The Evolution of the English Language

After a meeting earlier this week with the executive team at Melbourne University’s Ormond College, I found myself thinking about two things.  One, why I didn’t attend the college myself, and two, how many brand specific words I use in every day language.

The topic of brand language is always a prominent feature of discussion in our studio as we work with our clients to bring their brands to life, but during the discussions on Tuesday a comment was made about the evolutionary nature of the English language. And specifically, how it is constantly evolving as new words and phrases are adopted en masse, often inspired by new brand specific language.  A classic example is Google.  Founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, aka the ‘Google Guys’ in 1998, Google’s mission was to ‘organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful’.  Google is so synonymous with online searching that ordinary people around the world are saying they will just ‘Google it’.  Google is also now a featured verb in the world’s dictionaries, with the Oxford dictionary describing it as the ‘search for information about (someone or something) on the Internet, typically using the search engine Google.’

Out of curiosity, this inspired me to go on my own little Google adventure to search for other words that have become commonplace as a direct result of a brand.  Here are five for you to ponder:

Hoover:

Originally a trademark product from the Hoover Company in Ohio, its popularity has led to vacuum cleaners all over the world being referred to as Hoovers, and the actual act of vacuuming becoming known as ‘Hoovering’.

Band-aid:

Johnson & Johnsons trademark adhesive bandage product has taken on a life of its own, and is not only a term used when describing the physical product but also when individuals or businesses are creating their own ‘band-aid’ solutions for just about everything.

IPod:

Apple was bound to make the cut with its innovative and excessively popular technology, and the IPod is just one example.  The term ‘IPod’ has been used to describe all manner of digital audio and MP3 players, not just the Apple product.

Kleenex:

In the U.S., France, Canada, and to a lesser degree in Australia, Kimberly-Clark’s brand, Kleenex, is now a term regularly used to describe any brand of facial tissues.

Xerox:

Xerox is one brand, which actually tried to prevent itself from becoming a generic noun or verb with advertisements with statements like ‘You can’t make a Xerox’. Ironically, Xerox too made it into the Oxford dictionary as a noun and a verb.

If you would like to know how you can try and have your brand language added to the Oxford Dictionary, or just want to tell us a few more brands that you use in common language, why not give us a call.

Nikki Williams
Client Account Manager

For monthly updates of our thinking, click here to receive our free Brand Newsletter

The Final Chapter in our Comprehensive Trend Report
Over the last month we’ve published the first five chapters of our research report into trends in visual language. This Monday and we publish the final chapter of the report. In this week’s chapter we’re exploring trends in brand visual language relating to colour, as well as posing the 10 most critical questions you should be asking yourself about your brand’s visual language.

Trends in the visual language of brand identity are driven by many factors from the ‘me-too-ism’ of designers and their clients mimicking the visual language of market leaders, to new and emerging trends such as ‘sustainability’ that draw a similar and en-mass visual response from designers all over the world. Over the past 12 months we have collected more than five thousand different brand expressions spanning almost every major industry and category of the western world.

The brand expressions we tracked included existing, new and refined brand identities, product packaging, newspaper, magazine and billboard ads. The scale and breadth of these brand expressions allowed us to identify the major brand visual language trends of a broad range of market leaders for the last year. Whilst the majority of the examples presented in this report are recent, many trends are not in themselves new. It is our interpretation of the groundswell of take-up of a trend and the influence exerted within their market by the brands involved, that leads us to define the most compelling and influential trends.

What’s the value of a Trend Report?
All brands project an image through their visual language. It is up to each brand to make conscious and informed decisions about exactly what they wish their visual language to communicate relative to the competition and to their market’s perceptions.The report includes hundreds of examples of brands and their visual language to illustrate examples of brands who leverage trends to their advantage, as well as examples of those who follow trends to their disadvantage. The examples cross industries from fashion to food, from transport to telecommunications and everything in between, as well as markets from Australia to Asia, from Europe to the Middle East and the U.S.

