Laura Rice Visual hammer. Laura Rice Visual Hammer. How images beat thousands of words

04.12.2019

Laura Rice

Visual hammer. How images beat thousands of words

VISUAL HAMMER

Nail Your Brand into the Mind with the Emotional Power of a Visual Hammer

All rights reserved. No part of the electronic version of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, including by posting on the Internet or corporate networks, for private and public use without the written permission of the copyright owner.

Legal support of the publishing house is provided by law firm"Vegas Lex"

This book is well complemented by:

Steal like an artist

Austin Kleon

visual thinking

Blah blah blah, or what to do when words don't work

Marketing without a budget

Igor Mann

Speak the Language of Diagrams

Gene Zelazny

infographics

Martin Toseland and Simon Toseland

Preface to the Russian edition

The famous fathers of "positioning" and "marketing wars" Al Rice and Jack Trout determined back in the 1960s that successful companies always achieve the same goal: they manage to take possession of one simple idea, or, rather, a word, in the mind target audience. However, this is becoming increasingly difficult to achieve today. Jack Trout rightly calls the modern age "the tyranny of choice." The world is literally drowning in an excess of goods, various offers and, accordingly, advertising messages. How not to lose your bright and original idea in an ocean of advertising noise? If it is expressed only in words, today it is too difficult to convey it to the consciousness of those to whom it is intended.

Laura Rice, daughter and partner of the famous Al Rice, made a discovery that literally gave the discipline of branding a second life. From a vague creative, it has evolved into a well-structured technology for introducing a brand into the minds of potential buyers. It turned out that in all cases of market success we are talking about the same thing: “ nail» selling ideas « clogged» into people's minds visual hammer.

A visual hammer is a symbol that can unambiguously convey a selling idea. Thanks to his emotional charge, it is he who breaks through the advertising noise and firmly “hammers” the verbal nail into the minds of people.

A well-designed nail and hammer can do wonders for keeping a brand profitable even with a limited advertising budget. This is not at all surprising, since a “nail” firmly “driven” into the mind encourages people to go in search of it without being bombarded with advertising. At the same time, their attention simply does not capture hundreds of similar offers.

Today Russia is going through the third decade of its market development, but the era of the “tyranny of choice” is coming into its own more and more confidently. The country urgently needs to be removed from the “raw material needle” and the development of non-raw material business. But this means the development of profitable domestic non-commodity brands! Fortunately, the trouble-free "nail and hammer" system from the famous classics of strategy and branding is now available to every Russian entrepreneur.

Tatyana Lukyanova,exclusive licensed partner of Ries & Ries in Russia, CEO marketing and sales agency "Rice & Lukyanova", chairman of the industry branch "Marketing" of the Federal Interindustry Council of the All-Russian public organization"Business Russia"

Foreword

Nine years later, McGraw-Hill published our book Positioning: The Battle for Minds. In the following years, the topic of positioning has become one of the most discussed topics in the marketing community. In 2001, the twentieth, anniversary edition of the above-mentioned book was published. AT different countries more than a million copies have already been bought and another 400,000 in China.

Forty years is a fair amount of time; during this time, most ideas and concepts lose their relevance, especially in the rapidly changing world of marketing. Maybe the idea of positioning is outdated too?

I do not think so.

Many companies are still making brand positioning statements, and marketers are calling for clear positioning of all products in the minds of consumers.

In 2009, Advertising Age readers voted Positioning: The Battle for Minds the best marketing book they've ever read. In the same year, it was included in the Harvard Business School Press's "100 Best Business Books of All Time" list.

Various authors write a lot about this concept today. Recent books on the subject include Competitive Positioning and Positioning for Professionals.

So it seems that this topic continues to attract a lot of attention, despite the numerous and truly revolutionary changes that have taken place in the field of marketing over the past four decades - suffice it to name, for example, the Internet, social media, mobile marketing, the rise of PR. Separately, we should mention Google, Facebook, Twitter, Groupon, LinkedIn and dozens of other digital tools to influence the minds of consumers. However, no matter how important and cardinal all these innovations are, they are just tactics. And to succeed in the marketplace, a brand needs more than a tactic, even if it’s the latest and greatest. It needs a strategy, and it is for this reason that the topic of positioning continues to receive a lot of attention.

