Source: BrainCraft
Semiotics and Branding
Semiotics is often divided into three branches: Semantics, Syntactics, and Pragmatics. This division owes its existence to the philosophers John Locke and Charles Saunders Peirce. Semiotics explores the history of signs and symbols as a significant way of communication; in contrast to linguistics, however, semiotics also studies non-linguistics sign systems.
As you may deduce, the study of semiotics is essential to branding. What about your logo, brand, or signs is causing a catalyst-stimulus to act in the minds of your clients, and what is that stimulus?
Though most psychologist disagree on the efficacy of color therapy, for the sake of marketing and branding I will describe what marketers agree upon regarding which colors produce what emotional reaction in our psyche.
As you can see in the picture above, different brands would like to convey different moods in people's heads. Dell has chosen a sky blue that shows that they are dependable and trustworthy. Their slogan, "Dell, purely you", shoots for what most people want to feel when they buy a new computer, myself included.
Colors have always been a key part of the Internet; however, as the Internet has evolved into a massive business, strict color combinations or patterns have taken over and are being used in precise locations to herd you unconsciously into the direction of action and greater consumption.
Why would Blogger chose their button in orange? Apart from the obvious answer that their logo is in
orange. Could it be that, when you publish, they want you to be confident and cheerful about publishing?
The compose button on your Gmail account is hot red. Hopefully you will hit that happy trigger in your head and do it over and over again, since by composing and writing many emails you are utilizing their services.
It is simple to ask: why is this ad in this light blue color? The more you become aware, the less the ads will affect you. Or, better yet, you will start to realize whether you are reasoning based on an emotional pull or on an actual sound decision. Below, Microsoft is taking advantage of your poor understanding of emotional optics to make you jump at the idea of owning this computer. But you've got to do it soon! (The green button is a clear subliminal message that it would be healthy for you to do it as soon as possible.)
For the skeptics in the crowd that believe they are immune to the emotional effects of color, I ask you to take this Color Quiz. This test will not make you feel a certain way; it actually functions the opposite way: the colors you chose will allow the algorithm to discern how you feel at this very moment.
Since we are ball of perceptions, we must learn to pay attention to what we are up against. We are living in a world awash with corporations, a world in which corporations are actively conditioning us towards their own purposes, and these corporations ultimately want profit. There is a science to branding and it is not necessarily what looks good. There are studies conducted on the impact of human behavior and colors. How colored environments influence performance, behavior, negative and positive perceptions, moods, and emotions has been studied in-depth and is well-understood for the most part. But the prevalent use of the psychology of colors for corporate purposes need not make us saps or simple movable parts; we can become aware and resist the conditioning process.
Apart from resisting the constant flow of conditioning triggers, you can use the color wheel below to market your own products as efficiently as possible, by eliciting the responses you would like from your customers or clients. Once you've taken the Color Quiz, color profiling may make more sense to you.
To entrepreneurs, use color psychology to your advantage in your own business, or avoid it altogether at your own peril. Likewise, to individuals, it would be wise for you to understand how you are being subliminally pulled in different directions, which may shed some light into your own consumer habits, or you may simply ignore the subject making it easier for marketers to target you towards their desired actions.
How Millennials Are Changing Branding
Back in business school, in order to learn quickly and efficiently, I would compare and contrast different compaigns on my own time. Even if you don't have a trained eye for branding, anyone can gain some insight when you see big companies doing something over and over again. You can start to ask the right questions that lead you to useful insights. Remember, corporate Titans have the money to research everything, and not only that but they experiment for the sake of profit. We can learn a lot about any of their campaigns if we look at them under the right lens.
Many small businesses still make the mistake of going with what looks good, what is pleasing to the business owner, and what matches. While that is happening in mom and pop shops across America, something more calculative is happening in the branding and marketing machines of the Titans.
Now, I know that mom and pop shops don't have lots of money to invest on research and development or focus groups, but that is one more reason to spend time observing and asking questions about what Fortune 500 companies are doing and why they are doing it. Who are their target audiences and why? Asking these questions will lead you into an autodidactic journey.