Valuable Insights for all Owners and Managers of Brands
An understanding and mastery of the trends in brand visual language will allow business to ‘tune’ their brand’s image to ensure they’re consistently communicating the right messages to the right people. For every organisation seeking to best manage their brand identity, these trends must be part of the consideration process. For each brand there will be advantages and disadvantages to leveraging the cues and meaning inherent in these trends. The big question you should be considering is this; ‘does the trend provide an opportunity to leverage a set of visual cues to communicate the perfect brand messages to your market, or has the trend become so widely adopted as to compromise the uniqueness of the brands who follow it?’

Download Chapter Six
of our Trend Report

This final chapter of the report explores a number of trends in brand visual language relating to colour, as well as posing the 10 most critical questions you should be asking yourself about your brand’s visual language.

Click here to download Chapter 6 of our Brand Visual Language Trend Report.

Click here to download Chapters 4 and 5 of our Trend Report.

Click here to download Chapter Three of our Trend Report.

Or click here to download Chapter Two of our Trend Report.

You can also click here to download the First Chapter of the Trend Report.

© 2010 Truly Deeply. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License. We’re delighted for you to share, blog or publish extracts of our articles, on the condition that Storm Design & Brand DNA are properly credited (and linked to) as the source, and that you include our URL: trulydeeply.com.au

For further information, questions and enquiries, contact us.

David Ansett, Brandamentalist
For daily updates of our brand thinking, follow me on Twitter
Brand Designer

The Third Chapter in our Comprehensive Trend Report
Over the last two Mondays we’ve published the first two sections of our research report into trends in visual language. Each Monday for the next four weeks we’ll publish another chapter. This week’s chapter focuses on trends in brand visual language of ‘Affordable Luxury’, ‘the Cult of Personality’ and ‘Urban Attitude’.

Trends in the visual language of brand identity are driven by many factors from the ‘me-too-ism’ of designers and their clients mimicking the visual language of market leaders, to new and emerging trends such as ‘sustainability’ that draw a similar and en-mass visual response from designers all over the world. Over the past 12 months we have collected more than five thousand different brand expressions spanning almost every major industry and category of the western world.

The brand expressions we tracked included existing, new and refined brand identities, product packaging, newspaper, magazine and billboard ads. The scale and breadth of these brand expressions allowed us to identify the major brand visual language trends of a broad range of market leaders for the last year. Whilst the majority of the examples presented in this report are recent, many trends are not in themselves new. It is our interpretation of the groundswell of take-up of a trend and the influence exerted within their market by the brands involved, that leads us to define the most compelling and influential trends.

What’s the value of a Trend Report?
All brands project an image through their visual language. It is up to each brand to make conscious and informed decisions about exactly what they wish their visual language to communicate relative to the competition and to their market’s perceptions.The report includes hundreds of examples of brands and their visual language to illustrate examples of brands who leverage trends to their advantage, as well as examples of those who follow trends to their disadvantage. The examples cross industries from fashion to food, from transport to telecommunications and everything in between, as well as markets from Australia to Asia, from Europe to the Middle East and the U.S.

Valuable Insights for all Owners and managers of Brands
An understanding and mastery of the trends in brand visual language will allow business to ‘tune’ their brand’s image to ensure they’re consistently communicating the right messages to the right people. For every organisation seeking to best manage their brand identity, these trends must be part of the consideration process. For each brand there will be advantages and disadvantages to leveraging the cues and meaning inherent in these trends. The big question you should be considering is this; ‘does the trend provide an opportunity to leverage a set of visual cues to communicate the perfect brand messages to your market, or has the trend become so widely adopted as to compromise the uniqueness of the brands who follow it?’

Download Chapter Three
of our Trend Report

Over the last two Mondays we published the first two sections of our report into trends in visual language. Each Monday for the next four weeks we’ll publish another chapter. This week’s chapter focuses on trends in brand visual language related to ‘Affordable Luxury’, ‘the Cult of Personality’ and ‘Urban Attitude’.

Click here to download Chapter Three of our Brand Visual Language Trend Report.

Or click here to download Chapter Two of our Trend Report.

You can also click here to download the First Chapter of the Trend Report.

