Visual Hammer

When my dad, Al Ries, wrote “Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind” in 1981, he overlooked one important idea. The visual. Positioning is a totally verbal concept. You build a brand by owning a word in the mind. Yet the best way into a mind is not with words at all. The best way into a mind is with visuals. But not any visual. You need a “visual hammer” that hammers a verbal nail. The Marlboro cowboy. Coca-Cola’s contour bottle. Corona’s lime. The cowboy hammers “masculinity.” The contour bottle hammers “authenticity.” The lime hammers “genuine Mexican beer.” A trademark is not a visual hammer. Almost every brand has a trademark, but fewer than one out of a hundred brands have a visual hammer. A trademark is a rebus which communicates nothing except the name of the brand. A visual hammer, on the other hand, communicates the essence of the brand. Visual Hammer is the first book to document the superiority of the “hammer and nail” approach to branding. Some examples. The pink ribbon that made Susan G. Komen for the Cure the largest nonprofit foundation to fight breast cancer.