1. IPA Excellence Diploma 2011-12
Jean Francois Hector, @jfhector
Brands as clouds, comms as rainfall
Abstract
Any brand can compete in emotional and cultural power with the best creative products
if we approach creating them and communicating them the right way.
I believe that we should approach our brands as clouds rather than clocks.
This means learning to work with elements that are too textured, nuanced or even
emotionally puzzling to be pinned down in general descriptive terms.
We need to make these strategy rather than execution.
The Brand Cloud is a very concrete tool – a web app – to help us do that.
There’s a prototype for you to try out at brandsasclouds.com

2. I. ! THE IDEAS BEHIND THE BRAND CLOUD IV.! THE RAINFALL MODEL OF COMMUNICATION
1. ! Any brand can have the power of Batman 1. ! The Rainfall model of communication lets you communicate your
! brand’s essence directly, rather than through its description
2. ! We approach our brands as clocks;
! other creative products are more like clouds 2.! The Rainfall model communicates your brand
! as a feel that transpires in everything you do
3.! The next level of sophistication
3. ! The Rainfall model lets you communicate your brand
4. ! Talking about a brand’s essence through ! through emergence, rather than compression
! all the things in which it can be found
4. ! Measuring comms effectiveness in the Rainfall model
II.! THE BRAND CLOUD ALLOWS YOU TO
! CREATE A BRAND ESSENCE INTUITIVELY AND PRE-VERBALLY V.! FOCUSING CREATIVITY ON THE VISCERAL ANALOGUE DETAILS
1. ! How does the Brand Cloud work? 1. ! Creative ‘clouds’, not ‘ideas’
2.! Use the Brand Cloud as creative fodder
2. ! Live application: using the Brand Cloud to add depth and richness
! to the Natwest brand
3.! Prototype everything
4.! Adopt a truly iterative process
III. ! WHAT THE BRAND CLOUD CHANGES 5.! Iterate the strategy together with the creative exploration
1. ! The Brand Cloud lets you know your brand
! the way your right brain knows things
2. ! The Brand Cloud opens up the possibilities
! of what your brand can be based on
3. ! The Brand Cloud is a killer app for participation,
! it puts your audience at the centre of the branding process
4. ! The Brand Cloud helps your brand evolve organically with culture
5. ! Your Brand Cloud is fully testable

3. I. THE IDEAS BEHIND THE BRAND CLOUD
1. Any brand can have the power of Batman
The proportion of UK adults who say they enjoy ads as much as TV programmes has
almost halved in the last 15 years1.
70% of those who can skip brand communications do skip them2.
In the words of Gareth Kay: “the content we make isn’t culturally competitive any more”3.
What if we could make our brands as emotionally and culturally compelling as the best
best creative products (TV series, pop songs, novels, movies, apps, characters both real
and fiction) ?
Let me ask a different question: why couldn’t we?
Of course there are plenty of things that make brands different from other creative
products: commercial realities, the fact that brands don’t exist in and for themselves, the
need for accountability, to name but a few.
But, as I’ll argue, there doesn’t need to be a trade off between these and creating a
powerful brand essence.
I believe that what’s really holding our brands back is the very particular way in which we
create them and communicate them.

4. 2. We approach our brands as clocks;
other creative products are more like clouds
Karl Popper famously divided the world into two types of things: clocks and clouds4.
Clocks are neat, orderly systems that can be fully understood through reduction, by taking
them apart.
Clouds are too complex, too nuanced for us to understand them in this way. They can’t be
separated into parts. They can’t be engineered by putting clearly defined elements
together in a mechanical way 5 .
It seems to me that we tend to approach our brands as clocks: a mechanical sum of
neatly defined, fully pinned down, general descriptive terms. We understand their essence
by taking them apart and labelling all the pieces.
But the things that can make a brand or any creative product emotionally compelling
are often much harder to pin down and they can’t be captured in clear reductive
language.
Pop songs, movies, TV series, characters real and fiction are full of emotionally nuanced
and puzzling elements that you can’t summarise in a reductive brand idea or a set of
adjectives and attributes. General descriptive terms don’t even begin to capture them.
The most compelling creative products each have their own emotional signature. Listen
to 100 songs and you’ll feel 100 very particular, very nuanced emotions that you’ve
probably never experienced anywhere else. In contrast, our brand’s emotional vocabulary
tends to be very limited: most them aim for the same five or six generic, garden-variety
emotions that we’ve all experienced millions of times already 6.
These hard-to-pin-down nuances and emotions are at the heart of what makes the best
creative products compelling. Nick Hornby said that “emotional puzzlement” is the reason
why we can get so addicted to a new pop song: we therefore need to “crack it
emotionally”7.
John Peel said “At the heart of anything good there is a kernel of something undefinable,
and if you can define it, or claim to be able to define it, then you’ve missed the point”8.