© 2010 Truly Deeply. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License. We’re delighted for you to share, blog or publish extracts of our articles, on the condition that Storm Design & Brand DNA are properly credited (and linked to) as the source, and that you include our URL: trulydeeply.com.au

For further information, questions and enquirers, contact us.

David Ansett, Brandamentalist
For daily updates of our brand thinking, follow me on Twitter
Brand Designer

All Brands Have Meaning
Whether carefully and strategically considered or by default, all brands hold associated meanings in the market place. Well considered brands establish a competitive brand proposition (their brand strategy) with layers of meaning to both differentiate themselves from their competitors and to connect with their audience. These brand reinforce their meaning through all of their actions or brand touch points. As a brand agency we help brands to define their meaning and create the brand design for all their communications in order to create a consistent association with these layers of meaning in the minds of their customers.

Apple Vs Microsoft
Today we compare the brand associations of consumer technology icons Apple & Microsoft.

A Snapshot of Brand Association
The clever people at Brand Tags have been busy collecting a comprehensive list of more than 1.7 million associations that people have with brands. The result is a unique opportunity for those brands to compare the meaning and messages of their brand communication strategy with the brand associations of a cross section of the market.

A Comparison of Brand Associations
As expected, both brands have a high level of association with descriptive terms such as ‘computer’, ‘pc’ and ‘software’. Both brands boast strong levels of association with their product line; ‘Windows’, ‘Mac’, ‘iPod’ , ‘Office’ and ‘Word’. Also, interestingly both brands maintain a strong association with their founders and leaders; ‘Steve Jobs’ and ‘Bill Gates’, reflecting the brand equity that these two industry icons continue to maintain. However, from there it gets interesting to say the least. Given the enormous number of people who have contributed the brand associations (more than 300,000 of them of all ages, nationalities and brand affiliations) the differing tone of brand association is astounding.

The Apple Brand
The Apple brand is openly loved, maybe even adored with strong levels of association to words like ‘cool’ ‘awesome’ and even ‘love’. Plenty of brands want to be loved, but very few can lay claim to that strongest of positive associations. The words ‘design’, ‘creative’ and ‘innovation’ are also strongly associated with the Apple brand. When pooled with associations of ‘quality’, ‘sleek’, ‘simple’ and ‘style’ it is easy to see why Apple commands such high levels of brand loyalty and continues to create enourmous anticipation for each new product launch.

The Microsoft Brand
On the other hand I could barely believe my eyes when tracking the negative tone of much of the strongest brand association for Microsoft. Few successful brands include such high levels of negative association including; ‘evil’, ‘monopoly’, ‘crap’, ‘shit’ and that classic of poor customer feedback – ‘sucks’. Whilst at a commercial level, Microsoft’s strategic, commercial partnerships have built incredibly high levels of product use, it appears that the brand has seriously failed to translate that product use into positive brand association and brand loyalty.

If you’d like some help to define the meaning for your brand and create your communications in order to create a consistent association with these layers of meaning in the minds of their customers, why not drop us a line?

David Ansett, Brandamentalist
If you’d like daily updates of our brand thinking, you can follow me on Twitter here.
Graphic Design Melbourne



The brands we choose reflect how we see ourselves
Each day we make thousands of conscious and sub-concussion decisions about the brands we wish to include in our lives. Our choice of which brands we choose to connect-with is often a reflection of how we see ourselves and how we wish the world to see us. Some of these brand associates are more overt than others, but when mapped as a whole they create a sense of personal brand identity. ‘Brand Mapping’ as we call it forms part of the Insights process we use on our commercial projects. Brand mapping helps us to immerse our thinking into the lives of target markets our clients’ brands wish to connect with truly and deeply.

Here’s my brand map for Christmas Day 2009.

Try creating your own brand map, or have some of your closest clients and customers track theirs – the results are guaranteed to be interesting. Send us your maps, we’d love to see them too.

David Ansett, Brandamentalist
If you’d like daily updates of our brand thinking, you can follow me on Twitter here.
Graphic Design / Brand Agency Melbourne