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Some would claim regular new inventions from the ingenuiety of the human species, but there are often paralels in our past and in the natural world. Many "new discoveries" are no more than a renaming of an older phenomenon. A great deal can be written about brands, strategies associated with brands, positioning of brands and much more, commercial entities basically use brands to create a recognisable symbol which they can apply to everything they do, products, business cards, shopfronts, adverts, datasheets, uniforms, vehicles, websites etc. Some corporations have gone further than the traditional visual medium in creating an identifiable brand, Intel for example uses their own sound to signify their processors, as Microsoft use on their Windows operating system. To my knowledge there are no commercial organisations using our sense of smell at the moment but that may just be a matter of time. The more often the brand is reinforced in the target public mind, the greater brand awareness the organisation will achieve. People then also associate their perception of the product and the organisation with the brand or symbol which should give cohesiveness to the perceptions people have about the organisation in every area it is involved. The negative aspect to this is that a bad event or performance may prompt an organisation to have to re-brand or change their name or symbol. Can anyone remember what Windscale was? does anyone drive past Three Mile Island anymore? These two names were phased out after nuclear leaks. Windscale for example was renamed Sellafield. Three Mile Island was renamed so well that I spent a night there in complete ignorance until a colleague who knew the story told me to "get out of that hotel right now!! ". Merging organisations with different brands can cause all sorts of challenges, how to amagamate symbols and names in a meaningful way. Brands can be very valuable but are hard to put a monetary figure on. I am sure I will return to the subject of brands in this magazine in the future so I can return to the purpose of this text. Brands in the commercial sense are not a new phenomenon, not invented by commerce business or marketing, rather they were borrowed and applied from previous use of symbols and visual markings in a variety of other places. Armies had standards and colours and uniforms since time immemorial, churches have symbols, heraldic families had family crests, birds have colourful plumage and the rattle snake has its rattle. The point of all these various stimuli is identity and recogniseability. Most all humans of many and varied races and languages know to be wary of snakes, particularly those that rattle. Birds find their mates among other things by their plumage and many species of poisonous plant and berry are identifiable by colouring that has not changed in generations of evolution. When we humans start applying symbols to our own creations we also strive for consistent recogniseability and memorability. When we are faced with merging two different brands we should probably learn from the heraldic crests of great families, from the heritage left us by our aristocracy and from the very natural world whose colours and markings can be far more vivid than any man made creation. Author: Mark Abraham mark@sticky-marketing.net 30 May 2001
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