The Manifest Manifesto #7: A Good Visual Vocabulary is Essentially Essential.
I was sitting in a room with twenty or so other directors, designers, account executives, and producers waiting the most important meeting of the year with our biggest customer to start – the annual market strategy reveal. Over the next two hours, this multi-national brand’s internal research team will present a vision that will guide our marketing efforts for the next year. The phone chimed as offices across South America, Africa, and various parts of Asia dialed in. The coordinator sported a British accent which I mentally noted as a perfect fit for the importance of this event. The air crackled with that sort of nervous electricity in the air generated from collective anticipation. The coordinator pleasantly introduced the research team and then launched into his presentation. Within the first 3 minutes my inner Han Solo said “I have a bad feeling about this”.
The team explained that customers no longer want to think deeply about adverts and would benefit from an extreme form of reduction. You see, today's hyper-stimulated consumer has too taxing a cognitive load on them, so it benefits brands to get to the point as quickly as possible. The team then presented an example of what this reduced execution will look like across all major and sub-brands. This amounted to a templated approach to all advertising that required all brands to take a back seat to the overarching master brand. Each brand would conform to a strict template: The headline became a formula that must exist in a certain visual location. One photo would be allowed, but it must only show exactly what the headline said. Body copy here. Supplemental copy there, product inset neatly tucked in the corner. All set on a common color that must be the same across the portfolio of brands. And nothing else interesting allowed. The research team proudly labeled this vision “Brutal Simplicity”.
Brutal.
Simplicity.
I drew the words on my pad and put triple underlined the word “Brutal.” I could see the road ahead, a path that would lead us to ruthlessly murder the robustness and character of these individual brands. The unique voices of each brand would be mercilessly silenced one by one until, when the carnage was complete, we would hear nothing. And this wholesale slaughter would all done in the name of the customer.
But is that what the customer really wants?
What the customer really wants
In a world where seemingly everything is screaming for their attention at all times, is the desire to be handed "just the facts" wrapped in a templated bow? My answer, as a consumer myself, is no. I want to believe. I want a brand to tell me a carefully detailed story that invites me into a conversation that I actually care about. That story needn't be long, but it should be memorable and anchor itself to the core information of the Brutal Simplicity approach.
I should note, it’s not difficult to see the allure of the Brutally Simple approach. Beyond Keeping It Simple Stupid, it’s also terribly efficient. Instead of having to solve multiple brand and campaign equations on at least an annual basis, you can solve one and then force-fit products and solutions into it. The glaring problem with this approach is a psychological principle known as Concept Fatigue whereby the brain assumes it has seen or heard something it hasn't because it sounds or looks very similar to something it has experienced. When this takes place, the brain doesn't give its full attention. After all, there's plenty of other interesting and potentially unique stimuli to feed a growing brain.
Longer term this is exactly what happened to the global brand mentioned earlier. After the initial marketing push where everything was neat, tidy and semi-original the communication touchpoints all started looking eerily similar. So when customers glanced at Communication X from Brand Y they assumed it was Communication B from Brand C and moved on assuming they'd heard that story before.
Dear reader, you may consider yourself lucky to not be juggling multi-brand rollouts on a semi-annual basis and therefore be immune. You'd be mistaken. This same story also plays out on smaller stages all the time via communication touchpoints that play it too safe, have overstayed their welcome, or look and sound too much like another brand or product.
While this principle applies broadly to a brand's story, the tone it's told in and the mediums by which it's being told; we're going to focus on the visuals.
Your new best friend – Visual Vocabulary
A good visual vocabulary is essentially essential. In other words, establishing a consistent, comprehensive, and ever-expanding set of visual elements is necessary for an engaging conversation from a brand to its audience. Every color, icon, photo, illustration, and even typeface is the equivalent to adding words to your brand's vocabulary. If there's too few, your brand will come off immature or immaterial. If the elements are inconsistent, your brand appears disjointed and unconfident. The trick is finding a visual direction that is honest to its core values, tone and voice and unique enough to be seen and remembered in a crowded marketplace. To do this successfully, you've gotta build a lot of up-front equity and leave room for it to expand as it matures.
This all underscores the importance of a proper Brand Equity assessment beforehand to identify the pillars, decision-points, and personality that in turn inform the Visual Vocabulary of a brand. But that is another blog article, for another time.
As for right now, let me tell you the story of a brand that did it right and still continues to reap the benefits.
The story of Brew City
Brew City is the original beer battered fries and appetizers used in restaurants and occasionally seen in grocers across North America and globally. Chances are, if you see " beer battered" listed on a menu describing either a fry or appetizer, it's them or a copycat. However, a couple decades after their initial successful launch, sales had plateaued. The brand still represented a quality product beloved by consumers and trusted by operators, but their news was no longer new. In the years following their launch, the craft beer movement was in full swing and adopted by the population at large whose palettes were becoming increasingly sophisticated. No longer was their core audience beer-guzzling bros at sporting events that needed carbs to soak up the suds. Everyday folks now have an understanding and appreciation of craft beer itself. Their success also resulted in a host of copycat competitors appearing on the scenes vying for customer attention even as the market expanded to accommodate customer interest. Brew City still had bragging rights when it came to taste preference and depth of portfolio, they just needed a fresh way to say it.
Instead of communicating the brand message with a punny sports-and-beer-batter headline set over a large photo of the product on a sterile white background with some product benefits bulleted out where space allowed (the formula for just about everyone at the time), Brew City carved out something uniquely appropriate.
This began by visually zagging from competition through establishing a dark, rich and mysterious photography style that felt like it belonged in gastropubs and local restaurant-bars. Each shot became an opportunity to not only highlight the product itself, but also a particular beer type to pair it with. And just like that, the product line itself became tailored to tie in with every grub and pub featuring local craft beer.
The visual vocabulary further expanded through things like the creation of a unique set of rune-like glyphs to highlight product attributes and abilities and even a set of sanctioned physical materials including swathes of charred cedar wood and black slate to be used in communications. An approach to typography, color-tone and even tableware were established to work together with other elements in a variety of ways over a multitude of executions all to enabled conversations with potential customers and give them the feeling there was more to the story just beyond the edge of the screen or page.
The Result
This approach, paired with an exceptional sales and marketing team on the client-side managed to exceed volume goals by 5% and empowered the brand to highlight their products, educate consumers on market trends, and even spotlight specific chefs and brewers who were the best of the best while continuing to build and evolve themselves.
Brew City continues to successfully launch in new markets globally and because the foundational visual vocabulary is robust (and growing) there should always be something new and interesting to say.
Brutally Simplistic? No my friends. Brutally Awesome.
-M