Wicked Syt

Spotted this wonderful grafitti near Archway in London.

Whilst I may not buy into Saatchi's Lovemarks like J C Penny has, it's a fact that some brands achieve a place in our hearts / minds that is way beyond favourability or preference.

[Note: I also can't believe there is going to be a sequel to Lovemarks - The Lovemarks Effect. For a good review of Lovemarks see Russell. ]

And to large extent I think this is founded on what they do, not what they say.

Or, more accurately, brands for whom there is no disconnect between their communication and their service/product, where brand behaviour is a template for everything the company ever does and when this behaviour somehow strikes a chord with people, that cuts through the well established cynicism with which real people treat companies.

So perhaps looking at how these 200 brands that have been nominated as Lovemarks  by real people will allow us to pick up some clues.

Looking at Apple, Superman, Google, Family Guy, The Beatles, 42 Below and LEGO as examples of brands that have got it right probably isn't a bad place to start.

Blogs and Brands

I've been asked to give a talk about blogs as a brand communication channel - hence the recursive image of this blog.

All the basics are pretty simple I think - what is a blog, where do they fit in, who is involved, new blog every second and so on - but brands and blogs present an interesting question: how can a brand use blogs as a communication channel?

I've been wracking my brain for good examples of brand / blog. I can't really think of many. None of my favourite blogs come from a brand - one of the things I love about blogs is that they have a distinct, individual voice.

Innocent have a great blog, Nike dipped a toe with Gawker....

So, in the spirit of this ongoing conversation, I'd like to appeal to you. When you do think a brand has got blogging right? And when has a brand tried and failed horribly?

Linguistic Geekery

I've been messing around with the idea that brands constitute a kind of language of their own.

I stole the idea from the structural anthropologist Claude Levi Strauss who argued that myths had to be a language of their own because myths had to be told to exist and because they feature the same structures as language, that can be broken down and reconstituted.

Elsewhere, Levi Strauss posits that:

It is likely that languages exist in which an entire myth can be expressed in a single word

And I think that the language of brands might constitute such a language, where the entire myth of Nike can be evoked with the one word. Brands function like the myths of modern culture, providing meaning for us 'meaning seeking creatures' [to steal from John Grant], and the myth is separate from the form as it can be expressed in numerous different ways without losing its essential structure.

To put it another way, Just Do It as a core brand thought can be executed in innumerable ways and yet always express the same thought.

And then I thought what about logos? How does the swoosh invoke the myth? Here's where it gets really geeky - linguistics identifies two kinds of written langauge:

1. Glottographic: writing that literally represents speech. Like all of this.
2. Semasiographic: writing that conveys meaning without reference to speech. Like the swoosh.

So the swoosh conveys the meaning without recourse to the word, which is the power of a great brand icon - it is abstract and so can encapsulate the complex bundle of meanings that the brand evokes without dragging it down to actual words. It is a symbol.

Which is perhaps why people shave it into their hair. 

Authenticity

I've been pulled into a pitch, which is eating up all my spare time and thought. [I wanted to talk about meeting up with Russell and Paul last week - was very pleasant and started me thinking about when the internet and reality intersect - I'll post something once I've had a chance to work out what I was thinking.]

Anyway, on this pitch a lot of people keep talking about authenticty. Consumers are crying out for brands to be authentic and that.

What does that mean?

There seems to be a sense that authenticity is about real life, grass roots, non-commercial stuff. But how can a brand be non-commercial?

This guy David Boyle seems to know. Has anyone read his book Authenticity: Brands, Fakes, Spin, and the Lust for Real Life? I've not had the chance but he claims to look at how real reality is....

I think that being authentic as a brand is really simple. Stand for something, establish a consistent mode of behaviour and then express it through everything you do, communications and commerce.

It's when you say one thing and do another that you stop being authentic.

PS. When you try to fake a grass roots movement, it's called astroturfing. Brilliant.

Brandgrams

In his book, Searching for Memory, Daniel Schacter puts forward a curious description of memory.

