RSS
It’s not a brand. It’s a mosaic.
The world has changed.
It’s not about creating one-way, company-to-customer impressions anymore —if it ever was. Sure, you still put your products and messages in the marketplace. But now your customers put their experiences and expectations there, too. It all works together to create what we’ve come to agree is a “brand.”
But the image is out-of-date.
Success in this new era isn’t about searing impressions. It’s about arranging them. It’s about creating a mosaic of inputs and ideas, carefully positioned relative to each other. It’s about collecting all the pieces—both organization- and crowd-generated—and turning them into something people see, understand, and, most importantly, care about enough to pay for.
While you may not control all the individual tiles, you can control the image those pieces make when put together. Here’s what you need:
Vision. With so much information out there, it’s easy to lose sight of the identity you want to achieve. But lack of clarity leads to a fragmented image. Having a clear vision of your company and what it stands for helps you arrange the disparate parts into a cohesive whole, and forces necessary, and differentiating, selectivity.
Material. Two mosaics with the same subject can look very different based on the materials chosen, just as the same set of tiles can create two very different images depending on how they’re used. While you can “own” (and therefore control) your name, logo, and products, what materials you combine them with—language, imagery, customer engagement—creates a wholly different impression than your competitors.
Resolution. It can be tempting to focus only on “ownable” elements, but fewer tiles mean a less legible picture. Since your consumers’ conversations are happening anyway (and affect your brand), you can’t create your mosaic without them. You can either use them to add detail to your identity (via user experiences, feedback, and recommendations), or risk having them scrawled across your carefully constructed brand (via negative blog posts, tweets, or YouTube videos). While you can’t directly control what’s said, you can determine the context of how it’s heard.
Contrast. We don’t typically talk about both the “light” and “dark” of our companies. Yet well-formed images use both light and dark to create contrast, to form a more defined picture. Of course we like to focus on what’s great—and ignore (or more dangerously, hide) what isn’t. But transparency is no longer a choice. Our only choice is whether we want active or passive transparency: whether we want to determine how to address the light and dark or leave it up to our “viewers.”
Pattern. How pieces are used is as important as which. Its the arrangement of patterns in a mosaic that creates its energy and impact. Mosaics are static, of course, but their impression is not. As the builder of your brand mosaic, what impact are your patterns—your interactions and behaviors—having on the impression you want to give?
Thinking of your brand as a mosaic turns you from a brand manager, trying to control elements beyond your control, into a brand artist who controls how all the pieces fit together to create a vision for your company. The challenge is still to build a compelling and cohesive identity—but one that is meaningful to different people, differently, and one that uses all the materials at hand to realize your company’s vision.
Mosaic Branding™ is a trademark of Sametz Blackstone Associates.
Categories Branding
Twitter
LinkedIn
I LOVE this perspective, Tamsen.
Thanks, Meg! Maybe it’s because my background was in the arts, but I much prefer the idea of brand as something created from both the imagination and available materials.