Caricatures

For years, I’ve been encouraging clients to craft their business personas like characters on a TV show. ALL business is show business. Notice, I’ve been telling them, how the most memorable TV characters are caricatures, ie the most unique traits are exaggerated for definition.

So I was really excited to come across a recent post on Seth’s Blog where he says “Worse than avoiding the negative, though, is the tendency for most organizations to resist creating a brand that can be caricatured.”  He’s right. Most businesses just sit there on the shelf like a loaf of white bread waiting to be picked. But they don’t give people any reason to pick ‘em. So they wait longer. What they should really be doing is adding some definition. Like a braided challah.

Seth points to Cory Doctorow’s post reporting that British researchers  found that “over emphasizing prominent features on people’s faces made them twice as easy to identify than before“. They’re recommending police use charicatures instead of the traditional sketches.

Most businesses try to shove their benefits at us. Me, I’d rather sit in a dentist’s chair, listening to Barry Manilow, than listen to companies spouting their benefits out all over the place.

It’s too early for benefits. What you need to make your brand stand out are differences. Most businesses attempt to skip straight to the selling portion of the show. But how can you sell to them unless you can get them to stop on your channel?