Thinking

6 Nov 2020

With Color in Marketing, Context Is Everything

The many ways in which color affects product or brand marketing

Up to 90% of snap judgments made about products can be based on color alone. The thought of rules that help guide brands and products is appealing, but the ways brands use color vary greatly. It depends on the brand, audience and the culture from which it will be viewed—and the context it will exist as a part of.
Color theory is a deep and nuanced discipline, but as it relates to decision psychology in marketing and branding, analysis rarely goes beyond the superficial and definitive.

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

11 Aug 2020

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The Importance of Cultural Authorship

An insular approach to brand-building won’t cut it in 2020. Organizations that prioritize their culturally significant values and empower their consumers to tell their story will have greater control over their positioning.

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

26 Jun 2020

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Why Brand Storytelling Moves Us

Consumers like brands whose stories they can relate to—why storytelling is an essential and enduring part of marketing

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

16 Jun 2020

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Communication Strategies for Brands Competing for Attention

How to plant your brand message in consumers’ rapidly shifting attention span with memorable, honest and insightful communication.

Wait. What was I doing? Oh, that’s right.

Dennis Potter in Cold Lazarus wrote, “I’m a writer. I put words in other people’s mouths.” Well, as branding professionals, we have a similar apparent power—influence over the ideas that go into people’s heads and over which heads they reach. We move things around (literally and figuratively). We consider new combinations; new possibilities; new physical, psychological and metaphorical relationships. We order, organize, interpret, shape and communicate ideas, information and space—hopefully in a way that will add value to the people whose attention we are taking as well as those whose money is being spent.

Today, our attention span is spread so thin, and the competition for that attention is fierce. Marketers are trying to get people to process incredible amounts of information as quickly as possible, as to not risk losing their attention before the message is fully communicated. Layering of semiotic and semantic cues in addition to the combination of stimuli that engage all of the senses is the ideal, as well as to create a unique brand experience. But the more layers of information we include in our communications, the more careful we must be about how that content is aligned – and in considering the ways in which that content is processed. If not, our efforts to communicate may result in ‘Stroop effects,’ which greatly reduce a human’s ability to process content with speed, accuracy and retention—all vital factors in our efforts to put ideas into customers’ heads. After all, if we give customers the wrong idea or they don’t remember it, we have failed in our objective.

Simply put, a Stroop effect is the cognitive interference resulting in our inability to inhibit automatic processing of an attribute when there is an incongruous second stimulus. The famous example used to test this is a list of color words (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, etc.) written out in colors that do not match the word. When people are then asked to name the colors they see, the difference in their speed and accuracy between a control list where the colors and words match and this misaligned list, measures the extent to which they are unable to suppress the more automatic task of reading while trying to assess color content. This is a binding problem. We are simultaneously processing two sensory modalities related to concepts we understand—the color “green” and the word “red”—we can’t make them fit together, so our brains give the word more weight because if we are reading in our first language, we automate it without needing to think about what we are doing. The result is that we have a higher likelihood of saying the color is red because that is what the word communicated even when we are asked what the color communicates.

Now, I’m not suggesting that we might fall into the trap of setting a headline “This is Green” in a bright red color unless that dissonance was some part of the goal, but what about all of the visual semiotic cues that serve as much as direct stand-ins for concepts as words do? If we drew the iconic Coca-Cola bottle in green, would Coke still be linked to red in that instance? That’s probably a stretch, but when the concepts are more flexible than something like color (modernity vs. simplicity, for example) it might be easier to process cues incorrectly if there are conflicting stimuli.

This is potentially a significant problem, because our goal is to communicate a lot of information about a brand’s differentiating attributes quickly and if there is any misalignment between tone, words, the look, the feel, the associated smells or tastes or textures, we might not only be communicating more slowly, our customers might be walking away with the wrong impression entirely. For instance, most people process visual cues with more weight than tactile cues. This becomes an important point when developing new products where structure and graphics are both linked. If you develop a bottle that feels soft, flowing and supple, but is adorned with graphic language that communicates bold and sharp icy refreshment, the stronger take-away is likely going to be icy freshness (whether that is the correct manifestation of the brand strategy or not).

In brand development work, the more that these layers are in alignment, the more easily the concepts bind together perceptually as a singular thought or idea, and the more quickly and intuitively the stack of concepts can be understood. Considering the cultural significance of certain colors in different parts of the world will help develop relevant packaging for that group so that you won’t be saying green when they are reading red, for example. If you understand how a target segment thinks about masculinity and what the evolution of that concept means to them, you can make choices evolving the visual identity system for their body wash brand that will mesh with their sense of self. If you misread an emerging trend around clean looking design as no-frills utilitarian instead of as premium luxury, this could cause confusion resulting in a lack of understanding how to prioritize what is being said vs. what is being shown. All of the tools branding professionals bring to bear to communicate a complex idea (why this is a better choice than that for you at this time and place in such and such context) need to be mutually supporting, as creating shorthand expressions of these ideas that will find the correct home in a person’s head is an endeavor that is rife with opportunities for miscommunication, as well as amazing outcomes.

In the end, the way that brands manifest themselves is a subject of immense complexity. The totality of the means we use to reflect brand personality should be intuitive, memorable, honest and insightful, while building affection and being economical with how much attention it requires from participants.

