Brand Medicine, 101.
In our history, there are times when brand, their organic systems, begin to falter.
— They don’t speak to a community, or they forgot who they were talking to, what they were relating, carrying a story and a product to a certain audience. As in the emergency room, systems falter, and asynchrony occurs — brands babble, palpitate, quiver in uncertain tremor and
their circulation is stenotic. They might be bleeding — income and expense alignments are fractured.
I was thinking about working with P&G CEO A. G. Lafley — then, our work was about new brands and innovation — aligning consumer sets with latent and underutilized P&G technology and formulations towards the building of new brands to fit openings, globally, for new “circulation.” Now, in another form of emergent procedures, it might be a surgical divestiture — he’s cutting away brands that are failing to perform.
An emergency intervention.
What it comes down to — up to — and through — is:
relevance — the pertinence of brand;
resonance — the emotional magnetism of a brand’s proposition
and finally, the relationship —
what we think of as the three “r’s.”
Relevance is etymologically aligned to “relieve” and offers something to relief. Brand relief.
Resonance, is all about sound [literally, to re-sound] — the vibe of brand, does it echo back; and we know that any real brand is about story reflectivity; it’s a story that resounds, sounds back, echoes — a vibe that bounces back; it reverberates, like a deep note. A heart beat to our emergency and medical allegory.
And relationship — that is all about, to its linguistic legacy, “recounting and telling,” a referring or reporting, from relatus, to stand in reference, to report. A relationship, a relating, to establish in creating a relationship. Healthy — they grow and roll out as a community, organically expanding. Brands grow in that shared rhythm.
We tend to think, act, dream, and do the work of brands in design as a layering of allegory, the quest for symbolic meaning and archetypal evocations back to
the heart and soul of brand.
That’s how the story goes.
Deeper. Meaning full. Layered. Organic.
Tim | GIRVINDECATUR ISLAND STUDIOS
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Rethinking Beauty:
Brand Strategy & Visualization
Girvin BrandJourneys®
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