Sight Lines

I’m just on my way back from a flash tour of the capital city. I actually think I could now direct a person around Paddington Station blind folded – but that’s another story.   

However it does bring me nicely to the subject if this months blog, which is about ways of ‘seeing’.

Perhaps on the outset, this is an unusual topic, however, everyone has some sort of site – fact. Literal or metaphorical, if affects the way we look at the world because we never just look at one thing, and we are constantly assessing the relationship between things and ourselves. Sight impacts on the way we dress, shop, stop to gaze at a window, a poster or a news story, and while it is all about site, there are when you think about it, fundamentally hundreds of ways of ‘seeing’. 

Those of you who have heard Peter Cooper from Artysmith2 speak on a number of occasions will know he is fond of telling you that consumers don’t read. In a sense he is right. Seeing comes before words, as children we learn to recognize and point before we can lucidly communicate with sounds that form words. But just how much of our site, our seeing, our interpretation of that vision into words, with which we explain what we have seen to others, is a self formed perception, and how much of it has been seen and described to us through the written or spoken word of others? 

By way of example, I stood in a room yesterday with Mary Portas. Having recently been impressed by the fluidity of her writing and depth of description in one of her many books about windows, I was slightly in awe of seeing, let alone speaking to her. First impressions? She is probably shorter than me and looks about a size 6 or smaller. Amazingly well dressed, fantastic shoes, and a beautifully styled mass of auburn hair. She gave everyone that look which said – don’t speak to me – and I didn’t, neither as far as I could see did anyone else. What still bugs me today as I’m on the way home is that relationship between what I saw of Mary Portas yesterday and what I know through news clippings and books is not aligned. It’s funny because while photos and images have always proved the medium through which to communicate a direct testimony about how a person or item was at that given time, here suddenly the expressive power of the written word had already defused the clarity of what I was seeing. 

Without rambling on two much, the point I’m trying to get at, is that there is, it seems, a gap between what we see and what we know. While red might well say sale to you, it might say danger to me – perhaps that explains why HMV have pink sale signs... 

With this in mind, this morning, I tried Peter’s line on a new shop that I’ve just started working with. “Consumers don’t read”, I told her, “it’s a fact”. 

Apart from looking quite sympathetically at me and asking if I needed a cup of tea, she promptly informed me that she never trusts other people’s colours or signs, and takes her glasses everywhere so she can read about the product she wants to buy before she buys it. Regardless of whether that’s a sale item, a regular purchase, a food item or a gift. “I read everything” she said. 

“You can never be too careful”. This particular example might constitute a one in a million shopper, but at a time when we are all looking to sell more product to both new and existing customers, in a consumer market that is so unpredictable it’s difficult to know who is buying what from where, I think its perhaps a point that shouldn’t be over looked. 

So as I sit here and flick through this months creative review, marveling at some of today’s best creative talent, I know I’m back to the whole issue about seeing. We never stop absorbing images; our eyes are continually active, seeking to define one thing against another. If sight establishes our place as shops and consumers, enables retailers to define their target consumer market and moreover it establishes our place as individuals in the world, why do we seek to reaffirm this and often reorder this in words if the visual image really is mightier than that scribbled in ink? 

For me I guess that the jury is still out. I know that we are programme to see certain messages in different colours and define our characters by certain styles and images. Yet I can’t help thinking that as a consumer I need both. Enticing me with amazing visuals is one thing, actually getting me to buy one product over another, or buy anything at all, well I see that as a multi-sensual activity, for which words and verbal communication are perhaps the most important.

Comments

[Tony Luke]

oh no jo

i've read your blog and now have a better understanding on your view on just images.

however this is a very debatable subject as you know. it is apparent that you and peter are very fond perhaps of using images with minimal wording.

my first thoughts when i seen the first banner (putting my self in the shoes of someone that perhaps hasn't heard of CRS)
Who is CRS ? what is it ? which you, and me too may think this is a good thing, people will come in and ask right?

however consider this! if you don't have more wording a "snap shot" a clearer quicker idea of what CRS is about why are they going to think its relevant to them, and instead of stopping and asking..... its to late they are distracted and on the stool next door.

..and i agree to have one simple one to get the name out there and as a clear identification of your presents another thing to consider if a passer buy is walking past sees your signs and sub-consciously reads some of the information "are you passionate about retail","there's more to retail than you think" ,"CRS " regardless whether they enter the stool or not that information with the brand is in there head.

WOW after thinking about this long and hard i've come to the conclusion that you've got to get the balance right between branding and information and one simply can not work with out the other.

I'm not in anyway nagging or suggesting you should change your banners, my first email was just my views on instinct alone. and this email is after reading your blog its really got me thinking on the way i buy and the way my customers buy?

its crazy really its stopped me my tracks and got me to think, well done you!


Best regards

Tony