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The ecosystem of consumer interaction with brands has evolved significantly in recent years. Mainstream social influence culture, the explosion of video content, on-demand services across categories and the cynicism as a response to the increasingly post-modern world, have rendered it increasingly difficult to deliver meaningful advertising to consumers. If brands want to successfully connect with consumers in a meaningful way, they need to tell stories and create content, rather than ads, sharing their values and purpose. Due to the accelerated transition to an ecommerce-dominated shopping paradigm, price and quality have been reduced to table stakes, leaving other criteria like purpose-related factors as key differentiators in this arena.

Spirits brand Pernod Ricard’s North American CEO Ann Mukherjee recently noted: “Purpose could be about fun. Purpose could be about indulgence. Purpose could be about being a rebel. Purpose could be about saving the world. But purpose must be intrinsic to what the brand’s narrative is.”

Despite a shifting landscape, consumers continue to gravitate toward brands whose purpose aligns with their interests and beliefs, and are still weary of anything perceived as inauthentic. So how can brands communicate their purpose and draw in advocates if traditional advertising is yielding diminishing returns?

The authenticity of any offering made by a brand to a consumer is paramount in determining the effect that it will have and how strong the reaction will be. Reciprocity holds true for brands just as it does for individuals. In a consumer study conducted by Steve Martin of Influence at Work, one-third of customers visiting a fast-food restaurant went to the counter to order their food without distraction, one-third were handed a key chain as a thank you for coming in and one-third received a cup of yogurt as a welcome as they walked through the door. The recipients of the keychain bought 12% more than the control but those that received food bought 24% more than the control. They bought food—engaging with the brand—at the deepest level of all test groups because the brand offered them something that was high in their goal hierarchy at the time (people go to restaurants because they are hungry). While economists may think this a foolish approach, a brand offering a consumer what they want—not in response to a desired action, and without seeking engagement in return—has huge effect. This strategy can work with material items, but information works as well if it is highly desirable to the recipient. The latter approach is often least costly, considering that, regardless of the value of views and engagement, scale is needed to profitably monetize a large audience.

As more and more brands begin developing experiential, interactive or engaging content in an opt-in framework, there are a few ways to approach that will help ensure authenticity. Brands can lean into their expertise to make the useful yet inaccessible, accessible. They can highlight initiatives in an engaging way that are important to both the brand and its customers. Or they can live their purpose and attempt to have their desired effect outside of their primary customer journey, to connect back to the core offering.

Creating expert content could mean developing spaces where customers can benefit from their knowledge. This could be interactive trial opportunities where experts provide guidance (think free fifteen-minute makeovers at Sephora or department stores like Nordstrom who are adding in photobooths for social sharing and digital shop-alongs). Brands can also share information from their unique knowledge base, that consumers might not otherwise have access to. This is what Neutrogena did with their “In the Sun” film about skin cancer.

 

Free from overt branding and deployed as a public awareness tactic, this documentary film follows Dr. Chi, a dermatologist treating seven families with the goal of educating viewers about misconceptions and methods of safely enjoying the sun. While it may be somewhat self-serving for a brand that does sell sunscreen as a small part of their large portfolio of skincare products, the tone and lack of brand presence helps communicate the brand as genuine and inspirational, especially when viewed in the context of other self-help and educational tools on their website.

For brands who want to create content in support of purpose, highlighting initiatives is another great way for brands to illustrate shared value with an audience. Take Patagonia with its values rooted in environmental preservation; it was possible for the brand to leverage its powerful position to create buzz for emerging river ecosystem restoration groups. The effort was win-win. The film that Patagonia helped to produce won audience awards as SXSW Film Festival when it premiered. It increased awareness of, and advocacy for, an effort to shift attitudes around the impact of hydroelectric power on river ecosystems. It helped an external effort, re-enforced core brand values, and showed the scope of their purpose in an engaging and interesting way.

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Having a presence in spaces of shared interest outside of the primary engagement environment, is another strategy to communicate a brand’s purpose. Offering an individual what they are seeking, where they already are, can show that a brand is committed to providing something, beyond promoting their core product or offering. For an individual scanning through HBO Max looking for a comforting escape from the pressures of the everyday, “A World of Calm” might do the trick.

