Page 40 - MYM 2015

these two ways of communicating the same idea. A visual of a baby is perceived almost instantly in the right side of your brain. Not so with the printed word, “baby.”
The printed word “baby” is actually a visual that rst must be perceived in the right side of your brain and then that perception is sent to the left side of your brain where the word is translated into a sound. (You think in sounds, not words.)
That takes time and effort which many people won’t bother to do.
Walk down a street with many retail shops along with the signs spelling out their names. How many of these verbal signs do you bother to read? Not many. What you tend to see and recognize are the visuals owned by some of these retail chains. The Golden Arches of McDonald’s. Colonel Sanders of KFC.
Emotion is the glue that sticks a memory in the mind. But why are visuals emotional and words are not?
Every Brain Is Two Brains
A left hemisphere and a right hemisphere connected by the corpus callosum.
Your left hemisphere processes information in series. It thinks in language. It works linearly and methodically.
Your right hemisphere processes information in parallel. It thinks in mental images. It “sees” the big picture.
Your right hemisphere is also the site of your emotions. People with damaged right hemispheres tend to be “autistic,” lacking the ability to make an emotional connection with another person.
While the objective of a marketing program is to put a word or a verbal concept into consumers’ minds, the best way to do that is not with words at all. It’s with a visual that has emotional appeal.
But not just any visual. After all, advertising and other forms of marketing communications are loaded with visual images.
What a brand needs is a visual that reinforces its verbal positioning concept. The visual attracts the attention of the right side of the brain which sends a message to the left side of the brain to read or listen to the words associated with the visual.
The “position,” a verbal concept, is the nail. The tool that hammers the positioning nail into consumers’
minds is the visual hammer. (My daughter Laura
Ries has written a book on this subject called “Visual Hammer.” And I fully expect the idea to become just as famous as Positioning ever was.)
Trademarks versus Visual Hammers
In general, a trademark is not a visual hammer, although it can become one, especially if it is used by the leading brand in a category.
Why is this so? Because the trademark of a leading brand like Nike doesn’t just say “Nike.” It also says “leadership.” (Consumers call the Nike trademark, The Swoosh.)
But what do the trademarks of brands like Adidas
and Reebok say? If you recognize them at all, these trademarks just say “Reebok” and “Adidas,” nothing else.
In general, almost all brands have trademarks, but few brands have visual hammers. Almost all trademarks are rebuses, visual symbols that stand for brand names. After many years of constant use (and millions of advertising dollars), they are recognized by consumers as shorthand for brands.
And many trademarks don’t even do that.
Does your brand have a visual hammer? Or does it have a meaningless, rebus trademark? Or perhaps it has no visual at all.
How do you develop a visual hammer for your brand? The rst thing to ask yourself is, What do I want my brand to stand for?
Consider BMW. In 1974, BMW was a small brand on the global market. In America that year, BMW sold only 15,007 vehicles, making it the 28th largest-selling automobile brand.
Here is the headline of a typical BMW advertisement from that year: Our new BMW is a unique combination of luxury, performance and handling. And it’s amazingly easy on fuel.
If that’s what BMW wanted to say verbally, then developing a visual hammer for the brand would have been impossible.
So for most brands, the rst thing to do is to “narrow the focus.” Only a narrow, speci c idea can be visualized.
The following year, BMW introduced an advertising campaign with the slogan, The ultimate driving machine. That was the brand’s verbal nail. And the visual hammer that drove the “driving” idea
40 I October 2015