The Audience – On Brands
The magnetic pull of books is too much for me to resists, so while waiting for a friend outside a Crossword store one day, I walked in. Now personally, (and I hope bookstores don’t take advantage of this), I believe it is disrespectful to walk into a bookstore and walk out empty handed. So browsing always turns into buying and I picked up a book on poetry called Milk and Honey.
This was a book I had resisted buying at an exhibition earlier, but this time I picked it up nonetheless. A few lines from the first few poems, and the epilogue had tugged at a few heartstrings and I wanted to add it to my collection. Just as I was paying up at the counter, my friend arrived and took the book from my hand to see what it was about.
Now I admit there is a whole lot of empty space in the book. Some of the poems are extremely short, only a few lines each and the rest of the page is blank. My friend looks at it and smirks at me saying ‘you’re really paying for this?’
I grab the book back and put it in my bag with a strange acknowledgment that he was not wrong in thinking that way. But I went ahead and bought the book anyway with a new thought sewn in my head.
Perhaps this whole tug-of-war between creating for self-expression and creating for a public is not needed after all. The fact of the matter is that everything has an audience – we only have to reach them.
The same is true with brands as well. They’re like sculptures hidden inside a rock – all we have to do is carve out the excess and the sculpture reveals itself. Every brand, treated like an individual, has its own persona and style. As creators, we are only giving it physical form and shape by revealing its elements one at a time from the name, to the visual identity to its communication over channels.
After all, when a brand arrives, its biggest achievement is reaching the right audience, engaging with them, and sustaining that engagement over a period of time. That is where our services as content developers come into play as we work across all the channels of word, visual and film to make sense of the brand, ensuring that it reaches its people at the right time and place.
At the end of the day, as long as people are alive, there will always be someone who likes, wants and is willing to exchange their hard earned (or not) money for your product or service – all you have to do is appear in front of them and let the show begin!