5. 3. The next level of sophistication
I believe that the one biggest reason why our brands fail to compete in emotional and
cultural power with the other creative products is because we’re not equipped to work with
elements that are too nuanced or emotionally puzzling to be described in clear reductive
language.
The next level of sophistication for us is to become comfortable working with these
hard-to-pin-down elements and find a way to talk fluently about them.
A different way of talking about our brands
If we want our brands to be as rich, as emotionally nuanced and puzzling as the best
creative products, we need to find a different way to talk about them. We need something
that constantly reminds us that general, descriptive terms don’t capture their complexity
and subtleties.
Instead of talking about MINI in terms of a couple of positioning adjectives, we should talk
about it as a very particular feel – ‘MINI-ness’.
Call this your brand’s amorphous, indescribable essence, or aesthetic, or emotional
signature. It always lies beyond what general descriptive terms can capture.
There’s a saying in Zen Buddhism that expresses this nicely: “a word is a finger that points
at the moon. The goal of Zen pupils is the moon itself, not the pointing finger. Zen masters
will never stop cursing words”9 .
Then, how do we discuss our brands and work on them in a structured way?

6. 4. Talking about a brand’s essence through
all the things in which it can be found
Some of the most important and compelling things can’t be conveyed in a description.
Not at all, not even approximately.
They have to be experienced in a concrete, embodied form.
The ‘analogue’ vs ‘digital’ elements in communication
Paul Watzlawick made a useful distinction between what he calls the ‘digital’ and the
‘analogue’ elements in communication. (This was written in 1967, ‘digital’ here has nothing
to do with online advertising)10.
In any communication (brand comms, human communication, or just when you’re looking
at a piece of art or listening to a pop song), the digital elements are everything that you
can clearly capture in words and convey to someone else who wasn’t there. It’s all the
things that are unambiguous and precise, like the 1/0 values inside computers.
The analogue elements are everything that’s impossible to pin down, that you can’t
describe to someone else. They’re not one thing but an incredible coming together of a
myriad of small things that you experience implicitly, viscerally, often subconsciously.
Brands communications, as any creative products, contain both digital and analogue
elements. But as Paul Feldwick11 and others1213 14 have pointed out, what people
experience and respond to in brand communications are all the analogue elements – a
wealth of material, visuals, music, dialogue, timing, colour, entertainment, emotions, etc. –
rather than the brand idea, message or positioning adjectives that we marketers spend
most of our time and energy discussing.

7. To capture a brand essence in all it’s nuances, find things that have some of that essence
already embedded in them
What I’d like to propose is a way of working with our brands that puts these analogue
details right at the centre of all of our conversations and that allows us to make them
strategy rather than just execution15 .
I believe that the way to do it is to talk about our brands’ essence through a myriad of
concrete things that have some of that essence embedded in them – in a way that you
can’t extract or translate into a brand attribute or adjective.
I believe that the way to understand MINI, for example, is to look for all the things in the
world that have some ‘MINI-ness’ embedded in them – pop songs, people, books,
gestures, myths, quotes, places – things that intuitively ‘feel’ MINI, that have a family
resemblance with MINI.
I can’t convey to you the very unique emotional feel in a movie like Terry Gilliam’s Brazil.
But I can point out to what else you can find it in: I can ask you to remember the emotion in
Orwell’s 1984, and then put on the famous tune ‘Aquarela do Brasil’. The contrast between
these two things experienced together captures the Brazil ‘feel’ better than single
descriptive terms ever could 16.

8. II. THE BRAND CLOUD ALLOWS YOU TO CREATE A BRAND ESSENCE
INTUITIVELY AND PRE-VERBALLY
This is what the Brand Cloud is: a collection of all the things that intuitively feel like
your brand, that have a family resemblance with it, in a way that you can’t pin down in
general descriptive terms.
Pieces of music, quotes, places, gestures, books, myths, anecdotes in history, moments,
archetypes, online videos, specific bits of a movie, characters, people .. all the things in the
world that communicate some of your brand’s essence in an analogue way, that you can’t
extract out and capture in a brand adjective.
For example, there’s a moment in Rocky III when Apollo Creed takes Rocky to train in his
club, and shows him fighters who are so determined to win that you can see it in their eyes
that they will. This is a reference that feels like it should be part of Nike’s brand cloud.
Young, hungry footballers also like to believe that opportunity always come to those who
train hard. This should be part of Nike’s cloud too.
None of these are an illustration of ‘Just do it’ or anything from Nike’s brand description.
They just somehow ‘feel’ Nike.
The Brand Cloud allows you explore your brand’s essence intuitively, through experiencing
a whole range of things that ‘feel’ like your brand. It’s about curating a sense of it, rather
than engineering it in words.
This is how other creative products are created. The example I mentioned above is
actually how Terry Gilliam found the very particular emotion in his movie Brazil. He was on
a beach in the UK. The weather was dark and depressing, but a man was sitting alone
listening to ‘Aquarela do Brasil’ on a stereo. Gilliam was fascinated by the strange emotion
that these two things experienced together created. He couldn’t pin it down or name it. But
he had found it and so he could communicate it to his entire crew and reproduce it.

