Tocquigny

In my humble opinion, the majority of successful businesses employ two crucial foundational elements: quality product and effective persuasion.

In the traditional business model, product is what gets the prospect in the door, while persuasion compels the sale.

One of the secret weapons of branding, however, is the contrary: use persuasion for acquisition and product for conversion.

I’ve always had a weakness for rhetoric (see my past blog posts on the subject). How can human language be as powerful as a multi-million dollar super computer or as lethal as a machete? How can an audience be transformed through emotion, logic and credibility?

                                                       The Brand Manifesto

While most companies have mission and vision statements, only a select few have adopted brand manifestos. These commonly short, frank and liberal declarations don’t articulate what a company aspires to be — they define the company’s driving principles and passions. They are the living anthems and battle cries of a brand, something so finely ingrained in the company’s DNA that a bankruptcy or rebranding has little chance of changing it. Brand manifestos are written rhetoric at its finest.

But don’t just take it from me. Let some of the greatest brands speak for themselves:    

To add some flash to a recent new business pitch, we decided to utilize one of the first concepts that we toyed with in Tocquigny Labs.

Projection mapping, as it’s commonly called, is the process of projecting images onto 3D geometry.  It’s been used quite frequently on a large scale to transform buildings into massive canvases, like with Coca Cola’s 125th Anniversary Celebration, but the idea itself is quite scalable.

For our presentation, instead of just creating a PowerPoint, we decided to bring projection mapping to the conference room. We designed an arrangement of four white canvases at different aspect ratios and then wrote custom software that allows us to map different images and videos to each surface using only one projector, all while being able to control the presentation like a normal PowerPoint.

Just the small element of depth introduced by the physical canvases makes the presentation feel strikingly different, and despite the fact that the light actually comes from one projector, it often seems as if the canvases are self-illuminating.

Finding ways such as this to introduce some tactility to the digital world can be a great way to create engaging, memorable experiences. In fact, many recent tech trends such as augmented reality, multi-touch screens and natural user interfaces all deal with the merging of digital information and physical interaction. Projection mapping is just another tool in the technologist’s arsenal, but the results can be quite compelling.

One of our core responsibilities at Tocquigny (and more specifically within Tocquigny Labs) is to immerse ourselves in emerging technologies, with the key objective of identifying their respective applicabilities within our space. When something is launched, for instance Google+, it is my team’s task to become the resident experts, with the capability of answering a wide gamut of business and technical questions from both internal stakeholders and clients. Like scientists, we must see beyond the buzz-ridden Mashable articles and “Trending Topics”, and actually submerge ourselves in the technology. This all leads up to the key function of Labs: adding relevance & context. Every day we get to don our creative caps and architect innovative applications of the technology specific to our diversified client-base and their short- and long-term needs.

We have a roadmap of technologies in queue, but this week’s was one we had been waiting to test out for quite some time: the Kinect motion-sensing input device (created by Microsoft). Released in conjunction with the XBox 360, it didn’t take long for technologists to see the Kinect’s applicability beyond gaming. The infrared device brings John Underkoffler’s visionary gesture-control interface from Minority Report to life.

This $150 consumer-facing infrared camera has introduced natural user interfaces (through gesture- and voice-control) to the masses. Offered many different names by the tech-crowd (computer vision, NUI, gesture-control, feature-recognition, spatial navigation, et al), the Kinect represents what many feel is the future of physical computing. 

This week, we took the Kinect for a lengthy test-drive. Most notably, we used the device to capture full-body movements and converted them into commands that were fed into a piece of music composition software. Illustrated by the above photo, a person can control a digital symphony simply by moving any joint in their body. Sounds like a toy, right? A pretty practical toy… After all, this experiment was the catalyst for dozens of ideas pertinent to our future-facing clientele.

In the past few years, thanks mostly to the influence of the Internet, stereotypes regarding any and all things “branding” have come under scrutiny. Many of the ideas regarding what makes for a good brand and how it’s maintained – ideas that were foundational within the advertising industry – are now crumbling.

It doesn’t seem so terribly long ago that we all thought of a “brand” as an ideology solely created by an entity as an ideal reflection of itself, with the purpose of conveying that ideology to a given audience. A successful brand didn’t change or fluctuate. It was the suit of armor that every company wore, a steadfast and true identity.

Of course, the Internet – especially social media – changed all that. So did the fact that we now have so many new mediums (smartphones, tablets, viral videos, etc.) upon which brand messages can play themselves out.

In essence, those of us in the advertising business now have to grapple with the reality that a brand is really a much more organic thing, shaped through the living conversation that occurs between an entity and its audience, as well as through the medium in which the conversation takes place.

I mention all this because I recently came across the new logo design for the TBS cable network and automatically saw it as a particularly brilliant and concise demonstration (as all good logos should be) not just of how TBS wants the world to perceive them, but of how a brand really functions today .

TBS 2011 Network Rebrand from ferroconcrete on Vimeo.

How fun is it to watch it dance around and morph to purpose, acting and reacting as if it’s part of a conversation rather than a steadfast idea? It begs the audience to interact with it and influence its next move. Don’t you want to take TBS home with you and make it part of your family?

Welcome to branding 2011. Welcome to the conversation.