Thinking

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