9. 1. How does the Brand Cloud work?
Where does the Brand Cloud live?
The Brand Cloud is a web app. Every member of your brand’s marketing team can access
it, add to it and consult it – regardless of whether they work on the client side or one of its
agencies.
Unlike a brand book, it’s never made static. New elements are added all the time, and
bubble up based on how useful and compelling people find them.
The Brand Cloud is hyperlinked. You can click on any item and directly experience it: if it’s
a movie you’ll see the most relevant scene, if it’s a book you’ll get pictures of the most
relevant pages, etc.
The Brand Cloud can also be exported in physical form as a deck of cards or a wall of
items with web links on them.
Who adds to the Brand Cloud?
At video-game developer Valve, every single person contributes references and ideas,
regardless of their department. How much each employee has contributed to making the
game great makes up 5% of his/her evaluation17 .
We should do the same: everyone on your marketing team both on the client and
agencies’ side (everyone of them) should have it as part of their job and evaluation to
make useful submissions to the Brand Cloud.
They can do it by clipping anything they find from the internet (it takes two clicks), or
upload a picture from their smartphone with a couple of annotations.
When someone adds to the brand cloud, they also point everyone’s attention to what they
think speaks of the brand essence in the reference they share, and where the comparison
ends.

10. Who curates the Brand Cloud? Mostly everyone, but ultimately one person.
Every time you open the Brand Cloud app, the first thing you see are the items that other
people have recently added.
If you find an item that you think is powerful and particularly relevant to your brand, you
can ‘star’ it so you can easily come back to it later.
As more people star an item, it gets bigger on the cloud. Items that are more consensual
gravitate towards the centre; those which are more divisive closer to the edge.
This way, a stream of fresh elements constantly enter the Brand Cloud, and the best ones
emerge to the foreground.
But ultimately the Brand Cloud isn’t a democracy. Powers of arbitration lie in the
person on the client side who is respected for having the best intuitive knowledge of the
brand. He/she gets named ‘Brand Cloud Director’ (in reference to Pixar’s ‘director led’
approach where everyone contributes but one person remains responsible for the
vision18 ).
He/she calls a meeting once a month with all marketing staff and key agency people to
review the Brand Cloud:
- Are the biggest items right?
- Do these put together feel like a good picture of the brand essence?
- What else is missing?
- Should this be adjusted?
The Brand Cloud is a conversation. It gets everyone to feel the brand intuitively
The Brand Cloud is an ever-growing set of references that everyone on your brand team
shares: things that they don’t just know of, but have all experienced first-hand.
The Brand Cloud provides a concrete basis to talk about how the brand ‘feels’ to you,
rather than what logically and mechanically fits with the brand idea or adjectives. It
creates the sort of conversations that don’t happen often enough.
The Brand Cloud Director arbitrates according to his own intuitive vision of the brand, but
that discussion is held in the open. The items that get discarded are recorded. Everyone
learns to have a feel for the brand through these discussions and case studies, rather than
through a checklist of codified principles.

11. 2. Live application: using the Brand Cloud to add depth and richness to
the Natwest brand
This is what the branding process might look like concretely, using Natwest as an
example.
Note: you can also experience the full Natwest brand cloud at brandsasclouds.com
1. Where do you start?
It’s easy if there’s somebody in the organisation who has a deep intuitive knowledge of the
brand (a founder for example), or when there’s a very strong internal culture.
In this case, a brand cloud is made under their direction and review, to capture their
intuitive knowledge of the brand.
But where do you start when you don’t have someone like this? If that rich intuitive brand
essence needs to be created from scratch?
2. Kickstarting the brand cloud conversation
You can use these four simple questions to get started:
" a) The broad, overarching question:
What are the things in the world that intuitively ‘feel’ like Natwest, that have a family
resemblance with it? (both the present Natwest and what you feel it could become)
Natwest to me feels like it has a family resemblance with things like:
- the Big Lunch19
- door steps and store fronts (vs City towers)
- B&B hotels (vs standardised, soulless hotels like Travelodge)
- the book England in Particular by Sue Clifford 20 (a celebration of local particularities)
- Broadway Market
- local notice boards
- the youtube video ‘Charlie Bit My Finger’21
- ..
"