The non-traditional portrayals of animals and vegetation with absolutely no entertainment value or inspiring titillation (by design) lulls viewers into a deep state of relaxation. This may help to generate interest in their app as a way to pursue a similar relief in contexts beyond the environment already adopted. Of course, the deep contradiction in the idea of celebrity narrated, venture-backed “mindfulness” brought to you by the same platform presenting “Game of Thrones” or “Real Time with Bill Maher” may be too much to handle for those already sold on the benefits of meditation. Calm is following a proven strategy of using partnerships to expand their impact and show their purpose to new prospects, but time will tell if this execution is seen as a good articulation of that purpose or not.

Today, brands are both expected to represent something larger than their product or service and are limited by the efficacy of their advertising to tell that story. An Edelman earned brand study shows that 64% of respondents would choose, switch, avoid or boycott a brand based on its position relative to values held by the consumer. Additionally, communicating those values and purpose has a greater effect on advocacy than understanding product or service features. Creating shared value content can be one of the most effective ways for brands to show their purpose and whether it’s authentic, not used as a device intended to drive sales and provides something high in the consumer’s value hierarchy at the time it is provided.

Do that and the declining reach of advertising shouldn’t keep you up at night. But if it does, there is always footage of sea turtles sleeping on the ocean floor to help you nod off, brought to you by a curious partnership.

Photo by Jordon Conner on Unsplash

Originally published on AMA.org

I love letters, as do most designers, illustrators, anthropologists, symbologists, idea geeks, writers, communicators … you get the point. Letters are pervasive and powerful. We all use them every day and get so much from them, yet we rarely “see” all the work they are doing.

On some level, we all understand this. Letters are just systematized sets of shapes that, when arranged in specific ways, symbolize concepts or sounds. That this works at all is amazing. The way that words are shaped and their letters drawn offers predictable meanings for the people who look at them beyond the meaning of the word itself. And the fact that most people intuit attitude, emotion and meaning from the “image” of the words they are looking at without even realizing it makes typography one of the most powerful tools of design and marketing when creating brand meaning and influencing consumer sentiment.

There is a reason that brands spend so much time and effort establishing rules and guidance around typography—and it isn’t just about consistency. There is an idea in rhetoric called emotive conjugation, where the face value of a statement can remain constant while the emotional meaning changes. Has someone reconsidered the matter, or have they gone back on their word? Is someone resolute or pig-headed? Are they a whistle-blower or a snitch? The same facts are being said, but something entirely different is being communicated. It’s not just what you say, but how you say it. It is the same for typography.

Beyond the meaning of the words that letters spell, the way they look and are used could be aggressive instead of confident, stark instead of sophisticated, or naïve instead of friendly, and the line between could be razor thin. Pentagram’s brand program for Fisher-Price is on exactly the right side of the line—playful, joyous and celebratory in a child-appropriate way, while still being beautiful, expertly crafted and credible—and this is largely due to the custom typeface that was developed for the program and the way it is deployed.

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The Fisher-Price typographic language works so well because of the way in which the meaning of the typography echoes and enhances the tone of voice and the other visual tools. It has a bouncing energy because of the tilted axes of the letterforms without becoming illegible and distracting. It has a friendly approachability stemming from its softly rounded corners and flowing ball terminals. Looking at the alphabet in this font gets you 80% of the way to a trustworthy, but fun, smartly considered childhood brand. If a toy were packaged in material covered with a roman serif like Trajan, would you assume it was a fun thing for a kid to play with? Unlikely. If a financial institution used Comic Sans or Papyrus for their communications, would you trust it with your money even if the verbal content was smart, focused and insightful? Equally unlikely. There is too much visual dissonance between the content of the letterforms and the personality that one would expect, or accept, for certain categories or brands. Typography has a psychology all its own and letters through their shapes communicate extensively.

Some of the work done by letterforms results from the shape and tone of the characters themselves, but much is due to subtle associations. Our branding and design strategy choices are somewhat bound by choices made by others in different areas. Humans take part in creating and consuming culture every day and all those subtle visual cues they are immersed in begin to have associative meaning.

For instance, it would be difficult to use an angular calligraphic brush script without invoking trendy wedding stationery or positive affirmation statements so prevalent on Pinterest. These are probably not the most desirable associations for a technology company, but for a small kitschy coffee shop? Maybe. The full visual impression of the typography has a gestalt on its own whether intended or not—in the former case going beyond the superficial “creativity” those style of letters might have communicated 20 years ago. The challenge is that culture is constantly shifting, and the meaning and associations people link with letterforms goes along for that ride.

