OH WHAT A FEELING!

There’s something not quite right with messaging.

[Don’t get your hackles up, please.  We’re not maligning words or choices or their arrangements.]

In every map, every grid, every page in which we capture the essence of a business, it falls flat.  Sure, we can add emotional words, even exclamation marks (though save us from too many).  Yet the story is somehow lacking.  Words alone aren’t working … at least, for us.

Of late, we’ve been applying an idea from the design world.  Which is, the creation of mood boards, once assembled from a bunch of oversized, colorful magazines, even photography books.  With a glue stick, scissors and a generous foam core board, a collage develops that reflects themes and a vague essence of feeling.  Interior designers, artists, creative directors, fashion folks use these liberally; in fact, they guard the completed boards with their lives, keeping them ultra-confidential until the project has been revealed. 

So what stops us – communicators and branding experts – from starting our stories this way?  It connects the heart and the brain.  It helps coordinate a corporate tale.  And it quickly lets others know exactly where we’re going.  Yup, a series of pictures (yes, with words) relates the beginning and middle and ongoing events that make up a business’ life.

No Moody blues, here. 

MINE EYES HAVE SEEN ...

Six billion every day.

No, not McDonald’s burgers, but emojis sent and received via the world’s two-plus billion smartphones.

Advocates (and there are many, with tops being ad agencies) claim these little pictures emulate our feelings and the expressions and gestures we use talking with others in face-to-face conversations.

Still others who have plumbed the psychology of these stimulations du jour insist they’re changing our speech patterns and expressing our authentic selves – our interests, our reactions, even innuendoes. 

We don’t buy it.

Though this trend started in the ‘90s and gained steam of late, thanks to marketers like Coke and Dove, Bud Light and Starbucks (among others), it’s simply another way for us not to talk – and, by extension, not to understand each other. 

Sure, it promotes our brain’s desire for visual communications.  And it’s definitely a convenient shorthand to capture one, maybe two emotions.  But even those frequent users insist that there are clear rules for campaigning with these Japanese little pictures:

1. Know your audience’s emoji usage habits, like age, location, and gender
2. Identify the most common emojis and
3. Know how the audience speaks.

Hmm.  So if we truly studied our target audience’s speaking patterns, as number three recommends, wouldn’t it be easier to just, er, talk with them?

THE TRIPLE-HEADER TROIKA TRILOGY

Triangles.

The Three Stooges.

Snap, Crackle, and Pop.

Red, yellow, and blue.

For years, we – as marketers, advertisers, designers, and communicators – have almost blindly followed the rule of three … in visuals, in messages, in benefits, and more.  It’s been one of the unproven facts that informs our universe; somehow, three and no more seemed to cement our case.

Now, more than gut says we’re right:  Two UCLA behavioral science/marketing professors investigated a handful of scenarios with hundreds of undergrads, testing recall and reactions to anywhere from one to six reasons for each.  They deliberately explored the theory known as “set size effect,” or, in other words, the more descriptors, the better.  [Guess the “set size” creator never met Mies van der Rohe.]  The results were to be expected:  Students embraced the list of three, with four or more receiving a raised eyebrow or words of disdain.

Don’t stop there, though:  Three means more than a simple count.  It points to one of the issues we face now:  Way too many choices and way too little time to make effective decisions.  Though every day we face that challenge (especially in grocery stores), it’s just recently, when shopping for healthcare insurance, that we wished for an easier process.  We not only had to review the in- and out-of-network providers, but also go through, grid by grid by grid, comparisons of benefits, making sure we were matching apples to apples.   Multiply that by five providers.  And hear our frustration.

So “three” is now our golden rule. 

For us, that involves skirting aisles with too many similar products (how many different kinds of oatmeal do we need?), glossing over ads with more than three descriptors, ignoring multi-multi-imaged signs.  It also includes our stricter adherence to tri-anything in our work. 

Like our headline.