Photo by Jerin J on Unsplash.

Originally published on AMA.org

12 Mar 2020

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The Value of Anthropology as a Design Input

How designers and marketers can uncover a segment’s choices in order to craft a useful brand strategy

Design, when effective, is made for people. Because people exist within a unique social context, understanding the methods of meaning within a group of people is a necessary counterpoint to our instinctive ideas about the world. Customer beliefs dictate how they do what they do, including buying and advocating for the brands in their lives—and they’re always shifting. Their individual behavior is influenced by the activities of others, trends and abstract forces. And if we are to create perceived value, the cultural context and story surrounding the brand experience plays as much of a role as the tangible product attributes do.

As designers or marketers, how do we uncover a segment’s motivation for actions and choices so that we can craft useful brand strategy? How do we know how to think about an opportunity and model the ways in which a segment of society will interact with all the dimensions of a brand? And how can we avoid harmful heuristics and see a group’s behavior more clearly so we can elicit a desired response? The simple and not-so-simple answer is that we need to look at culture. Not just in the perfunctory, demographic overview way; we need to dig to uncover what customer choices mean to them and—as a species concerned about social perception—what meaning customers derive from signaling those choices to others.

In order to truly understand, we must dig until we can create knowledge around the relevance of information and understand how it informs and interacts with other pieces of information. We must discover how meaning is derived and how the different aspects of that meaning creation are prioritized. Think about Ikea for instance; the majority of the value in what they sell is completely separate from the products—it is in the act of the consumer assembling them. No one would spend three hours building something they didn’t value, so the consumer involvement is a large part of what creates perceived value in the product. This applies at a group level as well. The intersection of brand, culture and experience is where the real magic happens, so understanding the connective tissue between them is imperative.

We are constantly making choices and establishing hierarchies to address specific desires. These choices around what to communicate as brand values and how, or the way these traits are prioritized, largely determine the outcome of an initiative. Intuition, experience, perspective and practical matters factor into those determinations, but should not be a replacement for open investigation. What can be gained through ethnography, interviews—or a cycle of prototyping, testing and revising—is crucial to understanding an audience’s subjective baseline for value creation. If we omit that anthropological assessment, we risk missing invisible opportunities, or potential disruptions not clear in the context of a simplistic model with too many assumptions. We won’t know what brand values are resonant; what they should look, feel and sound like; or how to prioritize them for maximum impact in the context of social forces and the competition.

If this sounds like doom and gloom for those of us dealing with constraints on time, budget, access to customers or to people with Ph.Ds. in applied cultural analysis: Relax. We’ve all been there and there are some hacks to get you moving in the right direction, in the absence of deep research and analysis.

Employ ‘the five whys,’ pose a problem, then ask ‘Why?’ over and over with each answer forming the basis for the next question. This helps understand the causal relationships underlying the problem and why individuals are acting in a certain way. The way the problem is posed doesn’t matter so much—nor does the number of times you ask why—just keep going until you reach some insight that’s not superficially clear. This exercise often results in uncovering a deep motivation.

Another strategy is to use a hybrid framework for competitive landscape modeling, linking attributes consumers think of spatially (like amounts of cocoa in their ideal chocolate bar where the option closest to that point will be their preference) to attributes thought of hedonically (like the price of that chocolate with all else being equal, more value is better). Build a 2-axis grid where brands are plotted spatially along horizontal and vertical attribute continuums to see how crowded your spatial neighborhood is. But since selection may not be made solely on a spatial basis, your share of market may not be accurately represented. Just as more value is better than less, other attributes are viewed hedonically and these are typically defined by the target’s cultural context.
You then need to adjust the cut lines based on each brands’ hedonic ranking on different attributes. In doing this, you should be able to accurately anticipate the effect of adjustments to spatial and hedonic attributes. For instance, a 10% change to an important hedonic attribute will have a smaller proportional effect in a sparse spatial market than it would in a crowded one. Speaking with a sample from your target audience, and understanding how they think about different brand attributes, you can prioritize the mix of spatial and hedonic attributes in your communication, modeling them to see what will create the greatest opportunity.

Then, there is the concept of inversion. It’s so easy to be lured by the certainty of deduction and get caught in assumptions as we think through causes. Start at the end. What is the specific desired outcome? What specifically would prevent this from happening? This reframing is often enough to dislodge some of the assumptions we hold. We have limited processing power in a world filled with a tremendous amount of data. We selectively filter and develop rule-of-thumb shortcuts to open processing space for ‘trickier’ problems but we are famously bad at determining what is a System 1 versus a System 2 problem. Working backwards disables some of our biases so that we can see decisions and behavioral motivations more clearly. Avoiding mistakes is much easier than manufacturing brilliance.

So, be effective. Design for people contextually. Tap into the tools of anthropologists to understand the way groups act and the motivations that drive these actions. Short-circuit your high-level assumptions to get to root causes. Align brand values with cultural values and evaluate them in the same way those customers would to ensure equities are communicated or created optimally. Invert your thinking to avoid obvious traps. And create something meaningful, resonant and lasting—at least until the culture shifts.

Illustration by Bill Murphy.

Originally published on AMA.org

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