The Cooper typeface (and its myriad variants) was an advertising staple in the 1920s and ’30s before falling out of favor after overuse. It then made a major comeback in the ’60s and ’70s with its use by the Beach Boys and the Doors, Garfield comics, and several others. It became strongly linked with the vernacular of that era. In the ’00s it would have been hard to use that style of lettering without evoking that era because that was its last prominent cultural use. Fast-forward 10-20 years and enter Mailchimp’s supporting typographic system, a new logo for Chobani, The Black Keys album art, brand fonts for Fisher-Price and the UK’s Pantree marketplace, all resurrecting creamy, bulbous letters with small counters and backwards tilts. Now, this typographic style has slowly been pulled from the ’70s back into a dominant position in today’s modern consumer brand landscape. Human brains are pattern-seeking machines, and they will find meaning, or they will create and attribute meaning and connection even where there is none. So, carefully consider the connections viewers may find a way to make.

If the words being created with the letters communicate one set of concepts and associations and the shape of the letters used and their cultural associations communicate another, there is also a third level that type works on. This third level of communication comes from the way in which the letters and words are used. Type can become textural as it does in the Honey & Mackie ice cream brand language. At this point the type is almost more image than word, flipping the script so that the viewer sees a visual of a summer boardwalk or nostalgic ice cream parlor before it even registers as words which then deepen the meaning of the image. Type can be a super-graphic element that positions letters to function more as an illustration than as part of a word or words, highlighting the unique character of the individual pieces. As in the Saks Fifth Avenue visual brand language or in the Coca-Cola packaging design systems, this approach tends to work best when the letterforms themselves have ownable and recognizable shapes and features. When done well, this can be a mic-drop for brands trying to show how much equity they have in minute typographic details. Coke is so Coke, anyone can recognize it based on a can with part of an ‘o’ and a ‘k’ visible and the rest obscured by the curve of the cylinder.

By using typography as a visual as well as a verbal communication tool, brands can benefit from the picture-superiority effect—where subjects remember image cues better than verbal ones. By forcing an individual to see your typography as an image that they encode as visual, and then again as a linguistic concept, you get twice the binding power over a word that just registers as a word. Lean into the emotional content of the letters, matching or enhancing those of the verbal content. Consider the cultural associations of the letterforms and the patterns that viewers will read into the typographic design. And push on how that type is used, considering its role as color or texture or macro illustration, or as a shape all its own. The trick is to find the sweet spot where it still works as a word and legibility isn’t hurt unintentionally breaking down letters ability to be their amazing, powerful and modular selves. Do that and you’ll see their incredible power and become a superfan, too.

Photo by Claudio Schwarz on Unsplash

Originally published on AMA.org

Creative pathways help to set teams up for success by driving alignment around how design choices will bring strategic opportunities to life, and can help build a forward looking brand vision into the work defining how contextual elements can create meaning for the brand in the future.

Just as words can be vague or subjective without the benefit of context (think of the last creative brief you saw with words such as “premium,” “natural” or “authentic” and how hard you needed to probe to discern their intent), so too are visual cues. Elements such as color, texture, shape, typography and image are the building blocks of all visual design, but it is their interaction and context that serves to create a recognizable brand. That is where a creative pathway can help—by beginning to build the “world” that a design exploration would live within and setting up a point of view on the interaction of those elements. In developing a few of these alternate brand realities, a creative team can gain alignment from brand or marketing teams on the way different strategies could be articulated visually. But it’s important to make sure that any opportunities for confusion or misunderstanding are eliminated, to create a process that brings agency and client together in mutual understanding. That way, the exploration can be focused and grounded in insights and opportunities. If you allow ambiguity to creep in, you have potentially sabotaged the process.

Creative pathways define the vision before doing the work of realizing that vision as an artifact. They are not mood-boards. They are not concepts. Creative pathways are snapshots of potential brand worlds that introduce the organizing idea and begin to bring a brand language to life around that idea. They set guidance for the design principles or visual toolkit which then could be leveraged to develop distinct design executions. They map visually and strategically distinct areas for exploration, and they give meaning to key points of difference while being grounded in consumer and market insights, category trends and brand truths.