Meanwhile, it should be recognized that this concept has one significant drawback. The fact is that the positioning strategy is invariably formulated verbally, that is, with the help of words. Everyone who implements it, in fact, is looking for a kind of “verbal holes” in the minds of people and tries to fill them with the name of a new brand. Lexus, for example, once filled a "hole" that could be described as a "Japanese luxury car." Having taken a reliable position in the minds of consumers, the Lexus brand has become almost invulnerable to competitors.

At the same time - this fact may surprise many - despite the clear success of the verbal positioning strategy, the most effective way to penetrate the human mind is not a word at all, but a visual, visual image.

In 1973, psychology professor Lionel Standing conducted an interesting study. Participants in the experiment had to view ten thousand different images in five days. Each picture was in front of my eyes for only five seconds. Subsequently, people were shown pairs of images, in which one was from the first part of the experiment, and the other was new, and the subjects were able to remember 70 percent of the images they had seen earlier.

This is truly a phenomenal statistic. Try to show people ten thousand advertising slogans, each for five seconds, and after five days, check how much your subjects remember.

Believe me, in our information overloaded society, consumers are able to extract very little from memory. advertising texts designed to position a particular brand. So, no matter how carefully your positioning strategy is thought out and no matter how excellent results it may be tested in focus groups, if people do not remember your advertising message, marketing efforts are in vain.

What verbal appeals are most often fixed in the minds of consumers? What keeps some ideas and concepts in a person's memory for years, or even decades?

These are emotions.

Consider, for example, your past. What events do you remember best? Those because of which your heart rate increased and your blood pressure jumped. I mean, really emotional. The day you got married. Or when your daughter got married. The day you had an accident. Or received a long-awaited promotion. Or bought a house. All these events certainly left a clear picture in your memory.

Visual images have the power of emotional impact that words do not have - neither printed nor spoken aloud. Watch the audience in the cinema - you will see that people are either laughing loudly or wiping away tears. And look at a person reading a novel - perhaps even the one that formed the basis of the film whose audience you watched before. External manifestations of the so-called emotional involvement in this case will be much rarer and not so bright.

Laura Rice

Visual hammer. How images beat thousands of words

VISUAL HAMMER

Nail Your Brand into the Mind with the Emotional Power of a Visual Hammer

All rights reserved. No part of the electronic version of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, including posting on the Internet and corporate networks, for private and public use, without the written permission of the copyright owner.

Legal support of the publishing house is provided by the law firm "Vegas-Lex"

This book is well complemented by:

Steal like an artist

Austin Kleon

visual thinking

Blah blah blah, or what to do when words don't work

Marketing without a budget

Igor Mann

Speak the Language of Diagrams

Gene Zelazny

infographics

Martin Toseland and Simon Toseland

Preface to the Russian edition

The famous fathers of "positioning" and "marketing wars" Al Rice and Jack Trout determined back in the 1960s that successful companies always achieve the same goal: they manage to capture one simple idea, or, better to say, in the mind of the target audience. However, this is becoming increasingly difficult to achieve today. Jack Trout rightly calls the modern age "the tyranny of choice." The world is literally drowning in an excess of goods, various offers and, accordingly, advertising messages. How not to lose your bright and original idea in the ocean of advertising noise? If it is expressed only in words, today it is too difficult to convey it to the consciousness of those to whom it is intended.

Tatyana Lukyanova,exclusive licensed partner of Ries & Ries in Russia, CEO of the Rice & Lukyanova marketing and sales agency, chairman of the Marketing branch of the Federal Interindustry Council of the All-Russian Public Organization Delovaya Rossiya

Foreword

Nine years later, McGraw-Hill published our book Positioning: The Battle for Minds. In the following years, the topic of positioning has become one of the most discussed topics in the marketing community. In 2001, the twentieth, anniversary edition of the above-mentioned book was published. More than a million copies have already been bought in different countries and another 400,000 in China.

I do not think so.

Many companies are still making brand positioning statements, and marketers are calling for clear positioning of all products in the minds of consumers.

Various authors write a lot about this concept today. Recent books on the subject include Competitive Positioning and Positioning for Professionals.

