Rebranding is a beautiful inversion, something is wrong with our core principles, by making a superficial outer change we can somehow fix them. Or as the underpants gnomes would say
Plan to fix my brand:
- Rebrand
- ???
- Profit
The weird thing is that this trick is often more successful than we would like to think. Celebrities rebrand all the time to deal with scandals and to grab new market share. Politicians rebrand conceptsto better sell them, I wouldn't vote for the "Take Away Civil Liberties and Spy on Americans Act (TACLSA Act)" but somehow I feel pretty good about this "Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act (USA PATRIOT Act)".
It is so clear when we think about it logically, but why does this trick work. The answer lies in the way our brain has evolved to help us survive.
The brain is an amazing thing, so brilliant and mysterious, we still are in the infancy of understanding how the human brain works. There are some things that we do know about the brain though, and there are 2 key systems working together to make rebranding so successful.
- Our brains our amazing pattern matching engines.
I work as a software engineer, I have dabbled in Artificial Intelligence and pattern matching. It is surprising how difficult pattern matching is and yet how naturally our brains do it. The way a computer reads handwriting is a long and complex process, but after you are taught to read, your brain can figure out a new person's handwriting fairly quickly. The brain is immediately fantastic at picking out and recognizing faces, one of the reasons we see faces where there are none, like in clouds and on toast. Ever get the feeling that someone is walking up behind you, that's your brain recognizing that the shadows its perceiving aren't the right pattern according to the spatial information its built up around you. The brain is fantastic at patterns, don't believe me, check out what your brain does with your vision to make sense of the world.
- The brain works as an expectation engine:
The brain is constantly predicting what will happen next from the stimuli it is receiving as discussed here. This is why jokes are funny, your brain expects one ending to a sentence and when it is stimulated by an unexpected ending, the brain interprets this as humor. This is why we trip when there is an unexpected step, are brains expected one thing and got a different stimulus and are trying to catch up.
Well that's all well and good you say, so the brain is a pattern matching expectation engine. What does this have to do with rebranding. The power behind rebranding is that it leverages the way your brain works to trick you into not being able to pattern match or make expectations. Anytime you see the old Phillip Morris logo your brain associates it with cigarettes and the negative connotations within. The new Altria logo doesn't have those connection built in your brain. This is also why companies so vigorously defend their logos, Apple wants you to associate the little white apple logo with quality and sleek cool gadgets, if they let people slap them on refurbished Dells then the whole power of it goes away.
We are hardwired in such a way that rebranding is incredibly effective. Only our conscious mind is aware that Phillip Morris is the same as Altria, or that when a Republican says Bipartisanship they actually mean submitting us to their will. People can rebrand their ideas and their values and make them seem new, and the sad part is our brains evolved to believe them. It is only the higher reasoning level of our brain that can help reforge the connections that make us realize that "enhanced interrogation" IS torture, and that "legacy loans" ARE "toxic assets".
What the world should be focusing on now is not how to spin our problems in such a way to make them palatable, but how to actually solve our very real problems. The former is simple to implement, the latter is magnitudes more difficult, but magnitudes more necessary.
Comments are closed on this story.