On Brands and Baby Pictures

I think about brands a lot, both as a consumer, and as a professional who has helped shape several. Since my daughter was born, my perception of the world has shifted pretty dramatically, in a variety of ways, and one example of this is the revelation that the way we perceive baby pictures is very similar to the way we interact with brands.

Think about the last time you looked at a baby picture of someone you’re close to. When you see the innocent little 9-month-old face of your childhood buddy Oliver, you’re looking beyond what’s in the photo and associate what you see in it with the person you grew up with and still know today. The little nuances of the personality still developing at the moment that picture was taken, at an Olan Mills with a hokey backdrop and a barrel of plastic apples, weren’t yet fully realized. And yet, now, you look at that photo and see the little half-smile and twinkle in his eye and think “that’s so Oliver!”

If you show that same photo to someone who’s never met Oliver, they might agree that it’s a cute kid. But they have no idea who Oliver is, and would never react as you do, or see anything beyond the photo. The difference is that your relationship with Oliver defines your experience with the photo. Oliver has developed a reputation in your mind, resulting in a familiarity and expectation of certain behaviors and traits, and that’s the larger part of what you’re reacting to.

Now consider the way you interact with a brand. When you see the Apple logo, your reaction is much more largely connected to your relationship with the brand — the sum total of your experiences with it, good or bad. The reputation of that brand’s related products and services has had years to develop in your mind, and you expect certain things from it. The logo, as a central visual asset of the brand, serves as a “mental bookmark” for those thoughts and emotions. The reputation that it represents presents to you both memories of past experiences, and certain expectations about your experiences with the brand in the present, as well as into the future.

Let me expand upon this “mental bookmark” idea. Think about a song that brings back a particularly pleasant memory. When you hear it, you feel a little bit of the emotion you remember related to that memory. That very personal feeling is obviously not contained in the music, but it artfully enables you to revisit your own memory, and all the feelings associated with it. And though the memory is entirely within you, the song uniquely enables to you to experience it anew for a moment, that you wouldn’t be able to without it.

But that scenario is typically unique to one person, or a small group of people. Brands seek, as much as possible, to accomplish this kind of effect on a larger scale. Managing huge numbers of individual experiences, and attempting to maintain those experiences as being positive ones, is no small task. The resulting reputation is the brand, and the logo and other visual assets associated with it are only a small part of what creates that reputation.

That’s not to say the visuals aren’t important; quite the opposite. Imagine that the song that was playing during your first kiss was something by Nickelback, or that the baby’s face in the picture is covered in vomit. Sorry about that disgusting metaphor, just replace Nickelback with vomit, if that helps… but the point here is that the quality of what people associate with is crucial.

My daughter’s baby pictures for now only represent a recent memory of the past few months since she was born. In years to come, we’ll look back at them and envision all the personality that has developed since, and see things in it about her that we can’t predict now. That little sideways smile she’s just starting to show, or the way she raises her eyebrows when she’s looking up, may become her trademark expression, or might signal a piece of her personality that will become “so her.” So my wife and I take great care to take good pictures, and to curate the best ones as keepsakes.

Similarly, whether your brand is just launching, or it has an existing reputation, you want the visuals associated with it to be the best they can be. Obviously I’m going to tell you that the Creative for your logo, print, digital, and TV are very important —it’s what I do, but while you’re working on building and maintaining the experiences and the resulting reputation for the brand that those visual elements represent, remember that every step along the way is only one piece of the brand experience. And whatever you do, the goal is for each of these interactions to evoke a positive association, so that when they encounter the brand in passing they’ll say “that’s so [brand]!”

Disclaimer: All baby photos above are of me (I don’t even know anyone named Oliver.) Also, my daughter Nickelbacked all over me while I was writing this, and I barely even noticed.