I’m looking at CNN the other night, a foreign correspondent reporting from China. The reporter is standing on a sidewalk in Beijing standing in front of a barber shop. Behind him is the blue and red spiral pole you always see outside a barber shop. I think to myself; even in China this sign means the same thing? Is that not the goal of every marketer?
To have their brand trigger a bunch of clear expectations that are delivered with every single customer interaction. So you know when you push the brand door in people’s minds you’ll find a barber and not a vet or play whe vendor for example.
We help communicate the brand by staying faithful to the shape and colors of the brand. Just like the barber shop. So Heieneken owns green. And Coca Cola owns red (in their category). No sense Pepsi trying to be red, same for b-mobile. And Coca Cola also means young or young at heart. That’s why you’ll never see the Coca Cola Bridge Championship.
What’s your brand’s barber pole? Are you changing it every Monday morning or when you’re indexing 60% of sales targets. Do like the barber and think of the lifetime value of the brand, not the current financial year debacle. Otherwise, we would have a lot of barber shops signs in front of travel agencies, mobile phone stores, fast food restaurants and who knows what, because some barbers had a bad year.
Just in case your interested in knowing about the origin of the barber pole:
The origin of the barber pole is associated with the service of bloodletting.[1] During medieval times, barbers also performed surgery on customers. The original pole had a brass basin at the top (representing the vessel in which leeches were kept) and bottom (representing the basin which received the blood). The pole itself represents the staff that the patient gripped during the procedure to encourage blood flow.
The red and white stripes symbolize the bandages used during the procedure: red for the blood-stained and white for the clean bandages. Originally, these bandages were hung out on the pole to dry after washing. As the bandages blew in the wind, they would twist together to form the spiral pattern similar to the stripes in the modern day barber pole. The barber pole became emblematic of the barber/surgeon’s profession. Later the cloths were replaced by a painted wooden pole of red and white stripes.
Source(s):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barber%27s_pole
Blogger: dr
