The Musings Of An Opinionated Sod [Help Me Grow!]

A friend of mine has spent – no word of a lie – THREE YEARS helping his client encapsulate their brand pyramid in a way that they feel comfortable with.

Now I appreciate words are important … but three years???

Surely the World will have changed significantly enough in that time to mean that whatever they come up with may not be as relevant as it once was.

And then there’s the fact that whatever ends up being shoved on the powerpoint slide [which will literally never be seen by anyone again] has to be translated and may not have a naturally fitting local alternative, the culture and make-up of that country may mean that even if things can be translated perfectly, they may not be culturally relevant.

As I said, I appreciate the importance of these things – at the very least, in terms of encouraging/ensuring consistency – however isolated words without any form of context will never convey everything you want to capture because at the most basic of levels, their interpretation is dependent on the person reading them and to counter that requires the adoption of the most bland, rational, category-cliché definitions possible and even that is no guarantee of success.

Sadly I sometimes get sucked into this sort of thing and so rather than end up having endless arguments about role, value, definitions and relevance [that doesn’t mean I don’t have them, I just have an inbuilt limiter], I tend to do two things.

1/ When we are defining words, we add + and – elements to help shape the meaning.

So for example, if the word under discussion was ‘fun’ [which most clients love to have in their brand pyramids, despite the fact they are almost universally devoid of it] we would say:

FUN
+ Spontaneous, Playful, Inclusive.
– Vindictive, Violent, Dangerous.

2/ To back this up, we create a mood board [or preferably a mood film] that captures the spirit and meaning of everything being said, with the instructions that they should never be seen by in isolation.

[I’d love to show you some, but that would get me in trouble because obviously the ones I have are all associated with a client I have either worked with or work with and they’ll be some rule about it, even if it’s years ago or thought it was shite]

Now you might think that makes it more painful and difficult, but trust me, in the bigger scheme of things it isn’t.

You see not only does this approach actually speed up the whole process because the +/- element allows people to not get so lost in words … but the mood film allows people to be emotionally involved and engaged by it all so by the end of it, the outtake is a more universally understood set of words, both interms of their definition but – even more importantly – what they emotionally represent.

Of course it’s not perfect – there’s still a degree of subjectivity behind it and I still question how/why some brands do this sort of thing, especially when they seemingly prefer it to actually ‘doing stuff’ – but at least when someone see’s the stuff we’ve developed, there’s a greater appreciation of what is being expressed than a seemingly random bunch of words that have been shoved inside a triangle.