Business literature - a genre and category of books today is extremely common and even in demand. It is necessary to treat business literature very carefully, critically and with healthy disgust. Because for the most part, such publications are extremely empty, primitive and opportunistic. However, among the mass of business waste paper there are quite interesting and useful works that can affect, if not the level of the reader's competence, then certainly improve the quality of his argumentation.

Laura Rice. Visual hammer. How images beat thousands of words. - M.: Mann, Ivanov and Ferber, 2013.

Laura Rice's book Visual Hammer. How Images Beat Thousands of Words (Laura Ries. Visual Hammer) is a kind of development and a new version of Al Rice's positioning concept (Laura Ries is Ella Ries' daughter). "Visual Hammer" - the book is not very deep, but, no doubt, useful in terms of the considered examples, the "nail-hammer" applied system. The utilitarian pathos of the book lies in professional references how to hammer a consumer with a visual hammer, driving verbal nails into his mind, and in this respect it would be more accurate to call the book: visual "pincers" of consumption. But the essence, of course, is not in the name.

If we discard the metaphorical part, then Rice's concept boils down to the fact that modern branding consists of two parts: verbal (words) and visual (images). Building brand positioning only in words is no longer enough, a visual “hammer” must be attached to the verbal “nail”. The image, logo, corporate color, interior elements, media, packaging, media people, etc. can serve as a visual hammer.

“A bottle of Coca-Cola is not just a container. This is an image, a "visual hammer", which fixes in the mind of the consumer the idea that he is holding an original, real, genuine Coke in his hands. In Coca-Cola commercials, visuals speak louder than words. This is the main purpose of the "visual hammer" 1).

Rice directly says that without visual reinforcement, the verbal formulation of an idea is meaningless, the image conveys the idea much sharper and more direct, at the same time, the verbal name "causes only boredom."

“If a visual element conflicts with a verbal element, the former invariably wins. Photograph, for example, a woman of good appearance and sign the photo "Ugly". Seeing such a picture, no one, of course, will believe that this woman is ugly; most likely, people will simply decide that someone mixed up the signatures. And the woman in the photograph will not become uglier from the inscription. The visual element always dominates the verbal" 2).

However, Rice stipulates that at the beginning a verbal nail is created and then a hammer: “Despite the undoubted power of the “hammer”, the “nail” is still more important. In the end, it is the words, the idea - the main objective any marketing campaign.

"Hammer" is just a tool that can greatly facilitate the task of hammering the word - "nail" ”3) .

The visual hammer, and this is important to understand, is considered not from the point of view of visual design, but from the point of view of patterns of perception. This is how Rice evaluates not the compatibility of colors of brands or their semantics, but, for example, the fact that two colors in an identity are worse than one local one. What color is ExxonMobil or Dunkin' Donuts as opposed to green Starbucks or brown UPS, Rice asks. understanding of verbal and visual information.

Despite the simplicity of the concept of the visual hammer, it would be wrong to consider it "simple". The need for these manipulations is due to the fact that, as Rice notes:

“What makes a brand a winner is the perception of consumers who consider it a market leader. In other words, the struggle is in the field of perception, and not the real quality of products” 4).

Such sincerity, perhaps, you will not expect from Russian marketers.

Laura Rice's book can be recommended not only to professionals in the field of marketing and branding, but also to designers. After all, having a few well-formulated rhetorically and figuratively arguments is necessary both for creating the final product and for everyday work. In some cases, such an arsenal will be indispensable and the book "Visual Hammer" will be a good tool in it.

1) Laura Rice. Visual hammer. How images beat thousands of words. - M., 2013 - S. 23.
2) There. - S. 118.
3) There. - S. 175.
4) There. - S. 70.

Oct 23, 2015

Visual hammer. How images beat thousands of words

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Title: Visual hammer. How images beat thousands of words

About Laura Rice's book Visual Hammer. How images overcome thousands of words

The nail & hammer system described in this book replaces the traditional concept of positioning. Laura Rice (daughter of the famous Al Rice, author of the concept of positioning) convincingly proves that no matter how good a verbal positioning idea, the so-called “verbal nail”, it is difficult for her to reach the mind of the consumer if she does not pick up the right “visual hammer” for it , that is, a visual image that is fully consistent with the positioning idea and makes it easier to gain a foothold in a person’s memory.

Published in Russian for the first time.

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