Methods for brand visualization
Every brand builder needs visual methods to explain how a brand is architected, and how brand programs and platforms interact with the brand community.
The website Visual Literacy offers a very useful Periodic Table of Visualization Methods. You can mouse over dozens of visualization schemes for charts, diagrams, maps and metaphors. One or more might help you zero in on the kind of diagram or visual approach that fits your particular brand value stream.
For the big picture, of course, the stepping off point is still Hugh Dubberly’s masterful Concept Map of Brand.
Visualize what you do for the customer
Since brands are customer-centric by nature, the focus of any brand visualization should never be the brand itself. It’s the customer who belongs at the center of your brand diagram or schematic. Your brand is the enabling force that elevates the customer to richer forms of living. Brand platforms and programs only have value based on what they deliver to the customer. It’s this brand value stream, a dynamic (and transformative) process, that has to be illustrated. Otherwise, a brand is simply admiring itself in the mirror, static and alone.
NOTE: Added above paragraph on May 18, 2007