So how do you create one, or recognize what is missing if you are presented with something less? A creative pathway contains all the visual and strategic elements combined into a unified expression. The gestalt relative to the competitive or cultural landscape establishes a position in the minds of consumers and is the foundation of brand identity. Creative pathways help to decode how elements come together to create those meanings and present them in an accessible way. For instance, most brand managers would understand that there could be tension between “natural” and “effective” and if efficacy is required but natural is a key point of difference, this tension needs to be addressed. The creative pathway would show how handling that tension in different ways might help to take advantage of different opportunities. The visual language that the pathway begins to establish, will be much less likely to be confused or misinterpreted than would a verbal positioning statement, even if accompanied by a visual cue. Care must be taken to ensure that the pathway isn’t so narrow that only one execution could come out of it, but also that it is unified enough that the meaning and overall visual impact of the tool would not change if one element were focused on, over another.

Alignment like this can’t be achieved with a mood-board or an asset toolkit. If the elements are removed from their context, the overall effect breaks down. Clarity and alignment are the goals, so it isn’t enough to show a font or two. Helvetica set two inches tall in extra bold with an outline, drop shadow and gradient saying “ALL OUT SALES BLOWOUT” on a car dealership ad has a much different feel than seven point Helvetica tracked out spelling out the name of a fragrance in silver foil. The brand manager or the design team might look at the Helvetica specimen and envision either beautiful, understated simplicity or a garish hackneyed workhorse. Showing how it’s usage could create meaning for the brand is the best way to limit risk of misunderstanding.

Similarly, color can’t be shown as swatches from a guidelines document. How is color employed to say something about the culture, or make the viewer feel something unique? Colors effects are profound and not just in a psychological way. Colors can have physical effects—red can raise heart rates, while pink can lower them. They become key points of visual distinction when used in a unique way by a brand. Joyful Coca-Cola-Red, reliable UPS-Brown, more than words, colors get imbued with meaning through their experience. It’s the same story for shape, as well. The same-shaped cylinder package cues classic, old-fashioned simplicity for Quaker Oats and conversely, modern minimalist utility at its finest for Italian espresso brand Illy. In a vacuum, as a screenshot in the appendix of a creative brief, or as an image on a mood-board, all of these things can mean a dozen things to a dozen people.

It is through the combination of all these elements as a unified expression that we begin to articulate the brand, competitive position and audience needs into a visual creative strategy. This cursory look at a visualization of values, brand personality, equities and goals is what makes a creative pathway a powerful tool for driving efficiency and clarity early in the scope of work. Showing how the elements of color, type, shape, etc. are used together separates a creative pathway from a mood-board. The presence of enough assets and design tools to articulate most expressions of the brand is what separates a creative pathway from a key visual or campaign concept. The ability to extract directly from the pathway, elements that will become the distinctive assets for the brand, is what makes the creative pathway a powerful tool for building alignment between brand and the designers who will work within a more focused frame.

How might imagery and shape be used in combination to create a strong point of view on a tension coming out of the brief or competitive landscape? How can the overall expression reflect brand personality in a unique way that would break down if any of the elements were removed or changed? Creative pathways show the design strategy. They drive efficiency as they focus and provide a target for the design exploration. And they infuse the assets that are extracted from them as the building blocks of a design execution with a unified vision for the brand world where it will come to life in the future. Don’t jump from brief into design exploration. Take a step back and set the brand and the team up for success at the next gate and into the future.

Photo by GeoJango Maps on Unsplash

Originally published on AMA.org

The Right Color Is Appropriate

It has been shown that consumers see inherent value in congruity between color and positioning of the brand or product rendered in that color. For functional products or brands, the relationship between color and brand should match consumer expectations and beliefs about what colors are functionally appropriate. But if the brand or product is positioned as more sensory and social-oriented, the color needs to match expectations around the emotional content of colors.
In either case, being able to predict the consumer reaction to the appropriateness of a color seems more valuable than the color in isolation. Therefore, when choosing a color, ask: What are the expectations around color when it comes to the experience of the product or brand? One could imagine the pushback an orange juice brand may endure if it considered presenting itself as a “blue” brand in the U.S. The category norms around flavor are extremely strong. But in the United Arab Emirates, for example, the norms and expectations are different, so iconic juice brands like Rani can anchor their packaging and visual identity system in blue without issue.

