Visual Hammer

Nail your position with the emotional power of a visual

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By Laura Ries, Chairwoman of RIES consulting

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When my dad, Al Ries, wrote “Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind” in 1981, he overlooked one important idea. The visual.

Positioning is a totally verbal concept. You build a brand by owning a word in the mind.

Yet the best way into a mind is not with words. The best way into a mind is with visuals.

But not any visual. You need a “visual hammer” that hammers a verbal nail. The Marlboro cowboy. Coca-Cola’s contour bottle. Corona’s lime.

The cowboy hammers “masculinity.” The contour bottle hammers “authenticity.” The lime hammers “genuine Mexican beer.”

A trademark is not a visual hammer. Almost every brand has a trademark, but very few have a visual hammer.

A visual hammer communicates the essence of the brand in a unique and memorable way.

• Colonel Sanders who made KFC the world’s largest chicken chain.

• The polo player which made Ralph Lauren the largest-selling high-end clothing brand.

• The watchband which made Rolex the largest-selling luxury watch.

• The green jacket which made the Masters the most prestigious golf tournament.

• The red soles which made Christian Louboutin the leading luxury-shoe brand.

• The chalice which made Stella Artois the sixth largest-selling imported beer.

• The Aflac duck that increased Aflac’s name recognition from 12 percent to 94 percent.

MORE EMOTIONAL

Visuals have emotional power that printed words or aural sounds do not. Compare the word “baby” with seeing the image of a baby. Or reading a book vs. watching a movie. Quite often people will laugh out loud or cry when watching a movie, however, they are unlikely to show the same outward emotional response when reading the book version the movie was based on.

Words and slogans are important, but they lack the emotional impact of a visual. When strategy is communicated visually it is instantly more emotional.

MORE MEMORABLE

Emotion is the glue that sticks a memory in your mind. Think about your past. What do you remember most? Most likely you remember the events with a high emotional connection such as the day you met your partner, the birth of your child, 9/11 day, making your first speech, bombing on stage. And what specifically comes to mind for these events? Words or visuals? Memories are often referred to as pictures in our mind.

When you use a visual hammer, it makes your brand much more memorable.

MORE REPEATABLE

Words alone are not very attractive and honestly people don’t want to read any more than they need to. Visuals on the other hand are more welcome and appealing.

If your brand is lucky enough to find a visual hammer you will be wise to put it on just about everything and hammer away with it much as possible. Target and the target visual is on everything. And so is Coca-Cola’s contour bottle. Not much Coke is sold in bottles, but Coca-Cola wisely uses the iconic bottle visual hammer on everything including cups, cans, billboards, commercials, social media, delivery trucks and more.

Consistency and repetition will increase your authenticity and keep imitators at bay. Just about every watch maker copied the watchband of Rolex, yet these brands are all viewed as “fake.”

MORE BELIEVABLE

Try this experiment yourself. Take a photo of a beautiful woman and label it “Ugly Woman.” Then ask people what they see.

Despite the headline, most people will say they see a “beautiful woman” and remark somebody messed up the words on it.

When a visual conflicts with the verbal, the visual always wins. The image is believed no matter what the words say.

Seeing is believing. People are more trusting of what they see over the words they hear or read.

When you use a visual hammer, it makes your brand message more believable and credible.

The best strategy combines both a verbal and visual together and the reason you need both is because of what’s inside your head.

TWO BRAINS

We all have two brains. In your head is a left brain and a right brain connected by the corpus callosum. The left brain processes information in series. The left thinks in language and works both linearly and methodically. The right brain on the other hand is different. The right processes information in parallel and thinks in mental images. It “sees” the big picture.

Words appeal to the verbal, logical, and analytical left brain. Visuals appeal to the emotional, intuitive, holistic right brain. The ultimate strategy hits both sides.

Of course, lots of brands use visuals in marketing. However, when the visual isn’t a hammer, it doesn’t usually have much power. For example, how many times do you maybe remember a great ad but totally forget what brand was being advertised? Happens a lot.

That’s why brands need to use a visual that reinforces the verbal message. The visual attracts the right side of the brain and sends the message to the left side of the brain to read or listen to the words.

FINDING A VISUAL HAMMER

Despite the attention to the power of the visual, most marketing programs lack them. The main reason is usually that the verbal idea they are trying to communicate is too broad. Unless you have a narrow focus, it is impossible to identify a visual to represent your idea in a dramatic way.

Your verbal idea needs to be specific, not general. And you need to pick words that are easily visualized.

How would you visualize quality, great service or innovation? You can’t.

In fact, your verbal strategy may need to be adjusted to make it more visual even if it means it becomes slightly less accurate. BMW is more accurately described as a performance car. But how do you visualize performance? You can’t really. “The Ultimate Driving Machine” is better verbal nail because it is more easily visualized by cars driving on winding roads. Driving is a visual word.

10 WAYS TO CREATE A VISUAL HAMMER

When creating a visual hammer there are 10 visual tools you can consider.

Selecting a brand name that lends itself to a visual hammer can be very effective such as Tik Tok, Instagram, Red Hat, JetBlue, Panda Express, Longhorn Steakhouse, Target, Goldfish or Jaguar.

Twitter was a near perfect example of having a narrow focus, using a visual name and visual hammer that each reinforced one another to build a killer app. Twitter focus was on 140 characters only. Twitter called the posts “tweets” and used an iconic blue tweeting bird as its visual hammer. Then came Elon Musk and he put an X on all of it and deleted one of the greatest visual hammers ever. When people do dumb things you know it, because the mind rejects it. Most people still referred to it as the brand formerly known as Twitter. Remember when Prince tried something equally as kooky?

I guess if you are the world’s richest man you can buy what you want and shoot the bird if you want to. But if you are like the rest of us, stick to the principals of positioning and nail your brand into the mind with the emotional power of a visual hammer.