I was working in a team-collaborative session, a BrandQuest, Soul Summit—an innovation forum, and we were discussing the implications of attraction.
As brand strategists and designers, you know about the implications of product attraction.
As we put it, first there must be relevance—any needful brand has to have utility, it has a place as a necessary item—it’s useful, it’s the right thing for right now.
Then, there is the song—the sound of the brand as an enchantment, your audience has a connection because of the desirability of its “sound,” it’s chant, the lyricism of its expression. We call that brand resonance. Think about it as a song and this comes around as a melody that resonates with a guest, customer, and audience member. This relates to messaging—the framing of a way of communicating, but too, it lies in the visualization.
As anyone knows, GIRVIN thinks metaphorically about branding as a creative and poetic enterprise, it’s a way of thinking that humanizes and deepens the connectivity of memory and mindfulness.
But what of magic?
In thinking about the gesture of the magical, it’s about a sequence of representations—what is the object, the focus of attention, what is the portrayal of its evolution, and how is that perception transported into the newness, the wowness, of something newly defined?
In the hands of a magician, as shown in Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige, portrayed by Christian Bale above—that transport is trickery and deception. And this is different in the spirit of brand magic—the notion of the practice of a brand mage is something more akin to wisdom, since the origins of magic lie in the transport of natural forces that bends perception and brings a wholly new view of what that nature might be.
I think about brand magic in that context, which I’ve referred to as “the crossroads of experientiality.” Any journeyer knows of the decision-making at the crossroads—from here, “which way do you go?”
Magic is a transporter—it’s a portal of perception that moves from one degree of awareness to another—and two, and in that trans-port, a guest moves from one sight-line to another.
Speaking of magic, does anyone recall
Apple’s proposition of the iPad?
Enchantment aligns with these sentiments—since this too speaks to in-cantation, a kind of song-related spell-binding, but the word is, in a 13th century historical use, more akin to cantare—“to sing.” But enchantment is, of course, about the weaving of spells—to brand magic, we might think of this in the entangling of message, visualization, promotional expressions in a holistically engaged outreach—it’s magical, since it’s transportive.
Your audience was there.
And now they are here.
Tim | GIRVIN | Strategic Brands
Digital | Built environments by Osean | Theatrical Branding
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