You might remember our post last month about how caricatures can help identify criminals better. But do you know that caricatures can also affect your brand? Seth Godin, a famous marketing guru and co-founder of blogging platform Squidoo, believes the same concept also applies to business.

The best brands are caricatures of their true selves. Yes, they must have exceptional ‘features’ (a step that’s easy to skip, but without which leads to failure) but then, over time, those features become a caricature. During the formative days of Fedex, the caricature was that their drivers would even rent a helicopter to get just one package delivered on time. It’s easy to turn Starbucks’ variety and focus on your needs into a caricature as well, “half-caf, extra hot, short macchiato, extra foam, with soy, in a ceramic mug….”

In creating caricatures, you exaggerate some prominent facial features of a person. In running a small business, you can overstress your key competencies like excellent customer service, low price or product superiority. If you’re a running a small business which is very dependent on your personal image, you might also want to include your caricature in your business card. All these efforts will help make your brand or image memorable to the heart and minds of your target market.

You may also want to check some caricature samples we created here a Logo Design Works.

Photo via andsuchandsuch

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 27th, 2007 at 12:01 pm and is filed under Branding. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.