I. Aesthetic Truth

It’s never wise to play word games with the Bard; then again Romeo turned out to be dead wrong about a lot of things. Because, no, a rose - like your brand - would not smell as sweet with an awful name.

From the Indo-European to the Latin to today, “rosa” has been a sound, color, and fragrance universally associated with love and attraction. Intoxicating by evolutionary design, genus Rosa has been enticing people, along with countless other animals and insects, to spread its species far and wide. And while we may wonder what a rose called a “moistfug” or “cruxix” might smell like, that disgusted face you’re probably making right about now suggests you’d rather not smell something named that at all.

When shapes, sounds, smells and sensations blur together across our five senses, we begin to sense that our sensory perceptions are less essentially segmented than our language suggests. (Rhythmic, alliterative language can also trigger the flow states associated with this experience.)

This is the experience of something called synesthesia, and it’s a peek into how we simultaneously perceive, evaluate, and classify things in ways that generalize across our senses. Automatically, cross-culturally, and in the blink of an eye.

Understanding synesthesia unlocks insights for brand naming and logo design, brand identity systems, and countless other creative choices we make to communicate the essences of things to and through our senses. This is one of many timeless aesthetic truths.

Because the things we find ‘beautiful’ and ‘right’ tend to be the things that harmonize with prewired preferences forged in primordial environments - ancient instincts and assumptions sculpted by evolutionary deep time to create instant meaning and behavioral intent before our modern minds even get out of bed.

Still don’t believe me?

Check out this fun demonstration to see if you’re like 90% of your fellow humans.

Remarkably, we first feel the things we perceive. They touch us and move us before we create a single conscious association (that’s the synesthesia talking again) anchoring us in our gut instincts before we’ve even thought to ask why.

This symbolic inducement of concurrent feelings that only then trigger subsequent cognitions is only now starting to be mapped by the field of neuromarketing.

Check out the brands below. Can you tell which launched trying to be cute and approachable Boubas to the point of looking like toy blocks and sounding like baby babble, and which went full Kiki, signaling strength and sharp-elbowed authority? (AstraZeneca apparently tried to have it both ways with its vertiginous pretzel logo. Moral of the story - don’t try to have it both ways.)

Now which do you think best matches your own brand?

Bouba or Kiki? (Don’t say both.)

Do you think your entire team would agree with you?

Think you’d see a difference between, say, what the creative department and the global finance team would naturally gravitate to? Can you predict which a friendly, highly agreeable audience would prefer vs. an orderly, highly conscientious client? People who identify as women vs. people who identify as men?

And that’s just basic colors, shapes, and sounds. By the time we start building complex visual systems and communications it starts getting a whole lot more fun. Here’s a preview…

Finally, if you’re still feeling like an iconoclastic, high-modernist creative who doesn’t need Robert McKee to tell you about three act structure or color theory to cramp your style, here’s a fascinating look at what fractals have to teach us about the ancient aesthetic structures underlying even the ‘random’ novelty of Jackson Pollock.