Monthly Archives: March 2011

Brand Identity…or Ornamentation?

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Wikipedia defines a brand as an identity.  Many years ago, while excavating a late woodland Indian shell midden on Moshier Island for the University of Southern Maine, I came across a piece of deer rib bone I assumed was some type of weaving shuttle. (It wasn’t my day job.)  It had some notches on the bone which gave it a unique appearance and I wondered if they were ornamental or a personal identifier. 

Outside branding nerds, many in marketing today don’t quite know the difference between identifier brands and ornamental brands.   What’s the Idea? builds and rebuilds identifier brands.  Only then do we allow them to be ornamented.  And that dress up, as beautiful as it may be, must add to the identification story.  Go into a room, turn off the lights and listen to the voices of your friends and family. You can identify them.  But if you feel their clothes, not so much.

The big girls and boys know this.  Whenever an Interbrand, Landor or Wolff Olin starts a new  logo project they create a brief; one that sets the identity direction.  Recently for a commercial maintenance company I developed a strategy suggesting they were the  “Navy seals” of maintenance.  Preemptive, fast and fastidious.  When the art director went off to do logo designs, he had a directive. When the client reviewed designs, he knew “how to buy” and “what to approve.”  Of course some ornamentation got in the way and he wanted to be a “green” company and, and, and.  But the CEO ran his group with navy seal precision – it was the company. It was his identifier.   The mark and brand organizing principles where hard to debate.  This is how we do-oo it!.  Peace.

Music is Dying. And the Roots Backlash.

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Here’s the problem with digital music.  It’s music.  And music consumption is being replaced by the internet and messaging. 

Daily book readership, as a percentage of leisure time spent, took a major hit when the radio came around. Radio listenership diminished with the advent of TV.  TV is fluctuating but as baby boomers go asunder it, too, will take a back seat to the growth of whatever is next.  Even today, if you look closely at ear buds they’re tethered to people staring at the screens (video) not to people with with eyes closed, boppin’ to music.

I don’t listen to much music anymore, unless I’m in a bar. Or when Pearl Jam or X come around.  I go to see Hot Tuna (Jorma and Jack) every year but friends orchestrate that.  A road trip to Williamsburg to see someone new like Justin Townes Earle is worthy, but I stumbled upon him by accident.  The radio really sucks.  Pandora is cool, perhaps the only thing that can save music, but the model is wrong. iTunes has sold 10 billion songs since 2003, but made negligible money (on the songs) doing so.  Music in the advertising  business used to be very important.  Now, most music on TV and radio ads is created by the algorithm.

The music business has been mismanaged and mislead. It will come back — but Lady Gaga at $.99 a song will not do it. And it will never be where it once was.  As art become replaced by engineering, we lose our humanity note by note. The roots backlash will help the arts but it could get ugly.   Peace.