One of the greatest challenges we face as marketers is to build and maintain strong brands.
Thankfully our tool chests are brimming with tools to help us carve out rich seams of knowledge and understanding relating to our audience that feeds our strategic thinking. That’s not all, add to this the torrent of real time feedback being generated across social media spaces about our products and some would say we’ve never had it so good. How could we fail to build strong brands?
Sadly, the truth is many brands are over communicated and tragically miss their mark and that’s a real shame, because it needn’t be so.
Seth Godin, recently posted about the purpose of a book cover was to create maximum impact. Reading it I remembered looking at some old movie posters and thinking that one of the hardest jobs in the world, in my mind, is describing a 90 minute movie in one sentence without loosing any of the impact of the narrative. Talk about a tough gig, big respect goes to those guys!
The one that sticks in my mind (though there are many others) was the theatre poster for Platoon. An iconic image with the line, “The first casualty of war is innocence.” It worked on me and millions of other who were draw in to see it.
Distilling a message out of all that marketing data without losing its impact and relevance is something we’re going to need to become better at because space and time is tight in people minds.
Marketers need to become effective miners and sievers of data. They need to measure information against the essence of their brand and shake out the insights and meaning that enables them to reduce and purify their message.
The strongest brands have the simplest message.
