Marketing 101 … for preschoolers

Most of our great conversations happen during car rides. I think for this reason alone, we should buy an RV and travel the country ;).

The other day, as we were driving, N noticed a sign on a store that had a picture of 3 raindrops. He asked us about it, but it took a lot of explaining on his part to get us to understand what he was talking about, since us grown-ups have lost the superpower of Looking Up and Noticing New Things.

When I finally found the sign he was looking at, I explained that it was that company’s logo. Of course this, as with everything, only led to more questions. We ended up having a great mini-marketing crash course that might be roughly summarized with the following points. (You’ll have to imagine “whys?” inserted after every. single. statement to get the full impact of the moment.)

• Companies choose a logo to represent their product line. (Why?)

• Our brains are better at capturing images than remembering lots of words that might describe something, so when customers associate an image with a company, they’ll remember and think about them whenever they see that logo. Companies like it when people think about them, so they try to design really good logos.

• A good logo is a simple picture, usually. (Why?) That way it’s easier for them to print and for customers to remember after a quick glance.
  • We went on a short logo hunt as we drove through a few more blocks of storefronts.

• Some stores, like IKEA, don’t have a logo, (we went there later in the day and noticed this fact) but they have a particular color scheme and font type they always use, so the way the name is written is like a logo by itself.
  • We looked for more IKEA labels throughout the store and pointed out the consistent color scheme and font. This led to a continuation of a conversation about fonts ~ he had noticed before that some letters looked different (g’s especially) in different books, so we explained that people design a certain way of writing letters that looks nice, and people use different types depending on the setting (books, billboards, magazines, etc.).

• Why do you think companies choose the logos they use?
  • lots of little conversations here. One notable one was about the National Geographic logo. N thought it was a blank rectangle because it looked like a checkbox that needed a check mark. That made sense … maybe it subconsciously makes us want to read the magazine so that we can check it off when we’re done?

I’m thankful for these spontaneous conversations that come up often during our days. So often I don’t notice the things my boys see or wonder about things the way they do, with no history of preconceived notions. It’s quite a privilege to be able, as parents or caregivers, to see the world again through the eyes of a child.