You know the one … you, and 9 complete strangers, try to squirt water into the mouth of a plastic clown head while your friends stand behind you snickering. If you do it right, your balloon fills faster to the point of bursting. Sure you pay a buck to play, but if you win you’ll be the proud owner of an 18 cent stuffed animal that was made in Taiwan.

Guess what! … this is how brand works!

Here are the pieces:

• The gun is your product or service
• The water is your brand strategy
• The strangers are your competitors
• The clown head is your target audience
• The mouth opening is the emotional connection you’re trying to establish
• The balloon is the strength of your brand

Your brand strategy needs to be powerful and accurate. This is a race to shoot water into the mouth! If you successfully ‘hit’ the emotional connection, your brand strength begins to grow. Waver even one eeensy bit and your brand value begins to deflate. You have to hit that connection constantly!!

Look at great brands and you’ll see they rarely miss the mouth. Sadly, if we were to actually apply this odd (at best) metaphor to the real world, most companies would be Chevy Chase-like, squirting water all over the Carnie, the prize wall and the stranger next to them. Or, more likely, they’ll try to throw their gun at the clown head (talking about their product)…. Sure it’s funny to think about when you put it that way, but the real world ain’t no carnival people! When that happens, it’s just saaaad!

Remember, your goal is to burst your balloon first … and keep the rest of the booth dry.

Go Ahead, Socialize...

Hide Sites

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 10th, 2006 at 9:49 am and is filed under Brand-tastic. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.