Saying Goodbye To Permanence

I stumbled across this image and found myself going down a bit of a rabbit hole. When I look at this, I feel a permanence an immovable sense of history, with physical meaningful weight behind each brand. Each logo evokes something tangible, something we can eat, wear or gleefully destroy our lungs and livers with. Who wouldn’t stop and happily waste a couple of minutes of their lunchtime waiting for the mechanical cuckoo to emerge from the Guinness clock?

We can feel the warmth of those brands celebrating their place in the world, where signs gently flicker and buzz, burning up endless kilowatt hours. This was a performance that didn’t ask for applause; it demanded it. It would have awed us into submission. Brands had a sense of permanence, a solidity that says we are here, we always have been, and we always will be. They weren’t residents in Piccadilly Circus; they were Piccadilly Circus. So put that in your pipe (along with a pinch of Old Holborn) and smoke it.

This was an analogue world, populated with analogue people.

Which takes us to today. Today, we fill these spaces with transient brands, with short term campaigns that come and go like lazy unreliable acquaintances. An LCD, low-energy (in every respect) experience. They pay their rent, and when their tenure is over, they silently pack up their brand messages, their logos, their clever strategy, and siloed targeted audience personas and leave without a trace. Only to be replaced a week later with new neighbours, who, to be frank, look and sound a lot like the old ones. We know they won’t stay for long. So we allow their novelty to evaporate into the ether.

So what changed? What changed was the birth of a digital age. Like two alien races making first contact. Brands started to say “hello”. And we said hello back.

So. Now we were now able us to speak to our neighbours. They invited us round. They were interested in us and we became interested in them. They wanted our opinions. And we wanted theirs. When they acted like dicks, we held them to account. When the music was too loud - we told them to turn it down.

Our relationship became conditional/ transactional. We stopped applauding them. And they began to ask for our approval.

Which can have its drawbacks. In the words of Oscar Wilde, “Familiarity breeds contempt”.?

Gone is the bawdy, beautiful permanence. Replaced with something else.

But to what ends? And for better or worse? I'm not sure...

What do you think?

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So, has ‘meeting our heroes” been disappointing?

Have brands lost their mystique by being over-chatty?

Has their dwindling physical tangibility meant we have to work harder to make them real in our minds?

Do you miss the physicality of brands?

Is brand permanence harder to achieve for marketers?

Would love to know. _k

#Branding #Communication #Storytelling?