Branding is it an Inception?
What’s the most resilient parasite? A bacteria? A virus? An intestinal
worm?
An idea. Resilient, highly contagious. Once an idea’s taken hold in the
brain it’s almost impossible to eradicate. A person can cover it up, ignore it
but it stays there. Information is forgotten. But an idea fully formed,
understood? That sticks in there, somewhere.
This opening statement of the
movie Inception reminds me the first lessons my advertising guru taught me. We
are always trying to play with these so called ‘ideas’ in branding or
communication. ‘Inception’ is all about that game. Good brands are created out
of these inceptions of ideas in the minds of their customers.
We always say that emotional
connect make the customers act and rationalisation help them to justify their
actions. So emotions work better in most of the communications, when we try to
connect to the customer and create a positive inclination towards the brand.
This is the exact strategy what they have used in inception and it is evident
in the statement of Cobbs.
“The subconscious gets motivated through emotion, not reason, so we have
to translate the idea into an emotional concept and plant it. We could split the idea into emotional
triggers, and use one on each level”.
They did the inception
successfully by piggy backing the emotions of Fisher: "My father accepts
that I want to create for myself, not follow in his footsteps." These
positive emotions act powerfully in favour of the dream architects. Not just
that, the dream architect always insisted on placing the idea deep in the
subconscious levels of the mind for a better inception. We always try to
achieve these in our communication strategies.
The reason for the failure of the
inception by Eames was like most of the communication strategy failures we see
around us. The insight / idea were not planted deep enough and the inception addressed
superficial issues. To be effective a communication or inception should always
be based on the simplest and the basic insight of the consumer. Eames was not
in favour of direct inception of the idea to break up the monopoly of Fishers
Empire because of his previous experience. He says “there you’ve got various political motivations, anti-monopolistic
sentiment and so forth. But all that stuff’s at the mercy of the subject’s
prejudice you have to go to the basics, the relationship with his father”. Fisher’s
inception was done below three layers of dreams for a better reception. These
are the most difficult task we face during the preparation of communication
strategies.
The subtlety of the changes what
we are trying to make in the subject’s psychological layer is also very important.
Possibility of resistance by the projections or perceptions is very high as the
changes become aggressive. Ariadne was attacked by the projections of the Cobbs
in the dream training because of this reason. This principle is very much
applicable in real world communication scenarios, where we have to handle the
projections and perceptions of the TG.
Inception speaks about the
responsibility of communication and branding professionals towards society
also. Haven’t we come across similar statements like the following about
branding and marketing?
“This
isn't the usual corporate espionage, Mr. Saito. This is inception. The seed of
the idea we plant will grow in this man's mind. It'll change him. It might even
come to define him”
We can see an extreme case of
dream addicts also in the pharmacy of Yusuf.
The old man says “They dream to be
woken up... the dream has become their reality...and who are we to say
otherwise?” This is a classical state where brands give the reason to the
existence / identity to the consumers. Consumers are in the dreams experience the
lives of celebrities and kings when they use brands, ultimately that becomes
the hope for their existence.
In short we can see inception of
communication and branding principles everywhere in Inception. It’s a good
guide for strategy inspirations if you can dream and analyse within dreams and
inceptions.
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