The Ultimate Guide to a Fascinating Brand (Part 1)

I recently began to indulge in some books on design to build on my existing skills and knowledge of the craft. Here, I will be sharing a few concepts that caught my attention in Sally Hogshead’s book, “Fascinate, Revised and Updated: How to Make Your Brand Impossible to Resist”

Before I dive into that, I’d like to talk about the origins of branding. It appears that it was the ancient Egyptians who first practiced branding around 2,700 BCE. They did so by branding their livestock to indicate ownership and prevent theft. Gradually, the practice of branding evolved as companies began to employ it to demonstrate assurance to one’s consumers of the kind and quality of the product or service provided. To put it briefly, a name representing a product or an array of products.

It would be remiss to leave it at that because a brand is not just a name. A great brand has an identity. It has a personality that evolves with the needs of its growing consumer base. It’s important to know how a brand should be perceived. This makes language and messaging — the way a brand communicates with and captures its audience — equally important. It is a combination of these strategies along with design & communication, that helps achieve brand awareness and loyalty. A brand is how our user sees us.

Hogshead says in her book that to be remembered, a brand must fascinate. There are two ways to achieve that, either help customers feel more fascinating to others or help them feel fascinated.

Let me now explain the above with a case study featured in the book, based on Sally Hogshead’s experience on the Mission Space ride at Epcot theme park in Orlando, Florida.

The ride simulates the experience of an astronaut on a spacecraft while on a mission to Mars, complete with the high g-force that’s felt during lift-off, and offers two intensities to theme park goers.

A milder experience could be availed with a green ticket and the orange ticket was an adrenaline-packed version of the same ride. While lines for green ticket holders were significantly shorter and consisted mostly of children and the elderly, queues for orange ticket holders were long and the people lining up were markedly more excited for the intense ride they’d been promised. Hogshead had an orange ticket in her hand and so was in for a 45-minute wait.

She observed that many of those who’d opted for the orange ticket were running back to join the long lines for a second go, and she understood why. They’d just experienced a giddying and challenging simulation where their responses to situations and warning signs determined the outcome of their simulated experience. They’d emerged from the ride feeling an immense sense of accomplishment and several wanted to experience it all over again unlike those leaving, underwhelmed, after the green experience.

Sally Hogshead didn’t stop here, the marketer in her wanted to know why people were emerging with such contrasting energies.

So she paid for a green ticket and shuffled along the short line. It moved quickly and nobody seemed too excited. No one ran back after they’d finished the ride and certainly nobody took selfies. She noticed that while both experiences followed the same story, format, and design, not only did the green ride lack intensity, but also emotion, energy, and engagement.

Just like the tickets of the amusement park ride, every time you market your brand you can offer either the orange ticket or the green. Your customers want to be fascinated and as Hogshead reminds us in her book, “it’s difficult to be better but far easier to be different”. In this case, the orange experience is different, it’s fascinating. The green, on the other hand, is forgettable.

NOTE: FASCINATE THE GOLDFISH

We get most of our information on brands and products online. The addictive nature of web browsing has left us with the attention span of a goldfish, about 9 seconds. It implies that, when branding, not only do we need to fascinate the audience, we need to do so within 9 seconds.

So what is your orange ticket? The answer lies in my upcoming articles and of course in the book. I’ll take us through Hogshead’s, “Seven Forms of Witchcraft” — seven sets of strategies to create marketing magic to enchant all the goldfish out there.

From Fascinate, Revised and Updated: How to Make Your Brand Impossible to Resist

A little about me

I am Arpita Dhir, a product designer focused on building meaningful experiences and impactful solutions through design.

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