12. b) Starting from what’s already mentioned in the current brand description:
For example if one of the key brand attributes is ‘helpful’, what type of ‘helpful’ are
we talking about specifically?
‘Helpful’ in the abstract is bland and without texture. But thinking about it in concrete terms,
there are hundreds of different kind of ‘helpful’. Do we mean helpful like a great customer
care person? Like a guide dog?
Natwest’s particular type of ‘helpful’ feels to me like the broom army of Clapham, Guerrilla
Gardening22, a famous quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson23, ‘the return of the lost sock’24 , ..
" c) Starting from what is not in the brand description:
What are the facets of Natwest that the brand description doesn’t capture?
There’s a sense of ‘real’, ‘grounded-ness’, ‘no flash’ in Natwest. This can help you think
about other things that feel the same:
- shop fronts and door steps (vs City towers)
- Gavin & Stacey
- the less touristy bits of Cornwall
- employees from Southwest airlines (pilots help clean the planes) 25
- ..
" d) Starting from Natwest’s polar opposite:
What are the concrete things that feel completely unlike Natwest? (both in other
brands and culture overall).
These go into an ‘anti-Brand Cloud’, the polar opposite of the Brand Cloud.
- City towers (Natwest feels more like door steps and shop fronts)
- Travelodge (Natwest feels more like B&B hotels)
- ‘Clone towns’ (Natwest likes local history and the specificities)26
- stock photography
- big cold, machine-like Tesco supermarkets
- ..
3. Different threads start to emerge: As you start bringing in elements that intuitively
answer these questions, some of them will feel they belong together in smaller groups. As
this happens, different threads start to form.

13. 4. Reviews: This is reviewed with key people from the organisation, in presence of the
whole marketing team:
- do these elements really feel like us?
- do they feel distinctively like us?
- are they right for the business, its particular position and its history?
A lot of the things that would normally be associated with the elements above don’t feel
right for Natwest. For example:
- the hand craft movement and its ‘cooky’ side
- pranks, flash mobs (not right for a bank)
- anything ‘cooperative’ (feels more Britannia or Nationwide)
- anything tree-hugging (cliché)
- ..
It’s easier to discuss these concrete, material references than it is to debate abstract
adjectives.
5. Iteration The process goes iterating this way, bringing new elements in, having
conversations about them, re-arranging them, dismissing areas, importing elements from
one area into another to create unexpected cross-breeds, etc.
You continue iterating until you get to a powerful brand cloud that holds together as a very
clear whole.
At the end of the process, the brand essence isn’t ambiguous: there’s a clear ‘feel’ that
emerges from it.
Then you can try to articulate it more in words, the way an art critic would: bringing a
posteriori clarity to something that was created intuitively and pre-verbally.
For Natwest, all these elements share something that could be called a ‘re-enchanting’
feel, in the sense of things that go
- away from a society of strangers and towards making things personal
- away from big buildings and clone towns and towards the local and particular
- away from non-human interactions and stock photography and towards real people
- away from the purely economical and interesting, and towards some selflessness.
This feeling of ‘re-enchantment’ (the very particular kind that’s captured in the brand cloud)
could become Natwest’s emotional signature. I’ll show in Part V how this ‘feel’ will transpire
from everything they do, rather than being communicated as one explicit message.

14. Part conclusion
• The Brand Cloud gives us the concrete vocabulary to feel comfortable talking about the
hard-to-pin-down visceral details that people experience and respond to in our brands and
comms.
• It blurs the boundaries between brand owners and agencies. It makes everyone in the
organisation actively own the brand.
• It leverages the power of big teams to create richer brands.
• Approaching your brand as cloud doesn’t mean more ambiguity, but make it easier to
discuss.
What are the implications of the Brand Cloud?

15. III. WHAT THE BRAND CLOUD CHANGES
1. The Brand Cloud lets you know your brand the way your right brain
knows things
Two different ways of seeing
There’s an interesting theory in contemporary neuroscience that supports my argument
that we’re relying too much on descriptive terms.
But let’s clear things up first. There’s a myth dating from the 1960s that rational thinking
sits in our left brain, and imagination in the right. This has since been proven entirely false:
both brain hemispheres are profoundly involved in both reason and imagination27.
Why is our brain divided then? Why has it become even more divided over the course of
evolution?
In recent years it has become generally accepted that the fundamental difference between
our left and right hemispheres has to do with perception. It seems that our left and right
hemispheres see things in completely different ways28.
- The right hemisphere sees things in all their embodied details, nuances and complexity.
- The left hemisphere doesn’t see things as they are but as a simplified, mechanically
reconstructed model: a bit like the maps generals use, with tokens representing the
important features of the battlefield.
The left hemisphere does this to allow us to pin things down and grasp them in clear
reductive language. But this comes at a price 29:
- the left hemisphere is cut from the vividness of experience and all the analogue details
- it doesn’t understand what can’t be pinned down in clear explicit terms (like body
language or metaphors30 )
- it values internal coherence over experience31

