Symbols are nothing new here (either on the blog or as part of the conversation), and to a marketer there is no more pertinent symbol in our professional lives than the brand we’re hired on to propagate.
But, with the advent of the online life, folks are becoming more and more inundated with symbols and visual queues in their daily lives (buttons, headings, page layouts, typeface, tonality, memes, traditional branding, stock photography, lighting, the list can literally go on forever…). So the question is, if you’re not Nike or Apple, what do we need to be doing to stay relevant amongst the noise?
I was listening to NPR yesterday (take that for whatever it’s worth; I try to keep that morsel of background mildly quiet as to remove any pretentious or San Franciscoan-esque context that might be associated with that particular media symbol, my case in point) and they had a relatively smart piece on symbols as they relate to cognitive thought. Generally, the assumption was that most folks see our development into modern-humans through some physical, Darwinian lens that promotes us to free-standing, free-thinking beings. The piece set out to contrast us from other species by focusing on our seemingly inherent need and ability to utilize and develop symbols; that it’s not just a set of physical factors that set aside from the rest of the natural world, but rather our ability to communicate, express ourselves and otherwise define ourselves through the use of symbols (in my opinion, this is a slight over-simplification of our true differentiation, but for sake of argument it is a major point of independence that fits nicely into what I’m pulling together today, so we’ll run with it).
So we have these brands. Big brands, multi-million dollar media buy brands, brands with stories that rival Dante (figuratively) and brands that seemingly circumnavigate the world in the blink of an eye. It must be wonderful (or brutally impossible) to control one of these brands. Drop a million in this market and you can do no wrong…
Unfortunately, most of us do not have the buying power or the established, heralded stories that allow us those 90+% unaided awareness numbers. This is the majority of the brands in the world; the “oh yea, I think I’ve heard of you” when you know deep down inside you never have. I remember the first day I decided to take an interview with Save-A-Lot, I laughed to myself, “Save-A-Lot” I repeated, you couldn’t get more generic or meaningless in terms of branding, it evoked no feeling, no animosity, absolutely nothing.
But that meant something, that means there’s an opportunity here (the fact that I was expecting a reaction, I wanted to feel something after being exposed to it almost explains the human condition NPR set out to explain). The brand hadn’t been isn’t over-saturated and over-stuffed (think Circuit City, Budweiser or Macy’s), the precedent hadn’t been set that we needed to be out in front of everyone, we didn’t have the “daddy” issues that required us to stand atop the bar stool and scream, “LOOK AT ME!”
We’re just Save-A-Lot and our symbol, our brand, means something to some folks. That the same red, white and blue that 50% of American companies (grossly and wrongly estimated) start out with in an underutilized, but really aesthetically pleasing font (Frutiger) can still have an impact to the folks who walk our stores.
And that’s the key takeaway I have for today, we have a brand, a symbol really, that we don’t want to share with everyone (I know what you’re thinking, “C’mon this is Marketing 101 crap, basic segmentation, everyone in the world knows this,” but I wonder how many marketers are willing to fully embrace it? By default, the ego wants the brand to be seen and known by all, everybody wants to be Apple). But that’s how we stay relevant amongst the noise, we reach out to those who care (and might care down the road) and see if it’s OK if we strike up a conversation.
(This is selfishly, a reminder for me to take a look back on 3-months from now)
Photo courtesy of Mykl Roventine’s Photostream on Flickr
NPR Story (AUDIO): “When Did We Become Mentally Modern?”
