were forced to make a difficult decision [arrgh there are too many to choose from, lots of them are good, I just don't care this much about jam] which ultimately led to the 24 jam display selling 1/10 as many jars as the 6 jar table.
Dramatically increasing the number of options dramatically decreases the propensity to purchase.
Decisions with lots of options cause anxiety, paralysis, proleptic regret and a bunch of other negative responses mentioned in the Ted talk above. They increase the effort invested in the decision, the opportunity cost of any choice you make and ultimately can diminish the enjoyment you get from anything you do choose - the book explores these negative psychological effect in detail and suggests a strategy to avoid them, which is essentially lower your expectations and seek to make good enough, rather than the best, possible decision (satisfice don't maximise).
But we've developed another way to help deal with this problem, at least at the supermarket: brands.
We spend a lot of time thinking about what brands are and how they work - I started to wonder what they were for.
Brands are good for companies - they increase frequency of purchase, allow you to charge a price premium, drive loyalty, are a defensible competitive advantage and contribute massively to the intangible asset value of a company.
But what's the function for consumers? What value do they offer to individuals that leads to the non-rational behaviour that drives shareholder value?
The function of brands has evolved as the economy does. In early capitalist economies, economies of scale create large corporations that distribute across massive areas. Brands function as trustmarks, ensuring that you get what you expect.
But in hypercapitalist economies, we achieve functional product parity, which means that every minor purchase decision becomes difficult - there is no clear, obviously better option - which makes a supermarket a very uncomfortable prospect.
Brands come to the rescue: they function like heuristics - the take away the need to make decisions, take away the pressure of pretending to ourselves that we are rational economic agents, prevent us from breaking down every time we want some jam, by providing us with a simple rule of thumb: go with what you know.
Even if you don't choose the market leading brand in the category (although you usually will, by definition) you can anchor the category to it, allowing you to make a decision in relation to it.
So, as emotions are the lubricants of reason, brands are the lubricants of commerce.
Content and media are weird words. They are the antonymic binary stars that all our industries circle around, feeding of the energy they pump out into culture.
They don't really exist without each other. Even in the very specific sense in which we use the words, they are both defined by what they are not.
A medium is a vector for content.
Content is that which is mediated.
Without a medium, there is no content.
Without content, you have no media.
Content might be king [or even possibly a kaiser] but all that really means, and has ever meant, is that people like stuff more than the absence of stuff.
Less facetiously, people like ideas. We live off them. We literally define ourselves by our ability to have and to hold them. But with ideas we hit another semantic issue - there is no other word in philosophy that has quite as many different flavours to it.
I don't mean big ideas, innate ideas, platonic ideas or anything like that. Let's just say stuff in your head. The desired result from any communication interaction. I have stuff in my head, I want to put it in yours.
Content/media is a way to do that over time and space and to many heads all at once.
Stories are one of the oldest ways of doing that. Stories survive because they are either entertaining [man's life is ugly, brutish and short, and we tend to like anything that takes our mind off that] but also because they are useful.
Originally that useful meant 'and lo did ugggg eat of the purple bush and verily did he die' [I'm doubt that australopithecus used a bad Shakespearean register but you get the point] but later that came to be useful in the sense of telling us something about ourselves.
We are meaning seeking creatures. We think and therefore we wonder. And wondering very quickly leads us to some big [so far] unanswerable questions that underly existential despair.
So we craft myths that place us in a larger setting, and thus give us the sense that our lives have meaning.
John Lennon said "reality leaves a lot to the imagination" and stories help resolve the contradiction between the different kinds of human experience, physical and mental, providing our lives with a metanarrative that helps us explain ourselves to ourselves.
Brands have a similar cultural function, that allows us create and manipulate meaning in the commercial culture we operate within. As science overtook myth as the dominant paradigm for understanding the world, the importance of myths in our culture began to fade, leaving a gap we capitalists began to unconsciously fill with commercial icons, that became the myths that are brands.
Western culture is the child of logos [the opposite of mythos in Hellenistic tradition, it represents science and fact]. Without myths to provide context and meaning, we created our own around the newly powerful forces of consumerism.
Logos led us to logos.
Myths are stories that can be told in innumerable different ways without losing their core meaning. Just like brands. And right now we are learning some new ways of telling the same stories, updating the form to adjust for the current climate, which is the way it has always happened.
So, perhaps, if we can't work out how to tell these stories in a relevant way, we'll die.
Or, as an industry, we'll evolve.
Just like during the Cambrian explosion, lots of new kinds of brand meme carriers are going to try and find a niche to inhabit.
And lots of new kinds of agency will be born and some will die.
But some will survive and thrive.
British Airways displays relativistic patriotism, despite the semantic incongruity.
Microsoft have launched a trade marketing campaign with a blog and this cute video, showing the end of the love affair between advertisers and consumers.
It's smart and funny, reminding us that being narcissistic is a sure fire way to end your relationship.
Whilst it's true that most brands are never going to have anything resembling a relationship with their customers, that doesn't mean you get to take them for granted.
[I would have streamed it but Daily Motion was being weird. Thanks to Geert I've found the Youtube version. ]
[Found via Big Secret Pizza Party]
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