How brands touch us and why they only come alive in participation.
A surprising number of entrepreneurs and marketers have no coherent idea of what is meant by a brand and what transformative power lies within it. I specialize in designing strong and iconic brands that make people trust and convey intuitive meaning.
Brands deserve a more vivid and magical way of looking at them
All our decisions are significantly influenced by our gut feeling and our intuition – far more than we realize. And it is precisely this deeply anchored gut feeling that we are talking about when we talk about the magic of a brand. Ultimately, this is the result of an unconsciously processed probability calculation, the result of which then prompts us to act or prevents us from doing so.
Meaningful stories that take hold of our minds
Brand magic
Brands are far too often confused with static rules or a corporate design, but what a brand does goes far beyond that. It moves the subjective experience of the consumer into the center of attention. It is only in the brand that a “something that is silent in and of itself” begins to come alive and reveal its full fulfillment potential. It is therefore to be regarded as an invisible shell of meaning that conveys a strategically defined meaning to something “still soulless” and “seduces” the person touched by it to a more intensive encounter, participation and transformation.
From the consumer’s point of view, the magic of a brand is nothing more than an unconscious reaction to an inner gut feeling and the inexplicable and mostly unconscious spell it casts on him. Implicit, but – and this is really crucial – meaningful. In that it is oriented towards resonance possibilities with our unconscious and does not seek to satisfy (only) superficial ego desires.
Thomas Zerlauth is an internationally active brand strategist
Brand expert and specialist book author based in Vorarlberg, Zurich and Bangkok.
Thomas Zerlauth is a brand strategist oriented towards depth psychology and memetics. For more than 20 years he has been working as an internationally active brand developer in the luxury hotel industry and in the healthcare sector. As a psychotherapeutically trained coach, he already published publications and books on NLP, mental training, mindfulness and perception in the mid-1990s.
focus areas:
– markensprint
– brand development processes
– Brand assessment & analysis
– Competitor decoding
– Brand potential research
– Development of memetic brand bibles
Brands & Memes
Viral branding.
How brands use memes successfully.
BRANDS, MEMES AND THE ZEITGEIST
Memes are zeitgeist-driven and condensed units of information that vie for attention and brain time and ultimately must be transferred from one brain to another. As cultural instructions, they simplify complex contexts, guide our attention, and thus instruct us with what meaning to attach to something.
In a grand sweep, the author shows that brands are composed of memes, and each brand strives to capture our attention and occupy as much time as possible in our brains. Via their unique iconography and coding, they convey to us ideas, notions, behaviors, or belief systems that we (need to) talk about, making them easily transferable from one brain to the next. We have learned implicitly through memes – and without having to think about it for a moment – what a brand means to us, what it stands for, what it can do for us, and how it changes our lives.
