Chapter 12
Naming is only half the battle.
Read Time:
6 Minutes 33 Seconds (fast / skim reader)
8 Minutes 12 Seconds (average / steady reader)
10 Minutes 56 Seconds (concentrated / deep comprehension reader)
You’ll have heard the Branson inspired cliche “A Brand is more than a Logo”.
This is true.
But a Brand is not a Brand without a Logo.
The SUCCESS of a Brand – over time – goes like this:
1) Your Advert Needs a Logo, a Name and a Strap Line.
2) Your Advert Needs a Logo and a Strap Line.
3) Your Advert gathers the same attention with any of the three.
4) Your Advert Needs a Fraction of the Logo … in any colour, to be unmistakeably your brand.
Why does it matter.
If you’ve never given it much thought – some of the World’s most famous logos didn’t start out on a computer – they started on a signwriters bench.
Pre the computer age all business was done at close quarters; over a counter or in between handshakes.
Or at a distance; goods passing by or in the physical sense of the location where the product was made or sold.
Quite literally – face time meant someone taking their offering and putting it right in someone’s face, or it meant showing as many people as possible over as wide an area as possible where you were.
This links back to that 0.05 second “shape” recognition and retention by the third second in Chapter 10 “The Naming Game”
INTERMISSION
Ice Creams are available in the lobby vestibule
I remember the second time I saw Cimarron, New Mexico.
After days of nothing, following the stars as far as we could from Moon Rise to Moon Set, hiding in the shade of the wagon through high noon and siesta time.
Until eventually there it was.
A smudge just slightly darker than the dust filled everything that surrounded it. Dust, all the way to the horizon in every direction.
I’d been here before, God only knows why I’d agree to be here again, and even when we reached the single street one horse town, we knew what to expect from its clapboard fronted buildings half-starved dogs and Stevie B’s Store:
All the hardware, ammunition, vitals and guitars a pioneer, cow poke or miner might need. Alongside what passed for a bar out there in the wilderness.
But we wouldn’t be staying long – this wasn’t the final destination.
The smudge grew bigger by the hour, becoming a shimmering mirage in the heat haze. But then, at a size I could still hide by holding two fingers of my horizontal hand at full arm’s length, the heat waved smudge gained a new colour above the dun coloured timber.
Closer, and the solidifying structures were showing a red cap. Closer still and the shape of the colour began to take form.
In the least likely location, to my mind at least, I thought I recognised that shape.
With still an hour or more to travel I could make out it was a sign, a cut to shape painted red sign. My travelling companion said he couldn’t read it from that distance and asked what it was – I couldn’t read it either but I was sure I knew.
Never before or since have I known a thirst so great, so urgently in need of a quenching, a burning desire that our warm canteen with its last drops of water could not distract us from.
By the time we threw ourselves through Stevie B’s swinging saloon doors, we were beyond desperate.
“Hell Stevie! Why the sign!
You could have waited till we arrived to say you’d got Coca Cola!”
Coca-Cola was invented in 1886, by the mid-1890s, Asa Candler their head of marketing, was flooding the American frontier with oilcloth banners, tin signs, and painted walls.
They were deliberately targeting remote outposts because they knew the stark red script against a barren, dun-coloured desert was the ultimate psychological trigger for a desperate, thirsty traveller.
Now you may think this (original) Historic Fiction, of how to build a business empire, has nothing to do with today’s online marketing landscape – but you’d be wrong
No not just wrong.
Are you out of your tiny cowboy / girl / person mind!
If you chose to waste time on focus groups, and asked a room full of adults about their very first memory, they will weave stories of family, of prams, of home life… but consumer psychologists have proven they are lying to themselves,
That red script logo has probably been sat in their mind’s periphery since before they could walk.
You may not think your business has the time to wait for today’s pre-schoolers to grow up remembering your new logo – but the same frameworks for memory are repeated throughout lifetimes. The same principles apply:
You can’t be successful
if you can’t be Seen
or you’re not Remembered.
(Except the Secret ones, the Government commissioned ones, and the Drug Cartels. See “The Playbook”)
NOW let’s get back to making Logo memories.
Go back a Chapter and you’ll remember
“ATTRIBUTION OF MYTH”
• Misattributed quotes
• Legends
• But there are other forms…
This is one of the “other forms”:
YOU ARE LYING TO YOURSELF
Because it is so important to Commercial Brands and Global Business, Billions(£or$) are spent on Consumer Psychology every year.
When fractions of this research leak into the public domain – mainly because the world’s media have a lot of column inches, pages and 24/7 airtime to fill – you can pretty much be assured that the findings are accurate and substantiated.
There’s the twisting by journalistic spin and editorial shortening that can take you a long way from the truth (Shakespeare on Richard the Third as edited for Elizabeth the First is a good example) but if you drill down into what has been reported, this is all good stuff.
