There’s a word for that – brand language that makes a difference.

I was introduced last week to a genuinely fabulous organisation called Free Word. Their mission is both worthy and joyous – to promote and protect the written and spoken word.

We spent an outstanding evening in Farringdon in the company of some of the country’s finest young poets, including the current Young Poet Laureate for London Aisling Fahey, DJ James Massiah, and polymath Mark Rylance, whose ability to soothe, cajole & excite simultaneously through speech, whether writing or performing, is simply remarkable.

That evening I learned that our language houses a word for the state of finding it hard to get out of bed in the morning: ‘dysania’. Look it up if you don’t believe me.

We also own a word to describe your hesitation when introducing someone whose name has temporarily deserted you: ‘tartle’. And what a fine word it is too.

I left inspired by the wonder of language, and wondering why so few brands ever use its power and range to genuinely attempt to stimulate emotions and to differentiate. 

We’re all taught one or more languages from a young age. Most of us then shuffle our vocabulary like Scrabble pieces throughout our lives, here and there picking up a new word to drop periodically into our familiar speech patterns. As we saw in last month’s blog, the same is true for whole categories of brands.

If this sounds familiar and you work in branding you’ll find yourself at a distinct disadvantage. For whilst the visual impact of any branded experience has immense and instant power to persuade, it is the sound of a brand that lingers long afterwards.

This is because we access and communicate our thoughts and feelings using words. Which means that the words we use to describe our brands have the potential for greater long-term persuasive impact than what it looks like.

As a brand owner, perhaps spend a little more time crafting the sound of your brands, rather than the logo, for the simple reason that you can create a longer lasting impact on the brands’ performance and that of your business.

So this afternoon, why not follow the Twitter hashtag #freewordoftheday for some verbal inspiration instead of striding around as though you’re busy even though you’re not. Yup, there’s a word for that too...

Brand man: the role of communications in our survival.

We wouldn’t be here today but for our extraordinary ability to communicate. Me, you, the kids next door.  None of us.

You see you don’t have to travel back very far to the days when we (Homo Sapiens) were not in the comfort of a monopoly that we are today. We had competition at the top of the food chain. And it wasn’t just from sabre toothed tigers and woolly mammoths. There were other species of humans built much like us, doing much the same things as us, with the same needs & intentions. We were in a competitive market.
 

In the excellent 'Sapiens' Yuval Noah Harari suggests that a mere 170,000 years ago we (Sapiens) lived concurrently no fewer than three other 'Homo' species. Yet 100,000 years later only one had survived. Why?
 

Harari concludes that our dominance as a species was not due, as is commonly suggested, to superior brain size (all boasted brains of similar size). The difference between winning and losing was down to our ability to communicate.

Us Homo Sapiens used our resources (our similar sized brains) in a different way to the competition. We developed more sophisticated ways to communicate, and in so doing managed to engage, direct and mobilise people on a much larger scale than the others.

A critical element of this was our ability to use language to create stories above and beyond  "Watch out, there's a tiger behind you".  Uniquely, Sapiens created fiction, we could talk about things that we hadn’t seen, smelled or run away from. This was immensely powerful.  It was the start of myths, legends, gods and religion, which enabled us to imagine things collectively.  It was this that enabled us to co-operate flexibly in large numbers, and thus take over the world.

All this may sound a familiar pattern to brand people. At its core, branding unleashes the power of storytelling to galvanise large groups of people. Brands aren’t ‘real’: the AA, Downton Abbey and Moo.com are businesses, experiences and feelings, but you can’t touch them any more than you can touch religion, laws or limited companies. At one level, brands don’t exist.

Yet brands create imagined realities out of words and symbols, and thus offer powerful ways to engage the masses around commonly held beliefs and values.

So, the moral of this story is simple: when you don’t enjoy a relevant competitive product advantage, you best invest your time creating and communicating a story and set of beliefs (branding) that can engage and galvanise large groups of people. It’s worked for us for 170,000 years.