The Right Color Communicates Personality

Color is widely considered the most emotionally laden of visual cues. Processed by the viewer after shape but before content, color viscerally triggers subconscious reactions. As a result, it often communicates more than words. While colors do generally align with traits such as sincerity, excitement, competence or sophistication, the ancillary meanings associated with a color are the result of repeated, learned exposure. Humans unconsciously absorb images beginning at a young age which are transcribed over time on their psyche. A young child, easily impressed by bright scenes, might encounter a bed of brightly colored flowers and think, “Wow! That’s pretty.”
Over time, these repeated responses will solidify into tastes and reactions to those particular colors later in life. Now consider that even cities have distinct color palettes that dominate their expression and those colors typically trigger associations for insiders that would be absent in outsiders. The meaning that color conveys is extremely layered and nuanced, so for marketers, it is a more effective approach to take a wisdom-of-crowds approach and find what works for the most people in the most situations.
This way the color may read as more or less optimistic, or be so for a slightly different reason, but at least it won’t communicate something totally off to most.

The Right Color Appeals to Your Audience

Color perception and preference are highly dictated by culture and experience. That preference links strongly back to what the color is seen to communicate. What is the experience of seeing the color green actually like, for example? People in Japan describe traffic lights as being red and blueish even if they look just like they do in North America where we might call them red and green. If the result of a language that for thousands of years had no word for the color green (just something on the green end of the blue spectrum) is that they are defining the concept differently, how else are our unique cultural experiences dictating the meaning of our concepts?
What appeals is the result of history and experience—something that anyone would struggle to give voice to having known nothing else. So while it is beneficial to do research on your target, be wary of how you structure it. Align your stimulus with the way the result will be processed. Let the audience play with color if you want to learn about color, because asking if
the light should be blue or green won’t tell you much.

The Right Color Differentiates

In psychology, the Von Restorff Effect shows that when presented with numerous congruent stimuli, the one that differs from the rest is more likely to be noticed and remembered, delivering on measures of “stand-out” and building equity at once. So don’t just match surveyed tastes with your product or brand. Consumers only know what they know, and if a landscape is dominated by particular conventions in color (or anything else), the semiotics of the category will do a lot of the heavy lifting to communicate the purpose of the brand or product—but following those conventions will surely result in less visibility and memorability.
Think hard about what you are gaining by following convention or breaking from it. Almost 10 years ago, Kimberly-Clark used an almost unheard-of approach to color in the fem-care category to re-invent an irrelevant older brand for a younger consumer. Coupled with a brilliant social strategy around rethinking “taboos,” the disruption and differentiation U by Kotex achieved helped increase sales of the Kotex brand by almost 10%—an instance of using divergent color to shift a narrative so successful that it still comes up in conversations around bold branding choices.
Shakespeare famously opined that, “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” But if its color was not as deep, would its smell change? If it were dark blue, would your concept of “rose” still fit? How much baggage around “passion” and “romance” coming from our upbringings is changing our view of the color of the rose? Context is everything. Cultural and
competitive context define appropriateness. The personality associated with color comes from repeated exposure and links to emotions previously experienced. Appeal results from our subconscious associations and even things like our linguistic context. But at the end of the day, if your brand or product isn’t noticed or can’t be remembered, why bother? Nurture healthy
skepticism when you see claims showing that making the button red results in 21% more clicks than if it were green, or other such hard-and-fast rules. Or at least, ask what the rest of the site on which this button appears looks like and who was doing the clicking. Those claims may be as spurious as they are comforting.

 

Photo by britt gaiser on Unsplash.

Originally published on AMA.org

The role that brands play today in connecting cultural trends with corporate values is very different from what it once was. Positioning was once developed behind closed doors primarily through introspection; a few executives and consultants identified values and attributes as important and then pushed those into the market, crafting perception through consistency and placement. That approach is archaic and out of step with the modern world.

It is more prescient and necessary than ever for brands to engage directly with the surrounding culture, or they’ll risk that ever-more sophisticated consumers will shift their choices. But culture is fickle, and it takes real work to see both the forest and the trees in the trend-scape. Once brands decide to lean into culture, they tend to do so in a few familiar ways that correspond to the level of control they desire.