16. How the Brand Cloud and the traditional brand description work together:
two different types of knowing
What this means for us is that there are two very different types of ‘knowing’ our brands32.
We can know our brand essence in reductive abstract descriptive terms, the way our left
hemisphere knows things. This is what the traditional brand description does. It has the
advantage of clarity, but it can’t give us a feel for our brand. It misses out the juicy
analogue bits, and this mechanistically reconstructed model of our brand denatures it.
The other way to know our brand essence is to experience it in embodied form through
many different things, to get close to them, to experience them in all their concrete,
analogue details, and intuitively see patterns emerge. This is what the Brand Cloud does.
The best way to think about it is that the Brand Cloud and the traditional brand description
are two different views into your brand:
- the brand description lets your team know their brand as a set of instructions
- the Brand Cloud lets them know it intuitively
Truth is in the cloud
But the Brand Cloud isn’t an illustration of what’s already in the brand description: it is the
main, primary reference for your brand.
The brand description is created after the cloud, the same way that an art critic makes
sense of a compelling emotion he’s found in a piece of art.

17. 2. The Brand Cloud opens up the possibilities of what your brand can
be based on
Using the Brand Cloud as your main reference means that your brand can be based on
anything – even things that clear reductive language can’t capture.
Your brand can have its own ‘emotional signature’ in the same way that the best pop
songs, movies and creative products do.
One way to do this is to clash things that are generally not experienced together, the way
Terry Gilliam did. You can take two elements from the Brand Cloud that each in their own
way feel like your brand but seem quite at odds together, and cross-breed them.
For example, Expedia’s brand essence could be based on mixing the sense of fear, awe
and scale that get swimming in Devil’s Pool on top of the Victoria Falls, with the sense of
freedom and exhilaration that you experience on your graduation day.

18. 3. The Brand Cloud is a killer app for participation. It puts your audience
at the centre of the branding process
The Brand Cloud is also an opt-in for everyone else in the company. Front-line employees
(customer care people, retail and sales employees) in particular are encouraged to join.
You can also recruit a large panel of consumers to contribute to it and curate it, putting
your audience right at the centre of the branding process.
This way, you can get a feel for what sort of stuff they associate with your brand (when
they add elements to the cloud). You can also see which elements among those which
your team have suggested they find most compelling.
The default view of the Brand Cloud aggregates everyone’s votes, regardless of who they
are. But you can toggle on & off votes from different groups of people (client/agencies,
brand team/others, granular demographic segments of your audience, or even down to an
individual).
You can also invite experts, magazine editors, bloggers, some of your front-line employees
(or even all of them).
4. The Brand Cloud helps your brand evolve organically with culture
The Brand Cloud is a constant stream of references that bubble up or down, based on
what’s resonating with a whole bunch of people right now. 200 people’s cultural antenna
(or even 2,000) are always better than 2.
The recent stream of new elements is always what’s resonating with culture right now, vs
stuff that might have had some resonance 1-2 years ago but don’t feel as powerful now.
We recommend that you tidy your brand cloud every 3 months: keep only the best items
and reset the votes.

19. 5. Your Brand Cloud is fully testable
How do you know that the Brand Cloud is taking your brand in the right direction?
It’s easy to test your audience’s reaction to the most salient elements of the Brand Cloud
because they’re already in an embodied, concrete form they can experience.
Which elements resonate most?
Every brilliant creative product has a testing ground. For Chris Rock, it’s his local
comedy club: when writing new material, his testing routine is to turn up unannounced at
local comedy clubs and say his WIP lines at people – most of which fall flat33 .
Brands need to have a local comedy club too. If your brand has an ambition to resonate
with culture, the baby step is to be able to be a good, respected curator of culture. Your
brand should have something like a blog, a newsletter or a dashboard widget that people
will choose to follow because they find stuff on there that interests them or that they find
compelling.
You can put different elements of the Brand Cloud to the test, or produce something
extremely cheap inspired by some elements.
We should think about these as testing grounds, not channels. They don’t serve any
communication purpose. They may not even be branded. Their only purpose is to give
you a short feedback loop.
The elements that ‘trend’ get bigger on the Brand Cloud.
Which elements feel most distinctively like your brand?
You can test whether the elements in your brand feel more like your brand than any other
one:
For each element, ask a panel from your audience to show you which brand cloud they’d
put it in: Nike, Adidas, Asics, all of them? Just Nike?

20. Part conclusion
• The Brand Cloud allows you to give your brand its own ‘emotional signature’, on top of a
brand idea and visual identity.
• The Brand Cloud means the end of the static brand book. It helps your brand ride cultural
winds, rather than fearing them.
• It helps your organisation know their brand intuitively, rather than through a list of
adjectives and codified principles.
• It puts your audience right at the centre of the process of creating your brand.
• It’s entirely concrete and testable.
How do you use the Brand Cloud to communicate your brand, and answer any product
communication brief?