According to Schacter, memories are encoded in the brain as engrams - essentially a neuron firing pattern - that captures certain elements from the experience. Certain kinds of encoding are more likely to promote higher recall - specifically, elaborative encoding that allow you to integrate new information with what you already know.

This explains why succesful ads use referent systems - as Adliterate has pointed out - by making our brain process information and linking it to things already in our heads, there is a much better chance that we will remember it.

So brand experiences will build brandgrams in our heads. So far so good, this all feels pretty logical. But then he veers off. What he suggests is that the act of remembering isn't  really a recollection  -  it is a new experience.

"The cue combines with the engram to yield..an experience that differs from either of its constituents."

So the cue, the piece of communication, combines with the brandgram to create a new experience that "differs from either of its constituents". People are not simply experiencing the communication but the gestalt of the communication and their pre-existing brandgram.

Now that's what I call consumer created content.

Ideas which represent our understanding

                       

Freakonomics led me to the economist John Kenneth Galbraith.

In his book 'The Affluent Society' he coined the term conventional wisdom with the following defininition:

We associate truth with convenience...with what most closely accords with self-interest or personal well-being or promises best to avoid awkward effort or unwelcome dislocation of life. We also find highly acceptable what contributes most to self-esteem. Economic and social behavior are complex, and to comprehend their character is mentally tiring. Therefore we adhere, as though to a raft, to those ideas which represent our understanding.

Now I believe that what you do becomes the dominant ametphor by which you understand the world. The danger with that is that everything is interpreted in those terms, or, to steal from Mark Twain:

"To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail"

With that caveat in place, I'd like to suggest that Galbraith's definition of conventional wisdom could also be applied to succesful brands, which makes sense as he is talking about ideas that have lodged themselves into the popular consciousness - something that brands are also trying to achieve.

So perhaps brands should seek to inherit a similar territory: provide convenient truths that offer well-being, contribute to self esteem and provide cognitive short cuts to complex concepts.

Then perhaps people will adhere to these rafts of ideas because they represent our understanding.

Think what no one has yet thought

I've been working on a pitch this week and have spent a long time looking for nuggets of genius to steal - those beautiful little factlets that no one else knows that will show the whole thing in a different light and guide our way.

This is, of course,not the way to do it.

And, of course, I could have stolen that idea too - this time from the inimitable German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. [Why are so many philosophers German? And why do they all have such great hair?]

He was an interesting fellow - worth checking out the link - but for the following quote he should be the patron of all planners:

"The task is not so much to see what no one yet has seen, but to think what no body yet has thought about that which everyone sees."

Brand cultures

I love Richard Huntington's Adliterate Aphorisms, particularly

10)Great brands create culture, weak brands copy it

The great brands function like myths in modern society,  providing narratives and ideas 'to live by', to steal from John Grant.

I recently read Mr Grant's new book - The Brand Innovation Manifesto - and I really like his new molecular model of brands as clusters of cultural ideas.

Brands are inherently complex, they can't be reduced down to single propositions: they are webs of associations. Russel Davies' touches upon a similar point when he talks about idea linking and embedding.

John Grant has a new site to accompany his new book and a brand new blog.

So beefy we brand 'em

Not often you see this sense of the word brand used in a brand ad.

Nice.

The Nintendo Wii

Nintendo has just announced the official brand name of their next generation console, codenamed 'Revolution' - The Wii.

While the code-name 'Revolution' expressed our direction, Wii represents the answer. Wii will break down that wall that separates video game players from everybody else," says Nintendo.

Wii will put people more in touch with their games ... and each other. But you're probably asking: What does the name mean? Wii sounds like 'we', which emphasises this console is for everyone. Wii can easily be remembered by people around the world, no matter what language they speak. No confusion. No need to abbreviate. Just Wii.

This consciously global brand positions the console in contradistinction to the XboX 360 and PS3 as Nintendo embraces the new world where everyone plays games. And it sounds funny.

Link