When going to Columbia Flower Market the other day I came across Seamus Ryan’s photo studio – a little photo art studio where Seamus exhibits his art and does lots of fun little art projects in which the public can participate.

There is one particular project I came across which grabbed my attention called ‘Evidence’:

“In this project we asked the public to reveal all that stuff they carry around with them. Handbags were emptied and pockets turned out to give a rare insight into what people just can’t leave home without. Participants were responsible for their own arrangement of items. What these images say about their owners is subjective. They do, however, show how dependant on gizmos and gadgets many of us are.”

Check out the website and the wonderful insights you can draw. e.g. what brands do people tend to carry around with them, what kind of mobile phones are used, what are the preferred chewing gum brands etc…

Some observations of the most common items…

Those pictures have been taken in London, so not surprisingly most bags contain:

• An Oyster card – note the power of wallet branding – IKEA is a brand that appears everywhere as sponsor of those wallets, great branding impact!
• An A-Z

Items you can find in (nearly) every bag:

• Mobile phone
• Cash
• Hair brushes (for girls)
• Chewing gum
• Vaseline lip balm
• Medicine (that really surprised me, that nearly every bag contains some kind of pills)

Predominant brands across the bags:

• iPod
• Marlboro
• Extra
• Vaseline
• Kleenex

Ever thought about what your bag content is saying about you?

Brands are like human personalities and reputations. They’re just as complex and diverse. And the way consumers go about judging brands is a skill we know from judging fellow humans.

One of the most insightful tools we apply to the judgement of people is the analysis we make of the language they use: accent, word choice, performance, sentence length, fluency etc. All of these elements of language use can be pretty subtle but no less influential for being so. The subtlest of them all may be the metaphors we use. Human beings think in metaphors. That doesn’t mean we are all poets. It just means that our minds tend to handle abstract concepts by finding analogies with tangible, concrete, often physical things that we are able to perceive.

In that vein, I was interested to find out about the naming system IKEA use for their products. Here’s a snapshot:

Chairs, desks: men’s names (e.g. Jerker)
Beds, wardrobes, hall furniture: Norwegian place names (e.g. Oslo)
Kitchens: grammatical terms among others (e.g. Metrik)

There are lots of jokes to make about some of the names this system creates like Fyrklöver and Lessebo which get somewhat lost in translation, but for more serious reasons I still like their system. Language is a window onto human minds. So the semantic frames in which IKEA places its categories tell consumers something about how IKEA thinks about these different categories. IKEA uses language and metaphor to give away a bit of its personality and its that, as well as the prices and good parking facilities which consumers grow attached to.

The power of effective language use is often overlooked. But since it’s the job of brand owners to manage meaning and personality, and our ears naturally bend to language for clues, isn’t it right that more brands should give weight to tone of voice and linguistic style as a fundamental part of their brand strategy?