October 16, 2005
Do you hear what they hear?
So I encountered something interesting, today, that brought me back to thoughts of Martin Lindstrom and BRAND Sense.You see, my sleeping schedule is decidedly off from the rest of my household. And because those dear members of my family are usually the ones going to bed while I stay up and milk my insomnia, I do a great deal of late night television watching. Usually movies on one of those "premium channels," which shall remain nameless, but should really think about wedging a few more movies in between the 15 different series it has going. But that is a blog entry for another time.
And, as is per my wont, I've gone down a path of giving you context that, truly, is of no great consequence to our story. It's merely to elicit feelings of empathy from you, my attentive audience, for my sad, sad life. Now that you are sufficiently bored, I'll quickly change topics, in hopes of keeping your initially rapt, but rapidly becoming weary, attention.
With apologies to my vegetarian and vegan readers, let's get to the real meat (or roughage), shall we? Come along.
Because everyone else in the house is asleep, and because our house is not a sprawling mansion, I tend to watch these movies with the television muted. Completely quiet. Captions provide the dialog. It's as if every movie were a foreign movie, except the plots are generally less enchanting and they all have happy endings of one kind or another. But, again, I digress. Point being, I tend to watch a number of movies without a critical component of the movie experience: sound.
And generally, this doesn't detract from the experience. I can add the sound of explosions or gunshots or laughter or whatever. I can assume what the sound of wind rustling through the trees sounds like or what sound a laser makes.
But in every practically every movie, there are those montage or non-verbal scenes, where there isn't actually any dialog anchoring the scene. Instead, you get music. And here's where it gets interesting.
These movies fall into two categories: ones I've seen and ones I haven't. For the movies I have seen, I can generally remember the mood they were attempting to evoke. Like let's say, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Seen it a few times. I can pretty much hear the soundtrack in my head. For the ones I haven't seen, I like to think that I've seen enough movies in my day that I can generally guess what the music will be. Now, it gets even more interesting.
So, I add the soundtrack to the movie, in my head. Incorporating who-knows-what music in an attempt to fill in the spaces. I, for lack of a better analogy, write my own soundtrack based on what's happening, the feel of the movie, and the characters. So, I've got a concept for what the movie should sound like.
So, today, as I was saying, that kind of changed. I finally saw one of the movies that I had originally watched with no sound. And the music was completely off. I mean, it was the real music, but it wasn't the music I had imagined in my head. And it was effective, but it wasn't as effective as the music I had chosen, when I had my own private soundtrack.
And that made me think: We are always filling in the gaps, based on our perception of the brand. And then I started to think some more, as a cold sweat started to build on my brow. If we are not defining the elements of our identity to inform that brand, then the market will improvise, defining their own identity elements. And then, perhaps worst of all, it hit me. If we allow the market to intuit components of our identity based on their perception of our brand, and then we, as marketers, eventually step in to supply an identity that is incongruent with their assumptions, we're going to lose that market.
Brand damage through attrition. Brand damage by what you don't do. And irreparable damage inflicted purely by lack of planning, consciousness, and timing.
Which brings us back to Martin Lindstrom and his BRAND sense concept. There are a variety of elements that are missing from the majority of identities, every day. Most identities live on a look-and-feel-combined-with-voice subsistence. There's no audio. No touch. No smell. Not from a marketing department perspective.
But there is from a market perspective.
And unless we, as marketers, pay attention to all those elements of identity, all of those elements that are contributing to the formation of the brand in the market's collective mind, we're going to disappoint a good chunk of our market. Because they'll fill in the gaps. And when we guess, we'll guess wrong.
Am I doing it correctly in my day-to-day? Nope, but that's never stopped me from casting wide sweeping aspersions on the rest of you lot before. That's the beauty of writing for a blog called "hypocritical," friends, the joy of taking flights of fancy by finding fault with everyone else.
What sense-ible elements are missing from your identity? Has your market already closed the gaps with their own assumptions?
Technorati tags: Brand, Audio, Identity, Lindstrom, Brandsense
Do you hear what they hear?
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