If you’ve been on a film set there’s a lot of intense focus on what happens in front of and behind the camera. When a shoot is in full flow, there’s a lot of concentration on getting every detail, every nuance of the visuals and the performances right. There’s a feeling that everything you do is important.
A good film director uses the insights and skills of others to help bring their own individual and unique viewpoint to the screen and engage with the audience in meaningful ways though images, words and technology.
Many businesses and brands would be improved by bringing the intensity that a filmmaker brings to a new movie production to their business branding and design projects.
If everything is important in creating a film that has lasting value, then everything you do in your business is an important part of your brand and product experience.
One of the secrets of great filmmaking is great planning. Relatively few commercial films are shot in sequence, so great care has to be taken in pre-production to make sure timings and locations are in synch and actors and crew are in place.
As with film production one of the secrets of great branding and design is great planning. Think though what you want to achieve from your brand and the design and technologies you use, to get the best results and reach your goals. Don’t be afraid to have high production values and to question and refine every detail of your brand management process.
Take a cinematic approach to create a feeling, create an emotion, create a desire, and create a brand. Think about the context, the economic and social theatre in which your brand will appear.
Does you brand stand out or fade into the background with other similar brands and businesses that make similar promises and have similar visual languages? Do your branding and design tell a unique and memorable story that the people you want to interact and buy from you can relate to? Have you thought about what your customers are looking for and what you can offer that will have meaning and value for their business and their lives?
Like a cinematic success a great brand, a great business, will make people sit up and take notice and become part of their lives. A great film director will be able to tell stories and describe emotions through use of visual language as well as colour, sound, music, lighting and dialogue.
A successful director uses every tool that’s available to get the best results for the finished production. As a business owner or marketing professional you should be thinking the same way. And if you work with a team that takes a Big Data approach to branding, you can even have a 3D view of your brand that can give your business objectives more chance of box office and critical success.
As every great filmmaker knows, it’s important to be original and authentic, rather than string together sequences from someone else’s movies if you want to create something that is unique to you and your business. An authentic approach to design creates authentic brands – brands that don’t need to borrow everything from somewhere else as they have a point of view they want people to know about and unique values they are confident in expressing.
Everything that surrounds your branding and design should be an event – like a cinematic success that ultimately helps you stand apart from your competitors and gives you a long-lasting business advantage.
Eugene Burns
