I’ll never forget the day my son read his first word. We were living in the UK at the time, I was driving through town that day when he piped up from the back, “that’s Asda”. I whipped my head around and saw him pointing an impossibly tiny finger at the huge ASDA sign towering above the road. He was just 18 months old. He’d barely learned to speak at all and yet he was forming an impression of a brand. Making meaning from a set of experiences he’d had and then tying them together. Just like this five year old.

Your brand is a story. A window on awareness. More than just a logo or a price ticket. That story is shaped by the experiences people have around everything you do, from typeface to copy and even how they felt and what they saw on their very first shopping trips with their mum. It has the power to become the stuff of myth and legend (even for a tiny audience), if you enable people to see themselves as part of the story too.

Image by Slimmer Jimmer.