Is Yours a Brand or a Bland?

Procedural Memory is the key to your brand being automatically remembered.

Accomplish this through Relevance x Repetition.

Symbolic Thought is how to make a brand meaningful.

Access this by linking the unknown to the known.

Particle Conflict is the way to make a brand interesting.

Achieve this by adding an element that doesn’t belong, but fits.

There’s a trend in marketing today to make brands “fully integrated” and “seamless.” In other words, to eliminate all incongruity and surprise.

Shallow blands are fully integrated and seamless. To be deep and attractive, a brand must have incongruent characteristics that make it interesting.

Just like a person.

Francis Bacon said it 400 years ago: “There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.”

The most boring person in your life is the one “fully integrated and seamless.” Such people are painfully predictable.

Delight is built on surprise. Comedy requires it. Predictability is death to the imagination, strangulation to the soul, a suffocation of the spirit.

What is interestingly incongruent in your ads, your sermons, your sales pitches, your songs?

Don’t listen to your friends and neighbors. They can tell you only what kinds of ads, sermons, pitches and songs they prefer to see and hear. They cannot tell you what will actually work.

Young people in advertising have enthusiasm, theories, and fresh ideas. Old coots have experience and answers. It takes years of experiments and mountains of money to discover what will and will not work.

Do you want to spend your own years and mountains? Or would you prefer to listen to a coot?

Roy H. Williams