After reading Whistle Through Your Comb and Logic + Emotion lately, I was inspired to create my own chart of the brand/public interface. Both Leland and David, respectively have great ideas about how this shakes out, and here’s my take.
I’m not sure if Leland coined the phrase Brand Morality — or if he even wanted to — but I think it’s a great summation of what we’re getting at with the “2.0” phenomenon. To Leland’s point, brands should be less about the statements the make and more about a humanistic identification of “who they are.” It’s in the spirit of coming down off the corporate mountain and actually talking to people in their language. The average guy or gal on the street may not understand what’s entailed in a brand essence or mantra, but it’s pretty easy, if contentious, to discuss morality. Encircling that are the ways that the brand communicates with the public, the “channels” and/or “touchpoints” depending on the marketing lingo you speak. It’s a unified face for the brand that is informed by the various components of a brand’s morality: its beliefs, its history, its practices and its voice, among other things.
Here’s where the orange comes in. Besides being my favorite color and fruit, its wedges represent the various collective identities that exist within society. I might be nuts, but I see brands as helping people define who they are, especially within a wildly commercialized society such as ours. With the growing ability to connect on a one-to-one basis with customers, brands will have a stronger-than-ever influence on how identities are defined.
2 Comments
I dig the orange. Well played.
Thanks, Leland. I appreciate it. So are you going to go down in history as the coiner of “Brand Morality”? Could be royalties there.