As you can read in the headline below, Coca-cola is printing unique labels for 2 millions Diet Coke bottles.
Coca-Cola is partnering up with Gefen Team, Q Digital and HP Indigo. Coke wants no two cans to be alike. They want to convey to their "Diet Coke lovers that they are extraordinary by creating unique one-of-a-kind extraordinary bottles" - said Alon Zamir, VP of Marketing for Coca-Cola.
Here is another example: Budweiser is teaming up with Hewlett-Packard to create unique cans. Again, why would Coke and Budweiser go through the trouble of customizing their cans? The next question you should be asking is if this is going to be available to the public as a whole or if they are launching these special cans to a select few and "extraordinary" individuals. And it just so happens that both Coca-Cola and Budweiser are launching their products at concerts and music festivals.
The aforementioned leads to the following questions. Who is their target demographic? Who are these out of the ordinary special and unique beings? Obviously, it is mostly young people that have always gone to music festivals. So let's talk a little bit about this young generation.
Gen Y, a.k.a. Millennials, do develop brand loyalty, but not in the usual sense, as they become attached to brands based on quality and individual engagement. Millennials are known to be sophisticated technology-wise and immune to most traditional marketing and sales pitches, as they grew up in the midst of almost every marketing ploy. In the United States, they are more racially and ethnically diverse and therefore more segmented as an audience. To Millennials, personal finances are important in brand loyalty considerations, as they barely have enough resources to keep up with their day to day expenses, with almost two thirds of them needing their parents to co-sign when buying a car, renting an apartment, or attempting to get a credit card, often with disasterous results to their co-signers.
So what is the Coca-Cola / Budweiser marketing strategy based on? Mostly the following presuppositions.
Millennials are unique.
Where can we find many of them? Music Festivals!
How do we appeal to their Uniqueness? No two cans are alike!
The fact that Millennials develop brand loyalty based on quality and financial constrains more likely than not means that all that extra packaging cost and investment is going to go nowhere. Here you have potential collectible products way down the line, but they are going to be distributed in a place that makes it almost certain that they are unlikely to survive as collectibles. In the middle of their partying, Millennials will just pick up the next cheapest can in the pile, whether it's Pepsi, Coke, Budweiser, Coors, or whatever. Sometimes corporate experiments can go horribly wrong , and sometimes tried and true strategies are precisely so because they work.
So what do Millennials actually want?
Answer: SOME CONCERT TICKETS!
Score this round a win for Pepsi by going with a tried and true traditional marketing strategy.
So what do Millennials actually want?
Answer: SOME CONCERT TICKETS!
Score this round a win for Pepsi by going with a tried and true traditional marketing strategy.
The Theory of Moral Sentiments by Adam Smith (1759)
...As we have no immediate experience of what other men feel, we can form no idea of the manner in which they are affected, but by conceiving what we ourselves should feel in the like situation. Though our brother is upon the rack, as long as we ourselves are at our ease, our senses will never inform us of what he suffers. They never did, and never can, carry us beyond our own person, and it is by the imagination only that we can form any conception of what are his sensations. Neither can that faculty help us to this any other way, than by representing to us what would be our own, if we were in his case.By the imagination we place ourselves in his situation, we conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments, we enter as it were into his body, and become in some measure the same person with him, and thence form some idea of his sensations, and even feel something which, though weaker in degree, is not altogether unlike them. His agonies, when they are thus brought home to ourselves, when we have thus adopted and made them our own, beg It is the impressions of our own senses only, not those of his, which our imaginations copy.In at last to affect us, and we then tremble and shudder at the thought of what he feels. For as to be in pain or distress of any kind excites the most excessive sorrow, so to conceive or to imagine that we are in it, excites some degree of the same emotion, in proportion to the vivacity or dulness of the conception.
For full text click here: The Theory of Moral Sentiments.
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