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

Today, animation is often associated with movies and online businesses. On the other hand, caricatures are commonly intended to ridicule famous figures like actors and politicians. But that’s about to change.

Starting next year, animation and caricatures are set to become very important tools in fighting crimes in the UK.

According to the Lancashire Evening Post, a study by Dr Charlie Frowd, psychology lecturer at the University of Central Lancashire, shows caricaturing and animating photofits improve recognition rates from 40 to 80 percent. On the other hand, an ordinary photofit face was only recognized 20% of the time.

Photos of Brad Pitt and Tony Blair are used to better illustrate this project.

Turning a photofit to a caricature requires overstressing of some features of a human face like nose, forehead, or ears by as much as 50%.

“We found through our studies that different people need different levels of caricature to best recognise a face, so showing them an image as a series of caricatures – from caricature to anti-caricature – is the best way to improve recognition rates,” said Co-researcher Professor Peter Hancock, of the University of Stirling.

This software will be used initially by the Derbyshire Police.