Reframing Equities to Build Upon Dominant Trends

Most often embraced by established, iconic brands because it maintains strong continuity and control—the brand authors a narrative and attempts to seed it within an ecosystem where a new value paradigm sympathetic to existing brand equities has emerged. Though it offers a smaller reward (at least in the short term), it has little risk—other than lingering too long in a residual position. By creating links between brand attributes and dynamics within a group in a novel way, a savvy communicator attempts to reframe a consumer’s ideas about the role of that brand within that cultural context.

Nike’s ad with Colin Kaepernick tapped into the zeitgeist and began to reframe “Just Do It” as a celebration of personal expression and doing something difficult, if you believe it’s the right thing to do. It worked because it was timely, relevant and matched cultural trends to corporate values in a way that shifted the meaning of what was already there. It didn’t come across as opportunistic, but rather a natural expression of the legacy brand. This method links a version of the brand’s foundational story to a current trend, becoming a part of a given moment for that group.

Prioritizing Values That Will Become Culturally Significant

Brands can also succeed at increasing cultural relevance by identifying the direction of a trend and trying to get ahead of it. This allows for a greater pivot because by the time that culture catches up to the brand, it’s proposition won’t be seen as disingenuous—it is the same position they held before the trend tipped over. By extrapolating direction before a trend becomes dominant, brands avoid the trap of seeming opportunistic—if indeed the new position reflects real values and commitments. This strategy is ideal if the brand finds a trend aligning with an existing value and leverages that to guide the focus given to one value over another.

This is why when environmentalism became a dominant, mainstream, cultural force in North America, almost two decades of pushback against “greenwashing” that Patagonia didn’t have to worry about, followed. They had correctly identified the direction of a trend that matched a deeply held value of the brand and so they prioritized those values over other attributes—quality materials, product and experience innovation, etc.—and got there first. The challenge here is separating what is happening culturally from what appears to be happening. Even with a discerning eye, culture moves like murmurations in a flock of starlings, changing course without warning.

So, brands must be wary of hanging their hat on something that they might not otherwise, hoping to ride a cultural wave, as their prediction could be inaccurate. When executed well, it creates the feeling that the culture has caught up and that the brand can help people live the cultural narrative that they have come to value.

Empowering Consumers to Define the Brand Story

Brands can write themselves into culture by looking deeply at people themselves and what motivates them to feel confident in the story they would build for the brand. Then, do just that. When brands really understand the people they are engaging with and how they behave in different contexts, they can anticipate their individual choices. This takes some of the pressure off of a brand to decode culture writ large via trends and forces. They don’t need to have faith in their predictions, they just need faith in their consumers and the way they will reflect shifting cultural values. This allows the brand to grow as if emerging from culture. When this method works, it results in strong connections between the brand and the culture because they evolved as aspects of the same thing. But, it relinquishes authority to the collective intelligence of the mob— remember the starlings.

If culture as a whole is fickle and prone to change, what about a single data point in that group? Here, the greatest uncertainty is when individuals are authoring your story for you, but there aren’t enough of them to find a balance point. Airbnb is the model of how well this could work. As a brand, they are their customers. Customers are the product, the user, the marketer. And they have redefined the way our culture thinks about travel as a result.

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Because of the risk in effectively giving up control, this method is typically embraced by start-ups with little investment ability and little to lose if it doesn’t work as expected. In practical terms however, there is no reason more established brands couldn’t follow this path if their goal was revolutionary change—or if it was a last grasp at regaining fading former glory.

The late business management guru Peter Drucker was credited with saying, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” That may have been true of the old model of developing positioning. Maybe it still is, or perhaps not. But what I’m certain of is that a strategy that doesn’t consider its context isn’t strategic. And if your strategy involves building on aspects within, riding on top of, or emerging from a cultural context, your brand has a better shot at going along for the ride, wherever the culture heads for its next meal.

Photo by James Sloan on Unsplash.

Originally published on AMA.org

Since the beginning of time, humans have been building culture through story-telling. Cavemen told each other stories to make sense of the stars they could group into sets. Tribes and nations tell stories to themselves and others to create community. And ever since the first person met Maslow’s Physiological and Safety needs, we have been creating stories about “things” that we could trade to acquire group affiliation, joy, status, esteem, personal growth or enable peak experiences. The reason we believe something would meet those higher-order needs is largely due to the story or stories associated with that something.

