Rocking Hand
By Bella Acton, 4/08/2010
There was a punk rock music festival in Tompkins Square Park over the weekend. Not exactly my thing, but I did love what some enthusiastic soul did to our neighbourhood. On about ten of the pedestrian crossings, black tape had been strapped to the flashing ‘don’t walk’ hand to make it look like the official signal for rocking out that punk rockers so love. Entertaining stuff.
You know that it wasn’t part of a marketing ploy; but in fact the work of a rather excited fan. Which raises an interesting point about symbols and iconography. If you have a set of symbols that are short-hand for your brand and what you represent, you allow room for people to interpret it and play with it as they see fit. And everytime they do, they’re spreading your message; your brand. An overly used example of this is Obama’s logo-creator. And a less talked about example is Linux – who let us play with their penguin mascot and make it our own. So perhaps we should think along the lines of symbols and iconography and what we are willing to hand over to our fans.
Whilst this is true, if you do not actively protect your trademark then you lose it, so the line between freedom of expression for the development of your brand iconography and losing the right to associate that icon solely with your brand is a tight-wire.
Very good point. And on top of that, it requires a confidence that the positive stuff generated will outweigh the bad. Obama certainly had his fair share of negative expressions (‘Dope’ instead of ‘Hope’ posters), but his overall equity was strong enough to not only outweigh the bad, but also project him as a thought leader. Not every brand is lucky enough to have that kind of equity in their brand vault.