by Laura Ries
The lion is the “king of beasts” and could make an effective visual hammer, but it needs a verbal connection. Fidelity, a small banking chain in the South, uses a lion as its symbol and even owns the website lionbank.com. But the verbal connection is very weak. Typical billboard: “Hunting for a loan?”
A clever headline, but not very memorable. You don’t usually need to shoot a bank teller to get a bank loan.
If Fidelity were a giant bank, it could use a lion with the verbal hammer “King of Banks.” (Look how effective Budweiser has been with a similar approach.)
Next to the lion, the tiger is probably the most-admired animal. And Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes has pre-empted the tiger.
In 1952, Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes introduced the character, “Tony the Tiger.” The alliteration helped build the brand as well as the verbal nail: “They’re gr-r-reat!”
America’s largest chain of seafood restaurants is not called “Red Seafood” although that might have been a more accurate name than “Red Lobster” since the chain sells a lot more fish and shrimp that it does lobster.
But the Red Lobster name is more memorable and lends itself to a more memorable visual.
The specific (lobster) is always more memorable than the general (seafood.)
In the same way that (tiger) is more memorable than the general (animal.)
More than a hundred years ago, animal crackers were a popular treat for kids. A box of animal crackers contained a variety of animals like lions, tigers, bears and elephants.
Today, the most popular brand is Barnum’s animal crackers produced by Nabisco Brands. (The “Barnum” name refers to P.T. Barnum, the famous entrepreneur whose name is now enshrined in the country’s largest circus company, Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey.)
In total, over 54 different animals have been used by the brand on its crackers.
But a better direction would have been to focus on one animal. Pepperidge Farms focused on goldfish.
Goldfish crackers brand greatly outsells the various other animal cracker brands, although animal crackers are really more “cookie” than cracker.
In 1997, Goldfish crackers got an eye and a smile imprint added to tie in with its verbal nail, “The snack that smiles back.”
Goldfish crackers are popular with parents of young kids since the snacks are baked and seen as healthier. And kids love to see the little smile as they bite the heads off the fish.
Another company making the mistake of focusing on the general instead of the specific is Accenture. When they used a singular celebrity (Tiger Woods), the advertising resonated with the business community. One can understand why they replaced Tiger Woods, but not why they chose a zoo instead of a single animal. Its recent ads use a variety of animals including elephants, polar bears, giraffes, frogs, sharks and chameleons. (So far, no tigers.)
It’s a mistake to use a variety of animals. A visual hammer is a singular idea. Multiple hammers for a single brand don’t make sense. Would it have make sense to feature a dozen different golfers in the original Accenture ads?
I think not.
To create a memorable campaign it’s better to focus on one animal. My choice would have been an elephant because it’s consistent with Accenture’s market and its message.
Accenture’s market is big companies. A recent Accenture ad showed an elephant crossing a chasm on a narrow log. Headline: “You’re never too big to be nimble.”
Integrating your animal hammer with your verbal nail is the key to marketing success.
Recently, Accenture dropped the animals in favor of focusing on clients like Unilever, Marriott, Royal Shakespeare Company and others.
Verbally this move might make sense, but visually it does not. At least the animal visuals had some consistency and memorability. But where is the visual consistency between Unilever shampoo as illustrated in the first advertisement and hotels and actors?
In the absence of consistent visuals, Accenture is apparently counting on a prominent “>” symbol to unify its new campaign. That might make sense for an airline or an automobile, but it doesn’t make sense for a consulting firm.
Cows might not sound like a good visual hammer for a chicken chain. Yet they work very effectively for Chick-fil-A, a phenomenally successful chicken-sandwich chain located primarily in the South. Who is the enemy of the chicken sandwich? The answer is obvious.
It’s the hamburger sandwich, of course.
So for the last 16 years, Chick-fil-A has used cows in a humorous way to carry its message. A typical billboard shows three cows with sandwich boards that read: “Eat mor chikin.”
Even though closed on Sundays for religious reasons, the average Chick-fil-A unit does about as much business as the average McDonald’s and 135 percent more business than the average KFC unit.
Even without a verbal connection to the brand, a visual symbol can greatly increase brand recognition, especially in a low-interest category like insurance.
Ever since 1974, The Hartford Financial Services Group has used an elk as a symbol of the company. The original television commercials featured Lawrence, a ten-foot-tall, five-hundred-pound elk with eight-point antlers and a thick reddish coat.
What an elk has to do with insurance was never mentioned in the commercials, but they certainly were memorable and helped to establish The Hartford brand.
A better direction with a similar animal is what Deere & Co. is doing with its visual symbol, the deer.
Its John Deere brand, the world’s largest-selling farm-equipment brand, has used its famous slogan for many decades. “Nothing runs like a Deere.”
Then there’s the remarkable transformation of Aflac, the company that brought us the duck. In the year 2000, the company had a name recognition of just 12 percent.
