Who do you think of when you hear this expression: "Iron Lady"? It is the same person whose "end line" could be "The lady is not for turning"?
The answer, of course, is Margaret Thatcher the first woman Prime Minister of the UK. The lady who was Prime Minister for about 10 years and then was dumped by her party and replaced with...? If I said, "Grey" would that help jog the memory, or at least make you nod as you associate the word with the man? The man being John Major, who was famously depicted in the political satire show "Spitting Image" with an all grey puppet to drive home the point...
It is interesting to me that in everyday life we constantly see and accept shorthand for describing people in the public eye. These usually take the form of an adjective or descriptor such as the "Iron Lady" for Margaret Thatcher and "Grey" for "John Major". It is simply the way we remember and process things using simple expressions and individual words to categorize, classify and associate people with what we see them as standing for or offering.
I think we should take time to think about what it can mean for brand building
It was, for example, something that the (recently reformed) Spice Girls management realized when originally creating the "Spice Girls" brand band. They put together a collection of clearly different individuals or products under the "Spice Girls" brand band called Posh, Ginger, Sporty, Scary and Baby. What is interesting and significant to me is that if you ask most people who were around at the time to name say all the members of other created and "boy"/ "girl" bands like say "Take That", "Backstreet Boys", "Westlife", "Boy Zone" (or maybe even some of older bands like "The Who" or "Rolling Stones") most people can probably remember the name of the lead singer and unless they are really diehard fans are not going to be able to name all the members of the bands.
We use in everyday life a word or an adjective to describe people in the public eye. They come to own in our minds that specific association uniquely. It is that person we associate with that word - and once they own it, it sticks. We haven't moved the "iron" descriptor onto another lady and so on. Margaret Thatcher owns that in our minds. It's simple, it's easy and it sums up her and her way of doing things. No matter what she does she will probably always be associated with that and own that in our minds.
So why then do marketers not follow the same logic when it comes to thinking about brands in the minds of consumers?
I read a report once about a speech that Maurice Saatchi, of the communication group Saatchi fame, made in June 2006 where he argued that one day brands would only ever be able to own a word, and the sooner that marketing people thought about that the better, clearer and easier it would become to create powerful and interesting communication. He said, “One word equity is the global ownership of one word in the consumer’s mind. In any one category there will be good and bad words. I envisage companies competing to own the most powerful word”
That has always stuck in my mind and I think he is right.
As people and consumers we learn and memorize using shorthand as we just cannot remember everything. Caricaturists use the same technique when they take one or two features and exaggerate them. It is the one or two things that make people or things instantly recognizable. I am sure most of us will remember using mnemonics (a formula in the form of a word or short rhyme) to memorize things for exams even to make them shorter and easier to recall.
Why don't we do that more with brands instead of having long and complicated brand positioning that we all know creatively we need to boil down anyway?
What do you think? Leave a comment
No comments:
Post a Comment