The body of work on this subject is huge, but the main factors that concern this Chapter are as follow:
1)
Our true memories of childhood don’t start to form until 3 and a half years old.
This is why in western systems our pre formal education time is based around play, rather than trying to develop “intelligence” (the gathering and retention of knowledge).
A major study first published in “Psychological Science” magazine (2018) said 40% of people have a completely fictional first childhood memory.
Our adult brains (like all nature) hates a void – not a vacuum, that’s a stupid saying, nothing can live in a vacuum whether it abhors it or not.
A void on the other hand, just like people who have to say something, anything, to fill a pause in the conversation or an awkward silence in the room, is something we cannot live with:
“So I was born, and then what?”
“Well you had a blue scooter…”
“What? As I came out of the womb?”
“No but…”
“I can remember something blue!”
“Well there you go then.”
So yes we lie to ourselves to fill the gap, using fragments we have been told and then imagined as true memories.
Partially back with the Limbic Brain but working against us – a slant on Pareto’s conclusion that we do things “because we wanna” (Spice girl study) and find rationales later in life to justify them.
Except we do have REAL memories from that gap.
2)
At Nottingham Trent University, amongst other sources, they picked up on Commercial Logos, TV Adverts and Bright Packaging design from much earlier work by Dr Jim McNeal.
McNeal, a former Professor at Texas A&M University, famously stated:
“Children can write “M” for McDonald’s before they can write their own name”
3)
Yes our earliest memories aren’t of those blurry images of big people staring down at us, making daft noises and pushing things in our mouths – we have no idea what a nanna or grandad is – but those Cereal Boxes on our high chair feeding platform, those crazy shape children’s TV characters, Brand Mascots, the Disney, Lego and McDonald’s logos … we remember those from before we were 3 or even 2, because our Limbic system’s survival mode is telling us what they mean:
Bright, commercial shapes are providers of entertainment, comfort — and sugar.
THE BRAND MEMORIES FOLLOW US.
Those real memories and impressions form the literal framework for our future selves. At every age we are looking for the next gratification for our remaining – and changing – basic needs. But not just those.
It isn’t just the actual memories of specific brands that follow us, but the WAY we look at brands, style, colours and shapes in every part of our lives.
In nurseries and early years schools there has been movement towards using softer and more muted tones in areas where there is a need to reduce over stimulation – away from the constant high energy bright and vibrant.
Likewise – we use colours in commercial design and branding to help consumers “plug in” to the mood and meaning of a product or service.
SPECIFICS
We design using vivid colour palettes to invite adventurous people towards anything that is meant to be an exciting “join in / take part” brand.
We design using monotones and muted palettes for inactive audiences who want to be entertained or comforted while relaxing.
We design in luxuriant colours – those tones created from deep combinations on artists palettes that intrigue; like the blues that are never just blue – they’re the summer midnight sky still tinged by a red sunset seen through a silhouetted canopy of Japanese Maple leaves… for the audience who would wear that colour dress to a masked ball.
NOW – imagine the effort we could put into your Logo.
LOGO ON
The Shape of a Logo is as important as the colour and the font.
• Once we had a whole universe of concepts, symbols, and geographically specific physical mediums to play with.
• Then we gained literacy and everyone wanted understandable letters and words that were consistent enough to explain, describe, compare and contrast.
• Then we had lettering styles that were taught to apprentice Sign Makers and Stone Masons / Monolithic Inscribers – Roman, Block, Script, Italic…
• THEN!, Some damn fool invented computers, which led to people trying to make fish graphics and game symbols out of the basic computer fonts so
• THEN !!!, some other idiots invented “Graphic Interfaces” and we were back to using one font – usually Helvetica – for everything!
It’s better now – there are millions of digital fonts.
With almost a dozen, maybe, that are discernibly different.
But still the fact that virtually everyone, not just the graphic designers in the world are sat staring at the same screen with the same software to play with, has meant that most logos look very much alike:
1) Font
2) Font tweaked
3) Font in a curved tick shape
4) Font in a box
5) Font with shape adjacent
AND very few REALLY MEMORABLE SHAPES OR INTEGRATIONS
How is that going to be a first childhood memory?
Or drive a traveller to distraction in the wilderness?
HOW IS THAT EVER GOING TO MAKE YOUR BUSINESS STAND OUT?
Here’s what to do:
Think as deeply as you can about your company.
Not just your product or service, but your vibe.
The people who work in your business, the people you sell to, then talk to a real expert about them building you an Original Integrated Logo before using that as the base for everything your Brand needs to achieve.
Now. Where are you going to find someone who really knows how to help you with that?
We’ll put the kettle on. Have we said? It’s Yorkshire Tea but we also have DCaf and the occasional herbal knocking about – or coffee – we can do coffee.