21. IV. THE RAINFALL MODEL OF COMMUNICATION
1. The Rainfall model of communication lets you communicate your
brand’s essence directly, rather than through its description
The traditional info transmission model communicates your brand though compressed
summary terms (brand idea, attributes, adjectives). This can make sense to help your
brand compete as product. For example it’s valuable for Volvo to own the ‘safety’ decision
shortcut. But when it comes to competing as culture, this comms model is a rather blunt
tool.
The knowledge of your brand that it gives people is superficial: a bit like trying to get
across a great movie like Amelie by repeating that it’s charming, optimistic and very
French. And this adjectives and attributes often have little to do with why the brand might
resonate with people: most of MINI buyers don’t buy the car because it’s ‘energetic’,
‘cheeky’ or ‘inventive’.
The Rainfall model of communication bypasses this intermediary step of translating the
brand essence in clear reductive terms.
Instead, it takes the things that the Brand Cloud holds, and makes them directly
present to people.
For example if the myth that ‘opportunities come to those who train the hardest’ is part of
the Nike Brand Cloud, Nike should play it out in the real world (as they do with ‘The
Chance 34’). Making this myth present to people means making it more real.
If the concept of ‘the eye of the tiger’ is part of the Nike brand cloud, Nike should use this
as an executional element in one of their comms (as they recently did in the Rooney
Returns TV ad 35 ). Making this element present to people means making them feel it
viscerally: not just transmitting information or creating associations.
None of these are an illustration of Nike’s brand idea or positioning adjectives, but they all
‘feel’ Nike. The Rainfall model of communication works by making people viscerally
experience a lot of things that feel like your brand.

22. 2. The Rainfall model communicates your brand as a feel that transpires
in everything you do
But getting people to experience elements from the Brand Cloud isn’t what drives the
communication agenda.
Instead, Brand Cloud elements are what give a distinctive feel to everything the
organisation wants to communicate.
Thinking of your brand essence as an intuitive feel (captured in concrete references)
means that the natural way to communicate your brand isn’t as a message, but as a feel
that runs through everything that you do.
This feel and concrete references guide everything from sponsorship decisions, to media
behaviour, to user experience design. It’s communicated through a lot of small touches (I’ll
illustrate in part V how this ‘feel’ will transpire in comms).
It means that you don’t need to distinguish between ‘brand comms’ and ‘product comms’
any more. Apple haven’t done a brand ad in the UK since 1997, but everything they do
‘feels’ distinctively Apple.

23. 3. The Rainfall model lets you communicate your brand through
emergence, rather than compression and consistency
The Rainfall model of communication gets your audience to know your brand in a
completely different way.
I mentioned earlier that there are two types of ‘knowing’. They are indeed so different that
a lot of other languages (like German or French) have different words for each36 .
- ‘Wissen’ (or ‘savoir’) is knowing something in the way that you know a list of ingredients
or a math formula. It’s knowing through a reductive summary description.
- ‘Kennen’ (or ‘connaître’) is knowing in the sense of having a feel for something or
someone. It’s knowing by being exposed to a lot of different aspects, in all their
particularities and analogue details, and seeing patterns emerge.
Kennen is the type of knowledge that we have of a person or of things that are too
complex and nuanced to be summarised in descriptive terms. I might not be able to
summarise Nick Kendall, but I have a feel for who he is. I don’t know him through objective
facts (like his height or place of birth) but I intuitively know what value he is to me.
The Brand Rainfall model of communication gets people to know your brand in the
‘kennen’ way: by getting them exposed to many different aspects, letting them
connect the dots themselves to see patterns emerge. The more they’ve seen different
facets, the more they have a feel for your brand.
My knowledge of Nick is also personal to me: someone else might allow other aspects of
him to come forward. In the same way, the Rainfall model of communication gives people
a personal knowledge of your brand; each individual member of your audience can pay
more attention to the elements that resonate most with them personally and attach
personal meaning to them37.
The Rainfall model of communication makes people familiar with your brand in the sense
that it’s something that’s part of their world, something they’ve lived with, something to
which they’ve attached personal meaning. It’s not, however, familiar in the sense of being
something that’s routine, repetitive and has nothing new to reveal38 .

24. 4. Measuring comms effectiveness in the Rainfall model
Communicating a single clear brand idea or attribute had the advantage of making
measurement feel easy (deceptively so). But if you let people connect the dots
themselves, how do you know that you’re communicating successfully?
It boils down to two questions:
- are you picking the right elements to communicate, that will most effectively drive the
bottom line?
- are you communicating them well?
Let me start with the second one:
How do you know that you’re communicating your brand well?
You can ask an online panel representative of your target audience to show you what your
brand cloud looks like from their point of view.
Concretely, you provide the panel with a lot of elements (coming from both your brand
cloud and that of your competitors) asking them which ones intuitively feel like your brand
and have a family resemblance with it.
If the elements you’ve used in communication (or at any touch point) find themselves in
their version of your brand cloud, then your communication is probably working.
You can see how people’s answers are different depending on whether they’ve been
exposed to specific comms or touch points. For example you can show them pictures of
your comms/touch points, and asking them whether they recognise seeing them before 39.
This way, you get a clear picture of which of your comms efforts have been the most
successful at shifting people’s perceptions of your brand.

