Graphics Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 7
The Big Idea
When a company creates a brand it does the same thing a reporter does when she's chasing
down a late-breaking story: both want the raw data. The reporter needs the data to write
her story. The company's task is almost the same. It needs the information to construct the
brand's story. Both are searching for narrative lines. Both need answers to these questions:
Who? What? When? Where? Why? How?
If the reporter is sent to cover an unknown situation, such as a storm, riot, or cataclysm,
she must tell her readers or viewers: who was involved, what events have transpired, when
they occurred, where she's reporting from, why it all happened, and how it happened.
Though her answers are seldom complete, she gets enough to connect the dots, and then tells
us the story she sees.
Any company that owns a brand is likely to know what it has: a line of products or ser-
vices addressing needs, desires or potentials. The products are usually related. Their specific
features often are integrated into a larger context in terms of function, theme, and/or purpose.
Once the branded product line is there, the company's mission is to create the story behind
it. We might know what the products are, but the company must tell us what they do, and
where and when they will fit into our lives. If the answers to “what,” “where,” and “when”
fill a need in your everyday life, then the “who” answers itself. You are the one who would
use this, so you are the main character in their story. “How” might tell us about the product's
functions, how to operate it, or how it will alter our lives. Finally we want to know: why?
Will the product make our lives easier? Will it satisfy particular needs and desires? Will it
solve problems? Those are essential components in any branding story.
One of the great branding stories is that of Intel. Over the last twenty years, the Millward
Brown Optimor ranking has consistently placed Intel as one of the world's 100 most suc-
cessful brands, but before 1990 barely anyone outside the digital world had heard of Intel.
Intel began in 1968 as a developer and manufacturer of semiconductors. In those days,
only governments, corporations and large institutions owned computers. That meant Intel's
initial market was small, contained and well defined. Through the 1970s, the company grew
up with the industry, supplying better and better digital hardware with more and more cap-