Today it’s 94 percent. And sales have gone up just as dramatically.
Aflac sales in the American market went up 29 percent the first year after the duck arrived. And 28 percent the second year. And 18 percent the third year.
When considering the use of a visual symbol, you also need to consider the medium you propose to use. Television is primarily an entertainment medium while radio, newspapers, magazines and the Internet are primarily information media. Television messages should contain entertainment elements or they are likely to be ignored.
Take StarKist, the No.1 brand of canned tuna. For years, its television spots featured Charlie, a tuna dressed as a hipster with a fisherman’s hat and glasses.
According to Charlie, he has “good taste” and thus is the perfect tuna for StarKist. But Charlie is always rejected with a note attached to a fish hook that says, “Sorry, Charlie.”
The reason: StarKist is not looking for a tuna with “good taste,” but rather for tuna that “taste good.”
It’s interesting, too, that the No.2 brand of tuna (Bumble Bee) and the No.3 brand (Chicken of the Sea) also use animals to symbolize their brands.
Linking the brand’s name to the visual is also a good direction. Since 1894, the leading cake flour is Swans Down, a brand that uses a swan as its visual hammer.
Gorilla Glue goes one step further by locking its name with both its gorilla visual and its verbal. “The toughest glue on planet earth” is the verbal nail for the brand.
Vlasic, the leading pickle brand, uses a stork as its visual symbol.
But without a real connection to the name, without a verbal nail and without a substantial advertising campaign, Vlasic’s stork is losing much of its effectiveness.
As advertising costs continue to climb, more and more traditional brands like Vlasic are being forced to cut back on their ad budgets.
No brand can afford to rely only on advertising to sustain its visual hammer. A visual hammer has to be able to stand on its own.
That’s why it’s important to develop a visual/verbal strategy that will work effortlessly on your package, on your website and on all of your marketing material.
Take Yellow Tail, an Australian wine i
ntroduced in the U.S. market in the year 2001.
Three years later, Yellow Tail became the largest-selling imported wine in the country, a remarkable achievement considering the fact that there are some 6,500 imported wines on the market.
The Yellow Tail visual hammer is a black-and-yellow rendering of a yellow-tailed wallaby (a smaller cousin of a kangaroo) on the label. The advertising features many different objects with tails colored yellow. Typical headline: “Yellow Tail. Now spotted outside Australia.” Some of the objects include a mermaid, a kangaroo, a bird, a peacock, a lobster, a comet and an alligator.
I question the wide variety of visuals. It might have been even more effective to focus on the wallaby only.
But there’s no question the Yellow-Tail advertising and packaging built a strong brand, in part because there was little competitive imported-wine advertising during the early part of the last decade.
Yellow Tail has recently shortened its verbal nail to the innocuous slogan: “Tails, you win.”
Dropping “Australia” is a mistake. A liquor brand need a “country of origin” to communicate its authenticity. Scotch from Scotland is highly valued around the world. But Scotch from Switzerland? That doesn’t make sense.
Saki from Japan. Tequila from Mexico. Champagne from France. Vodka from Russia. Rum from Cuba. A “country of origin” is helpful in positioning a liquor brand.
Not only did Yellow Tail build a wine brand that could last for decades, but it also helped improve the perception of Australia as a country that produces excellent wines.
Yellow Tail should continue to promote its country of origin. It’s good for Yellow Tail and it’s good for Australia.
Like wine, bottled water is another category with hundreds of brands fighting for market share.
Because of their distribution strength, PepsiCo’s Aquafina and Coca-Cola’s Dasani lead the category. And Evian is solidly entrenched at the high end.
One brand recently making progress is Deer Park, a Nestlé brand. It’s one of the few water brands that have an instantly recognized symbol. Consider some other middle-level brands: Poland Spring, Arrowhead, Crystal Geyser, Ozarka. How would you visualize them?
The one brand that could be visualized is Arrowhead, but the symbolism is faulty. What does an arrowhead have to do with water? Nestlé verbalized the brand as “mountain spring water” and uses a typical mountain range as a visual device, an idea preempted by Evian.
In over-branded categories like bottled water, it’s difficult to develop a unique verbal nail. That’s why it’s important to use a brand name like Deer Park that can be symbolized with a unique visual. Locking the name and the visual together can pay big dividends in the long run.
What often happens, however, is a lack of coordination between the brand name, the visual hammer and the verbal nail. Confusion has killed more branding concepts than almost any other factor.
Take Hamm’s, a regional beer brewed in Minnesota, originally by the Hamm family which accounts for the brand’s name. Two brilliant advertising ideas built the Hamm’s beer brand. The first was a jingle accompanied by the beating of tom-tom drums. “From the land of sky-blue waters.” The second was Sascha, a clumsy, dancing black-and-white cartoon bear.
Sascha, the bear, was so popular it was used for more than three decades.
