Never look back.

“Remember when’s…” in the ad business will kill you. It’s heartbreaking to believe there was a time when viewers would actually leave their couch to adjust the rabbit ears for a better picture – of toothpaste. Or that something as simple as a furry critter on a cereal box could cause a retail stampede.

Simpler times? Definitely. Fewer choices? Of course. But there’s something about the stark iconography of these earlier campaigns and the powerful way they connected with viewers that could speed a little plop, plop, fizz, fizz to the cluttered, fractured and complex media world we’re living in today.

What’s all that mean? To create a strong, viable brand entrenched in the lives of its customers, we need to pare down to just two issues: how and where to connect in new, creative ways (because it sure isn’t only the couch or even just the internet anymore); and secondly, how to deliver a dynamic new iconography for the brand when we do connect.

Consumer Connectivity: Getting in Their Orbit

The problem is the consumer: the “stay at-home, tune-it-outs” and the “stay at home-too-distracteds.” Even if today’s viewers wanted to tweak the rabbit ears and help us out, they’re pinned glass-eyed in their place by the slurry of price-points in most ads or doing a hundred other things at the same time.

The number of lifestyle touch points has increased exponentially with shifts in technology, in recreation, and in lifestyle, but each has become more fleeting. Today building a series of simple “gets”, fast communicators or icon shorthand reference points, in to your brand is the difference between a message that “clicks” both literally and figuratively, and something that just fades into the annoying white noise we all navigate around. 
Any creative brand campaign needs what we should think of as orbitals: different messages or explorations of the same brand proposition that show the brand in coordinating, concentric shades of the same light.

Orbital icons circle a brand like Saturn’s rings, drawing the audience in through a series of connections: in different media, through street guerilla tactics, viral passalongs and a new breed of real world interactive quests for consumers to crack brand codes, stories and challenges. Alone, any of the messages are just space debris but when they all circle the same way, pulled in unison by the gravity of a brand, they can create a glowing planet people want to explore and even live on.

Rise of the Un-Icon; what of iconography?

In the new media landscape bringing stark iconography to your brand isn’t just more efficient; it’s fast becoming the only way to be heard at all.

But should we all return to the critter days of Leo Burnett circa. 1967? A jolly green, snap crackle pop of grrrreatness? Sorry Charlie. The hyper self-aware backlash against marketing and being marketed to, born with Gen X, has gone forth and multiplied. The icons we use today need to bypass the consumer’s finely tuned marketing defense system and get in the orbit of their lives. They have to appeal on pure creativity and connectivity, even becoming self-deprecating, less mainstream and un-icon-like to succeed. We’re in the era of the un-icon.

The New Iconography Take Whiplash the Cowboy Monkey, brand icon for Taco John’s. The capuchin monkey has ridden his Australian Shepherd Ben to 52 straight weeks of same store sales increases for the Taco John’s brand with little shill and a lot of series style entertainment. Positive blogs increased by 150 percent a month since the campaign’s inception three years ago. Viral components of whiplash have extended a small marketing budget against the might of the floundering, Chihuahua-less, Taco Bell.

Target’s bullseye, too, has made Mart-ers out of the Marts with a series of orbital icons. Target continually out-markets bigger rivals with a discount dog named “spot”, a campaign of fashion designers paired with the bulls eye anti-fashionista icon that has clicked in e-marketing as well as traditional media. The icon appeal has allowed Target to run “wow” campaigns – the first marketer to take over the entire New Yorker magazine with New Yorker artists and cartoonists interpreting the Target icon in their own ways, or to dominate train transportation at the last winter Olympics without even becoming a sponsor.

The greatest example of the new brand un-icon? That little brand, Apple. They’ve stuck religiously with an elegant, clean white palette almost devoid of graphics leaving rivals floundering, looking fussy. Then the iPod brought us the iconic silhouette: consumer as faceless, grooving shadow only distinguishable by the fine white ear cords. Whether it’s brand extensions, another installment of the “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” campaign or the company’s move into the TV and cell phone markets with new hardware, Apple’s minimalist iconic logo, design commitment and uncluttered background make their new products and messages orbit around the same once bitten Apple.

Burger King, too, has gotten behind the new un-icon idea bringing back the “King” in his polarizing creepy plastic head. They’ve created Whopper Jr. the kid burger with attitude giving their value menu a face. And they rode the subservient Chicken for a couple of years before he became trite.

And that’s perhaps the most important factor in new brand icon creation. You have to know when to get off. Once you’ve built stark iconography, once you’ve surrounded your consumer in new, entertaining ways, stop while the going is good. Pull the plug. Budweiser did it with the frogs, when they brought in the lizards. It extended the appeal of a campaign by two more years – and who wouldn’t drink to longer campaigns?