Take a look at this picture. What does it mean to you?
A few colorful bricks in the middle of a street, big deal. Yes, but there is more to it. After a week here at B&J, I am seeing branding everywhere, and the city of Portland is no exception. So why when repaving Sw. 5th Ave did the city decide to spend taxpayer dollars on colorful bricks? The answer partly lies in the rails running through the upper left of the picture. Sw. 5th is home to the Portland Streetcar (public transportation being another large part of Portland’s brand), so even though the street lacks many cars or pedestrians, this is still a bored-eyeball-high-traffic area. All those tourists and 503-natives staring at their toes, the bricks brighten their view, making their time in Portland a little better. The bricks tell them the story of a funky, Pacific-Northwest town where even the roads are individually crafted. To local retail, the bricks tell the story of a city committed to revitalizing its downtown area, a city with an urban growth boundary. The bricks are a stand against suburban sprawl.
Cities can teach us about branding and how to communicate. No marketer has it harder. Everything in a city coheres to tell its story, whether it is trees sprouting from skyrise rooftops (ooo, green!), delicious, affordable foodcarts bordering ground-level parking lots, or the constant, humbling presence of the homeless. A thousand elements must be optimized for function and feeling, but for a city, none is more urgent than the traffic light. This was made abundantly clear to me yesterday as I was almost t-boned by a driver going 45 to catch a yellow light. Today’s post is therefore dedicated to that most vital of messangers, the Hermes of signs: the traffic light.
First and foremost, a traffic light must be functional–a bad traffic light is the urban equivalent of bad cholesteral, clogging the city’s arteries and leading to cardiac arrest. Yet in addition to their purely utilitarian purpose, traffic lights, like playfully-patterned bricks, can tell a story. In Japan, many traffic lights sing a song “Toryanse,” as you cross the street, the lyrics of which are, “Going is easy / Coming back is fearful / Although I feel fearful, please let me pass / Please let me pass.” Cute and haunting, a mix only possible in Japan. In Bischwiller, Alsace, France, we can see a French style traffic light, which includes the typical larger signal overhead and then a smaller one at eye-level for the first car in line.
Photo by Mark McIvory
The lights are precisely cast in iPod white. The lower screens don’t force you to crain your neck up to see the light. The design is thoughtful. Bischwiller uses the light to tell a story about consideration and different thinking.
Far from the seven screens of the French traffic light, many intersections in China bear a single rectangular panel of multi-color LEDS. The box displays growing and shrinking boxes of color that communicates how much time is left before the light shifts:
The light combines design and functionality. Here the story is one of efficiency and innovation, and a willingness to buck Western tradition.
In Tuv Aimag, Mongolia, we see a traffic light telling a much different story, one of faded glory. It alludes to a period of former prosperity and Soviet support when not only was there traffic, there was so much it had to be regulated in some way:
Finally, there is this wonderful monstrosity at Canary Wharf in London, located in a real roundabout:
Thankfully it is only a sculpture, but it illustrates a real marketing issue. Even the traffic light, a masterpiece of design so simple we only notice it when it breaks, can be confusing and incoherent. You can plow money into your marketing budget, launch a hundred campaigns and features, buy every adword out there, but without a clear story and direction, the result is chaos and lost opportunity, a tree of traffic lights. The sculpture asks you to question your work: what story are you telling and how are you telling it? How could you make it more remarkable, more functional, more beautiful?
Another thought: What kind of light is your brand? A traditional three cylinder light, functional but unremarkable? A light full of song and dance, fun but hard to take seriously, like the Japanese light? A light expressing thoughtfulness and reaching out uniquely to each customer like the French light? An innovative light: new, strange, an alternative to the status quo, like the Chinese light? Or is it worse? Have you neglected your brand, leaving it out to rust and tarnish, the bulbs burnt out? Or even worse, are you paying for the works, but watching your message devolve into a forest of red lights?
All good questions to consider, but I would like to end by reiterating the most fundamental question. What is your story and how do you tell it?
Still searching for answers? Let us help.
Sources: Japanese light song; French light; Chinese light; Mongolian light; London light.
PS. Can we all pause and and appreciate the fact that I didn’t entitle this post: “Giving Your Brand the Green Light”. All right, thanks.
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