After a sequence of owners, Hamm’s beer is now being marketed by MillerCoors, but it’s not the brand it used to be. It’s been downgraded to one of the cheap beers found on the bottom shelf.
Too bad. Hamm’s could have become another “Coors” with a consistent visual/verbal strategy.
Like many other brands, Hamm’s name is unrelated to its visual hammer (Sascha, the bear) and unrelated to its verbal nail (From the land of sky-blue waters.)
As the number of brands proliferate, as life gets more complicated, it becomes more and more important to lock all three elements together.
Three good ideas are not better than one coordinated idea. As society becomes more mobile, as people travel more often to places they might not have visited before, the need for visual hammers has intensified.
Take the retail industry. Most retail chains identify their outlets by names only. Preferably the larger the sign, the better.
Some of the most successful retail outlets, on the other hand, use strong visual symbols to identify their brands. Colonel Sanders for KFC. A chili pepper for Chili’s. A red lobster for Red Lobster. A red target for Target stores.
Outback was the first Australian steakhouse. You might have thought the entrepreneurs who founded Outback would have developed a visual symbol to identify the brand.
Outback should have emulated one of its competitors (LongHorn steakhouse) that uses a “longhorn” symbol to identify its brand.
Marketing deals with three elements: (1) the spoken word, (2) the printed word and (3) the visual. The mind responds to each of these elements quite differently.
When you hear “Outback Steakhouse,” you quickly think to yourself “Australian steakhouse.”
Not so when you see the words “Outback Steakhouse” on a building. To understand the meaning of printed words, you need to perform an extra step.
You have to translate the visual symbols represented by the type into aural sounds your brain can understand. That takes time and effort so many people don’t bother to do so.
Visuals are different. If you are attracted to a visual because of its size, shape or its unusual character, it makes an immediate impression in your mind without the need for an aural translation. That’s why unusual animals are usually much more effective than common animals.
That’s why the leading high-end delicatessen brand is not called “Pig’s Head.”
It’s called “Boar’s Head,” even though a boar is nothing but a wild pig. “Boar” is a unique and distinctive word which makes it memorable.
Boar’s Head is more likely to be associated with a deli brand than a more generic name like Pig’s Head.
Nor is the literal meaning of the Boar’s Head brand name much of a handicap.
(The head is one animal part that is seldom eaten except for perhaps Andrew Zimmern on Bizarre Foods.)
A unique and distinctive brand name will develop a secondary meaning that allows consumers to associate the brand with a specific product category. Deli meat in the case of Boar’s Head.
In spite of its lack of a verbal nail, Boar’s Head is still a successful brand, thanks to its unique visual hammer.
When you can combine the name, the hammer and the nail, however, you can build a brand that is almost bulletproof. Roach Motel is a good example.
“Motel” is a common word, but what makes motel a particularly memorable word is the fact that it is almost never used in connection with a bug or insect killer. There’s also the killer nail: “Roaches check in…but they don’t check out.”
A penguin is an unusual animal which makes it a good choice for a visual hammer. Even though Linux has only five percent of the personal-computer operating-system market, the brand name is quite well-known.
Linux’s verbal nail is the brand’s unique position as the most popular “open-source” operating system. Compare Linux with Microsoft Windows.
How many people have a strong visual impression of the Windows visual even though the brand itself has a 90 percent market share?
The Windows visual might be attractive and might be symbolic of the function of an operating system, but it just isn’t unique and distinctive, thus not very memorable.
Microsoft’s use of multiple colors doesn’t help either.
In 2005, Google bought a little-known company called Android which had created software for mobile phones. On the heels of the iPhone, Google seemed ready pounce.
While launching its own phone didn’t work out as planned, Google introduced Android as a mobile platform to compete with the iPhone.
Along with the technology is the Android visual, the green robot that has become a powerful visua
l hammer for a brand that is unique and distinctive.
A robot might be an obvious choice for a high technology product, but when the robot combines a simple design with a single color, it can make even the obvious choice stand out.
The same is true of Panda Express. When it comes to Chinese food, using a Panda is also the obvious choice. But Panda Express was first in the mind and links the visual with the name, which says both Chinese and fast-food.
Currently Panda Express is growing rapidly and is the leader in the Asian restaurant category with a 45-percent market share.
Fast-food restaurants and retailers, in particular, make a serious error in not developing unique visual hammers for their brands.
Retailers tend to be verbally oriented and often look at visuals as nothing more than “decorations for the brand” if they even use a visual at all.
Part of the reason for the rise of chains over local mom & pops is because the chains in general are more likely to develop effective visual hammers.
Not many local Chinese restaurants visually stand out the way Panda Express does.
The same is true when surfing the Internet. Websites need to create unique hammers to get their brands off the ground and into the minds of consumers.
Hundreds of social networking and blogging sites have been launched in the past decade, but none have taken flight quite like Twitter.
