Welcome to Marketing Chronicles. A newsletter where marketers come for expert industry commentary at the intersection of strategy and creativity — every Wednesday sent before daybreak. If you like what you see, join us for free.

In this edition:

• Column: How To Make Your Brand Look Like Itself

• Inspiration: Honda’s Hypnotizing Ad “The Cog”

• Documentary: “Making A Marketer 2”

Column: How To Make Your Brand Look Like Itself

Oftentimes when I speak to new marketers I hear the topic of “design” coming up in conversation.

For one reason or another, the marketing function has become largely associated with design and creativity (something extremely important indeed) instead of driving growth and profits.

You see, creativity is in fact a major determinant of how effective an advert will be (only second to the size of the brand). However, marketing as a discipline is much more than just adverts.

Marketers represent the consumer within the organization. We bring valuable inputs into pricing, distribution, and product development strategy, because in the end of the day, the only ones in the organization that actually deal with consumer research are the marketers.

So, while logos, taglines, and commercials are critical for the execution of a marketing strategy, they are just the tip of the iceberg.

What Role Creativity Plays

Most brands don’t have in-house agencies. Meaning, for any and all creative work that needs to be done, they reach out to their creative partners outside of the organization by briefing them on a project of strategic importance.

Let’s take the example of running a TV ad.

The brand manager will build their brand plan for the following year and through it uncover weak points that must be addressed — these could be around product improvements, pricing adjustments, and of course brand mental associations.

To improve a brand’s image in the minds of consumers, adverts can play a disproportionate role in achieving that.

But the reality with ads is that most of them won’t be remembered by the customer the following day. A study done by the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute showed that on average only 40% of ads seen on TV are recalled the following day.

Out of which, only 40% are correctly attributed to the right brand.

Meaning, 84% of ads end up being a waste of money because people don’t remember the ad nor connect it back to the brand in question.

While we could go deeper into what makes a great ad memorable, today I’d like to unpack further how to make ads more easily associated with your brand.

What Are Brand Codes

Brand codes are distinctive brand assets that leverage the senses (although, because of our media environment, it often ends up being just visual and auditory) to give a brand a “face and body shape”.

So, while a brand’s positioning is the brand’s “soul”, brand codes are the brand’s body — it’s what people experience.

Brand codes can be a variety of things:

• Logo (i.e.: Nike’s swoosh)

• Shapes/patterns i.e.: Louis Vuitton’s patterns)

• Colours (i.e.: Coca-Cola’s 484C red Pantone)

• The founders themselves (i.e.: KFC’s Colonel Harland David Sanders)

• Fonts (i.e.: Adidas’ Avant Garde Gothic Demi font)

• Packaging (i.e.: Coke’s iconic bottle in the shape of a coca seed)

• Characters (i.e.: Frosted Flakes’ Tony The Tiger)

• Product Cues (i.e.: Intel Inside’s sound)

• Locations (i.e.: DKNY’s New York setting)

• Celebrities (i.e.: Nespresso’s George Clooney)

• And more

What makes these codes so important is that they are mental shortcuts that consumers use to associate a message with your brand. If people don’t know that it’s you, your ad has failed it’s number #1 job.

What’s more, they maintain your brand top-of-mind, they pull consumers in when faced with options, and when used properly and consistently over a long period of time, they bolster your brand image by being played with.

Therefore, ensuring that EVERYTHING a brand does is highly codified is the most important thing any brand manager should be worried about when reviewing creative.

This doesn’t mean that you should be slapping your logo on everything distastefully. As mentioned above, brand codes are much more than just logos, so leveraging your agency team’s creativity to bring these codes to life throughout your communications becomes a secret weapon for every brand.

Where Do I Find Brand Codes

Codes can come from anywhere. But the best place to start is by going through your brand’s heritage, loyalist research, and founders origin story.

Take, for example, Dior’s star.

Back when Christian Dior was contemplating on whether or not to start his own fashion house, he was walking down the streets of Paris when a literal copper star fell by his feet from a few stories up from the building he was walking by.

Since then, the “Dior Star” brand code has been used consistently everywhere.

Other times, coming up with brand codes can be something more strategic. Take the example Snickers. Some years ago they realized they weren’t distinctive enough so they’ve decided to focus in on their logo typography, the red circle that goes around it and added the breaking of the chocolate bar where the caramel and peanuts come out in order to highlight its ingredients.

Codes In The Wild

Now that you understand what brand codes are, pay attention to the brand communications around you.

How many ads you get hit with on a daily basis can you correctly attribute to the right brand (without seeing the logo, of course)?

Chances are, very few. Because marketers are quite an undisciplined bunch and don’t codify their communications enough, or simply get bored with their brand codes too quickly (because they see it every day all day — but it’s important to remember that the customer doesn’t get exposed nearly as much, so we must “wear in” our codes at every opportunity we get).

Take for example Cartier. They codify EVERYTHING in a tasteful way. Watch the following ad and see if you can count how many of their codes appear throughout.

Or take Sephora’s activation on the Burj Khalifa building. Tasteful, yet clearly codified.

Or Hermes, everything screams the brand, yet it’s still a gorgeous advert.

And when you’ve done the above for 20+ years and have remained disciplined in allowing your brand codes to wear in the minds of consumers, you might eventually get the chance to play with your brand codes (but don’t do it unless you’ve been consistently codifying all of your communications for a VERY long time, otherwise you risk diluting their equity).

Consistency, discipline, and unabashed codification of everything in a tasteful way is a surefire path to achieving high levels of brand distinctiveness.

Inspiration: Honda’s Hypnotizing Ad “The Cog”

This is an oldie, but a goodie.

Back in 2003 Honda launched its new Accord. That car, which had already been a commercial success, was known for just “working”. All of its parts worked together and never failed.

A reliable, affordable vehicle that people could drive for years.

To illustrate that, they launched an ad titled “The Cog”, which costed around £1m to produce with CGI, but went on to be lauded as one of the great adverts in modern times.

• Honda's UK domain saw more web traffic in the 24 hours after "The Cog's” television début than all but one UK automotive brand received during that entire month. The branded content attached to "The Cog" through interactive television was accessed by more than 250,000 people, and 10,000 people followed up with a request for a brochure for the Honda Accord or a DVD copy of the advertisement. [Wikipedia]

“The original ‘Cog’ advert took 606 takes between testing and filming to capture the final cut, so we are really looking forward to seeing how ITV’s viewers recreate Honda’s precision engineering in producing their version of our iconic ‘Cog’ advert. However, we would not recommend them taking their car apart to do so.” Jean-Marc Streng, Managing Director at Honda UK.

Try not watching until the end.

Documentary: “Making A Marketer 2”

A few days ago the Marketing Festival launched a great sequel to their “Making A Marketer” documentary where they interview some of the giants of our field such as Mark Ritson, Byron Sharp, Zoe Scaman, Tom Roach, and others in an attempt to unpack some of the biggest challenges we face in our industry today.

Worth every second of it, enjoy.

More of PPA:

• 🤝 Connect with Pedro on LinkedIn and/or X

• 💌 In case you missed it:

  • When Your Brand Needs Some Dusting Off

  • How To Grow Small Brands

  • How To Set Up A Brand For Success

PPA 

Pedro Porto Alegre is a seasoned marketing professional with in-depth experience building brand and communications strategies for top-tier B2C and B2B organizations across Canada. His repertoire extends from crafting and executing integrated multi-media brand marketing campaigns to the commercialization of performance-driven innovations for multimillion-dollar and nascent brands alike.