We like brands better when we get to know them through their stories—just as we do with people. The picture you develop of a person after considering a personal anecdote is much more nuanced and accurate than the sum of their static observable attributes. Have you ever been creeped out by someone or just didn’t like them but couldn’t pinpoint exactly why? Something that could be endearing or funny in one context within the framework of a story might seem downright malevolent. Think about the haircut of the antagonist Anton Chigurh in the Coen Brothers’ adaptation of “No Country for Old Men.” On its own it’s a little strange, but once you begin to understand Chigurh’s story it becomes imbued with deep meaning and seems to be a manifestation of his deliberate contempt for societal norms. The separate elements help build the story, but the story helps to amplify the meaning of the separate elements.

Brands have stories that reveal and serve as signs of their deepest truth—the foundational legends and myths that they hold dear—just like people. It is our job to express those stories for brands in a way that honestly provides insight helping consumers and the employees at the company to understand the brand in a deeper and less ambiguous way than the narrow surface presentation might allow. It needs to do so in a way that is engaging and memorable for the audience that comes in contact with it. Once we find the intrinsic story that possesses the nuance and deep meaning, every manifestation of the brand becomes a tool for perpetuating that mythic story.

Take Nike, for example. Nike is the Greek winged goddess of victory, not the goddess of teamwork, achievement or sport. Nike (the brand) invokes the goddess; it says, “I came to win,” not to give it my best or accept anything less than triumph. Nike changes the activity of playing a sport by changing the story. It illustrates how powerful story can be in shaping our perceptions of something. And because it is a deeply resonant story that rings true, creates specific feelings and satisfies specific needs, it is enduring, memorable and almost intuitive.

When these stories are deep and laden with cultural information, they can perpetuate their own existence. The evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins described his theory of memes as a way of transferring skills or behaviors between people through imitation. This occurs following the same basic requirements of evolution—the meme must convey a benefit of sufficient advantage that it ensures continued existence through replication. Jung’s archetypes—the hero’s journey toward mastery, the benevolent ruler providing structure and order, the magician who changes your view of what’s possible—are memes in this way. They provide insight into some aspect of the world where direct experience is not necessary for the story to provide an adaptive advantage. The greater the advantage, the “stickier” the story. The basic archetypes are extremely sticky because they communicate a great deal with low investment. This frees time and focus for other activities. They encourage replication or persistence in the minds of the people who know it and those that are exposed to it. We all need legends as shortcuts to deep insight. Companies do, too. These basic archetypes serve as the building blocks for great stories because they are remarkably quick to unpack and understand.

It’s impossible to completely spell out the functional benefit, the sensorial benefit and the emotional benefit message in the time most brands have a person’s attention. The best that brands can do is provide them building blocks pulled from archetype and cultural touchstones for the viewer to connect in a way that is part information and part simulation so that it pulls them in as an active participant who can take something away in the end. We need to leverage archetype and semiotics to provide the themes and the context so that the story arises inevitably to imbue the brand with a totemic power. Once a person works through a story in their head, it will stay with them because of the narrative, discursive way we process our relationship to reality. Anyone who has tried to explain the world to children understands this instinctively. By creating stories for and about brands, the information those brands convey becomes harder to forget and harder to look past even if you can’t quite put your finger on the takeaway.

Hemmingway wrote of telling stories, “For a true writer each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment.” That is our challenge. Brand legends are in our heads; often frustratingly fleeting in and out of consciousness like a partially remembered dream. You can’t be cool talking about how cool you are, or think that it is sexy to talk about how sexy you are (sorry Right Said Fred). What we need to communicate on behalf of brands is the un-said. We struggle to visualize the invisible. There is always a story on the surface that people can point to but the more powerful, more meaningful myth is often at the layer just below that. We need to be able to access that level of truth and meaning, however if we bring it up too far it becomes gauche. These are the most interesting and impactful stories to discover and to craft—the ones that reveal deep insight into a brand’s personality, but that are almost unseemly to say out loud. And these are the stories that become an enduring part of the culture and of the companies that they describe.

“Goddess Nike” by mr.gears is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

Originally published on AMA.org