25. How do you know that what you’re communicating drives the bottom line?
If a lot of your sales happen online, you can make a link between which elements are
present in someone’s view of your brand cloud and how much they’ve spent on you by
linking Google Analytics to the Brand Cloud app.
But if your sales aren’t trackable in this way and you want a quicker read on your comms
effectiveness, you can use other measures of brand health as lead indicators – like brand
warmth or top of mind brand awareness.
For example, respondents can move a slider representing your brand on spectrum from
warm red to cold blue – a methodology that has been used successfully before40. You can
compare your brand’s scores with the category’s average.
For each respondent, you can correlate these results with which elements were present in
their view of your brand cloud.
By aggregating data from the whole panel, you can have a read on which brand cloud
elements have a bigger impact on brand warmth, preference and eventually sales.
As always with effectiveness measurement, a number of factors need to be carefully
controlled using regression analysis (e.g. proportion of existing customers in the
sample)4142 .

26. Part conclusion
• The Rainfall model of communication bypasses the brand description; it works by making
people viscerally experience a lot of things that feel like your brand.
• It communicates your brand’s essence as a feel that runs through everything you do,
rather than as a message.
• People intuitively see patterns emerge from the different facets of your brand. This lets
each individual person read your brand in the way that resonates most with them
personally.
How does this change the creative process?

27. V. FOCUSING CREATIVITY ON THE VISCERAL ANALOGUE DETAILS
We spend most of our time discussing and judging creative ideas from abstract
descriptions, scamps or storyboards.
The consequence is that we default to a very particular type of creativity: single
reductionist creative ideas that can be judged from their description.
But the things that people are experiencing and responding to in brand communications
are the very things that we can’t judge from their description. Paul Feldwick argued that
creative work doesn’t have to be based on a very obviously original idea. The other
creative products generally aren’t.
We need a creative process that’s centred around these visceral analogue details.
#1. Creative ‘clouds’, not ‘ideas’
The first step is to think about the creative output as a cloud: its about curating a very
particular feel through an incredible coming together of a myriad of analogue details
A brief for a specific task won’t be about coming up with a clever, original idea to illustrate
a message. It’ll be about showing something or saying something in a way that ‘feels’
powerfully and distinctly like your brand essence.
#2. Use the Brand Cloud as creative fodder
The particular comms challenge you’re facing brings the brand cloud into focus: once you
know what the problem is, you can look for inspiration in the cloud and pick elements that
are most relevant to the task.
What inevitably happens in the traditional creative process is that random elements are
brought in that don’t feel like the brand. Starting from your brand cloud helps you
answer any brief in a way that feels distinctly like your brand.
For example if Natwest wants to communicate around great saving rates or acquisition
incentives, they could look into their own brand cloud for inspiration:
- Gavin & Stacey could be used as a sitcom reference

28. - Natwest could talk about its products through real events and real people, for example
referring to things that were recently in the news.
If Natwest wants to communicate around their helpful service, it helps to know what sort of
‘helpful’ they identify with specifically. They could compare their staff to the broom army of
Clapham for example.
And obviously this big set of references informs the tonality and feel of everything Natwest
does. The Brand Cloud should make the PPM an ongoing discussion.
As you bring a lot of elements in, some will feel like they belong together in one area and
others in other areas. You might put these up on different walls, discuss which elements
belong or don’t, what else could be brought in, refine them, mix them up with something
different .. These creative clouds are machines for creative accidents to happen.
#3. Prototype everything
We need to judge this sort of work in its concrete, material form, not in the abstract.
(Imagine presenting iPod Silhouette as a concept or a storyboard: it’d be hard to see
what’s compelling about it).
No other creative industry judges ideas in the abstract to the same extent that we
do. At Apple a design idea is only seen by four or five people before it’s prototyped 43. The
movie industry too has moved on from the elevator pitch. Pixar doesn’t start from a story,
but from a rough setting and characters (e.g. fish under the sea) and then collectively add
as many cool moments as they can. It’s only after several cycles of prototyping and
reviews that story elements start to emerge44.
Our prototypes can be anything. If you make TV ads, prototyping can be shooting very
cheaply on the fly during creative exploration, with whatever equipment and people you
have to hand. If you make products, you can get a simple 3D printer for under £2,000.
Production and prototyping costs have decreased incredibly fast in the last five years. In
contrast the cost of ten marketing executives sitting in a room trying to make decisions
without the right elements is still as high.
And instead of making one big bet on one idea judged in its abstract form, you can make a
series of smaller bets. That’s how TV executives at Channel 4 make investment decisions:
they seed 50 projects, then invest a bit more in 10, before commissioning pilot episodes
for 2 of them45 .

