JD Photography

When I was living in Japan I joined a band. It wasn’t anything serious at first, we just played metal cover tunes. As we got used to playing together we realized we could probably get some gigs. We drifted away from metal, but we were still a rock band.

This process of discovery is where my mind wonders when I think about the creative process for coming up with a brand. There are so many questions that need to be asked so the team knows whats going on. Same with the band.

Are we a cover band? Will we write our own songs? What’s our name? What genre are we going to play? That’s right, we’re a rock band.

Similar questions are asked in branding. Who’s our audience? What’s our market? Who are our competitors? What do we stand for? The questions should seem endless because we need as much information as possible to helps us craft the brand.

The goal of the band was just to play music in front of friends and engage with the local Japanese community. We enjoyed writing music, learning new covers, and playing live. We were always ready for a gig, big or small.

Cath Caldwell writes in Graphic Design For Everyone, “A brand comprises three components: verbal, visual, and emotional. When successful, the different elements combine to form a cohesive whole, capable of seeping into an audience’s psyche and generating a powerful emotional response.”

Just like the band, we created buzz about what we were creating, people wanted to see what we were doing.

We had to find our stage presence. If we just stood onstage and just sang and played our instruments we would loose the crowd. We had to preform. With every performance we generated additional buzz, leading to additional gigs.

Our set-list could be considered our emotion. We would chose songs the Japanese knew and loved. We would also choose songs that other homesick American’s would love to hear live to remind them of friends and family back in the states.

I never felt the emotional response more than when we were asked to perform for a local nursing home. We added a few more “classics” to our set-list. Songs from the Beatles were always well received. We played some Jimi Hendrix and as a joke we threw in a metal cover to see how they would respond. It went very well.

Our Japanese interpreters informed us that there were three people in attendance who were all over 103 years old.

My mind raced to what these people had gone through living in the Nagasaki Prefecture. Did these people even want to meet an American? I would understand if they had resentment towards America and Americans for the bombs dropped and the lives lost.

To my dismay they had tears in their eyes. Happy tears that we came to play music for them. They were happy to meet us, happy to greet us, and welcome us to their home. They thanked us. We thanked them.

Whenever an emotional response is talked about I always drift to that day in my memory. There is nothing stronger that can cause action like that of emotion.