Expression and communication to
motivate people

‘Smashing your brand’

The design expression required in branding is the kind that allows instant recognition of a pattern to evoke understanding and empathy.
In conventional branding, the most important positions were occupied by naming symbol and/or logo, but in a world where the diversification of the information environment has led to an explosive proliferation of information, it has already become difficult to assert the uniqueness of a symbol.

The concept of ‘smashing your brand’ proposed by Martin Lindstrom in this situation represents a departure from the symbolic emblem and is an experiment in how to promote the brand without using the symbol and/or logo.

Originally, the word brand is derived from ‘burned’ i.e. burned-on marking, but sometimes a form of promotion concentrating on colour or photographs can convey the brand messages and individuality more effectively. The departure from the symbol and/or logo may indeed make possible a form of promotion that transcends the five senses.

Smashing your brand

Appeal to ‘sensus communis’

Sensus communis is the perception arising from integration of the five senses. In expression and communication for branding, it is essential to find a balance between logical appeal to clearly convey meaning and messages, and sensory appeal to convey images and mood.

It is important in communication for branding to promote these forms of appeal in all perceptual experiences i.e. sensus communis; therefore relevant devices and creative strategy are required.

What is ‘sensus communis’?

Human sensory capability i.e. sensus communis refers to a comprehensive perceptive sense which combines the five senses, emotion and memory.

• Sensus communis is a basic ability which plays the role of integrating the various senses such as sight and touch. (Yujiro Nakamura)
• A human is a single unit of sensus communis. (Merleau-Ponty)
• A human who has been deprived of sensus communis is in truth nothing more than an animal that can think logically. (Hannah Aren
• The formation of the five senses is the labour of the whole of world history to date. (Karl Marx)
• Even when you listen to music, it’s just a lot of different sounds flooding into your ears, but they have no content or meaning. (Sufferer of depersonalisation neurosis)

Source: ‘Theory of Sensus Communis’ by Yujiro Nakamura

Brand ‘one voice’: message and experience

Brand ‘one voice’ means that all the basic elements (symbols, photographs, statements, etc.) deployed in media appropriate to the target are integrated into expression through a single voice, and is an approach that emerged in New York in the 1990s.

The brand ‘one voice’ approach, unlike conventional visual identity, is an attempt to integrate elements from message through to perceptual quality in advertisements and image media. The evolution from Apple’s ‘Think Different’ campaign to its iMac promotion, and the success of the United Colors of Benetton series of message advertisements can be seen as examples of ‘one voice’.

Structure of brand expression and presentation of ‘experience’

Exformation

Among the concepts that the art director Kenya Hara presents, there is an idea represented by the term ‘exformation’. The term was invented as the opposite of the sense of informing by accurately conveying information. Exformation refers to design and devices intended to raise awareness in the subject that they did not know something.

An important method in branding communication is an approach based on exformation, which, rather than using persuasion to appeal to the logical mind, invites discovery but as far as possible without establishing a narrative.

Brand is in the mind (or the heart) of the beholder. The brand achieves a powerful internal permeation and motivates people, not just through the feelings it conveys, but more by encouraging a secondary creative imaginative process in the mind of the subject.

The Muji brand carries products stripped of all unnecessary elements and the products and brand themselves could be said to have been subject to an exformation process. Exformation thus works on the ‘sensus communis’ and helps to increase the legendary nature of the brand.