29. #4. Adopt a truly iterative process
We need an iterative process, rather than a try-again-and-again process.
When the creativity you’re looking for is about finding an original way to illustrate a
message, you can do that by trying again and again until one really good idea comes to
you.
But the kind of creativity that centres on the analogue elements requires that you take the
output of the previous iteration as a starting point for the next. Because this sort of creative
work is never good in its first showing, you need to improve it bits by bits. Pixar calls their
creative process “going from suck to non-suck”46.
Another reason why we need to iterate together with our clients is what Stephen Johnson
calls “the adjacent possible”47: only some ideas are possible at a given time from your
current way of seeing things. To go further you need to ‘evolve your consciousness’.
Seeing things in concrete, material form helps you think more clearly about the problem
and better articulate what it requires.
#5. Iterate the strategy together with the creative exploration
If the visceral, analogue elements are the most important, then we can’t know which
creative strategy is the best until we see the work that comes out of it. We need a way for
strategy to happen mostly during creative exploration, not upstream of it.
We may start with a temporary formulation of the creative strategy, expressing it the
best you can. The creative strategy document is versioned. In its first iterations it’ll be
broad and abstract, but more concrete and specific as we prototype and iterate.
The planner’s job is to capture the conversation after each iteration, and revise the
creative strategy document to include lessons learnt so far. It’s a process of homing in.
Strategy is discussed through the details, not abstractly. Instead of revising a single
descriptive formulation of what is required, it points to very specific elements from previous
iterations that capture important learnings: “not like this, more like this”.

30. CONCLUSION
I believe that any brand can have the power of Batman if we approach it as cloud rather
than clock.
This means learning to work with elements that are too textured, emotionally nuanced or
puzzling to be pinned down in general descriptive terms.
The Brand Cloud helps us do this.
It lets us create a brand essence intuitively and pre-verbally, by bringing elements in and
moving them around.
It puts the all-important visceral details at the centre of everything we do. It gives us the
concrete vocabulary to talk about them and make them strategy.
It helps our brands evolve organically with culture.
It gives each brand its own emotional signature. You can communicate your brand through
that very particular feel, rather than as a message.
The Brand Cloud is the brand book for the hyperlinked, networked, fast-changing age we
live in. It’s the right brain counterpart of the single reductive brand idea.
Word count: 6,974

31. 38 Iain McGilchrist – The Master and his Emissary (2011)
1 39 Heath 2004 Measuring the hidden power of emotive advertising
TGI UK 1984 - 2008
2 40 ‘The 21st Century Consumer’ – W Gordon, 2000 MRS Conference
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41 Peter Field and Les Binet – Marketing in the era of accountability, 2007
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5 Karl Popper – the logic of scientific discovery interview-Apples-design-genius-is-British-to-the-core.html
6 44 Peter Sims – Little Bets (2011)
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46 http://www.fastcompany.com/1742431/pixar-s-motto-going-from-suck-to-nonsuck
9 Shigematsu (1981), p3
47 Stephen Johnson – Where good ideas come from (2011)
10 Paul Watzlawick – Pragmatics of human communication (1967)
11 Paul Feldwick – Exploding the message myth (Thinkbox talk)
12 Robert Heath – The Hidden Power of Advertising (Admap 2007)
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14 David Penn – Brain Science, That's Interesting, But What Do I Do About It? (2005)
15 Douglas B. Holt, Cultural Strategy, 2009
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full-of-awesome-read-it-now.html
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how_to_make_good_decisions_les.html
19 http://www.thebiglunch.com/
20 tinyurl.com/chnect3
21 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_OBlgSz8sSM
22 tinyurl.com/articleonbookcrossing
23 http://www.gurteen.com/gurteen/gurteen.nsf/id/X0022B066/
24 lostsocknyc.tumblr.com
25 http://www.cult-branding.com/southwest-airlines-cult-brand-profile/
26 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clone_town
27 Iain McGilchrist – The Master and his Emissary (2011)
28 Iain McGilchrist – The Master and his Emissary (2011)
29 Iain McGilchrist – The Master and his Emissary (2011)
30 Adolphs, R. – Hemispheric perception and from facial expressions (2001)
31 Deglin and Kinsbourne (1996)
32 Warrington, E. K. – Categories of knowledge (1987)
33 Peter Sims – Little Bets (2011)
34 http://www.nike.com/en_gb/football/the-chance
35 http://wklondon.typepad.com/welcome_to_optimism/2012/06/wayne-rooney-returns-not-so-old-blue-eyes-is-back.html
36 Iain McGilchrist – The Master and his Emissary (2011)
37 Iain McGilchrist – The Master and his Emissary (2011)