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Creative Strategy Importance: Visual or Verbal?
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Creative Strategy Importance: Visual or Verbal?
The new BMW M5
You Need Both to Build a Powerful Brand. Advertising today is a visually oriented discipline. And we have Confucius to thank (or blame) for this state of affairs. Confucius` famous saying, "A picture is worth 1,000 words," has been quoted endlessly in advertising circles in America. Furthermore, most creative directors started out as art directors. First and foremost, they see their job as creating a unique and distinctive visual. The words can come later.
Art directors generally believe that pictures or visuals are more important, while copywriters generally believe that the right choice of words are more important.
Both are wrong.
It`s like asking what`s more important in building a house, a hammer or a nail? Both have to work together. The best hammer in the world is useless if the hammer misses the nail. And the best nail in the world is useless unless there`s a hammer to hammer the nail in.
The visual is the hammer. It`s difficult to build a strong, powerful worldwide brand without a strong, shocking, dynamic visual.
The success of Marlboro cigarettes demonstrates the incredible power of the right combination of visual and verbal. Introduced in the U.S. market in 1953, Marlboro eventually became the world`s largest-selling cigarette brand.
Marlboro was the brand that made Philip Morris a hugely successful company. If you had invested $1,000 in Philip Morris stock at the end of 1953, the year Marlboro was introduced, your stake would be worth $15.5 million today. (As a matter of fact, Philip Morris stock appreciated faster than any other stock on Fortune magazine`s list that year of the 500 largest companies in America.)
Wow! The Marlboro cowboy must be an exceptionally powerful visual.
That`s not necessarily true. That`s not how advertising works. The Marlboro cowboy is only a hammer.
What was the cowboy hammer trying to do? At the time of Marlboro`s introduction, virtually all cigarette brands were "unisex" brands, appealing to both men and women. Almost all cigarette advertisements featured pictures of women as well as men.
To the cigarette manufacturers, that made a lot of sense. Cigarette companies figured their future depended on their ability to create as many female smokers as male smokers. (They have almost achieved that goal. Today, 28% of adult American men smoke vs. 22% of women.)
Marlboro was conceived as a "masculine" cigarette, one of the first brands to focus entirely on men. (In 55 years, there has never been a woman in a Marlboro ad.)
It was this "masculine" verbal message that the cowboy hammer was designed to drive into the smoker`s mind. It was this combination that built the exceptionally powerful Marlboro brand.
Is a picture worth a thousand words? No. Without a verbal, a picture is essentially worthless.
Currently, the auction house Christie`s International is offering one of Andy Warhol`s large portraits of Mao Zedong for $120 million. Granted, the portrait is 14-feet tall and it was completed in 1973 just after the U.S. and China renewed their relations. But is it worth $120 million?
What makes any painting worth that kind of money? It can`t be the quality of the painting. (The portrait of Mao was actually printed on a silkscreen press.)
It`s the name of the artist. In this case, Andy Warhol.
The world of art and the world of business are alike. It`s the brand name that makes a work of art valuable. Picasso, Van Gogh, Monet, Dali, Mondrian. It`s the brand name that makes a product valuable. Rolex, Mercedes-Benz, Apple, Lexus, Marlboro.
Branding is a one-two process and it doesn`t start with the visual. It starts with the verbal. I could paint 1,000 pictures of Mao Zedong and none of them would be worth anything. Why? The verbal is wrong. Al Ries? What does that name mean in the art field? Nothing. On the other hand, put "Al Ries" on a book and the book will sell. (Maybe not millions of copies, but a few thousand anyway.)
So the first question a marketing manager must ask is, "What is the verbal? What is the verbal message we are trying to put into consumers` minds?"
That`s the nail. It`s not that the nail is more important than the hammer, but the nail is the first decision a company needs to make.
Source:
http://www.brandingstrategyinsider.com/2009/09/creative-strategy-visual-or-verba
