There’s quite a bit of grumblng and back-and-forth-ing about memory these days. Columbia assistant professor Betsey Sparrow’s study that Google is significantly altering human memory kicked off a rancorous debate about what the cognitive consequences of all this digit-ality.
 
So, is Google ruining your memory? No more or less so than your GPS is ruining your ability to find your way around using a map. In other words - communication and information technologies are always changing, tweaking and morphing existing skills into new forms. Sometimes, they’re morphing them totally out of existence. The availability of Google changes our need to remember facts. Little facts - like the address and phone number of the local pizza joint. Big facts - like what year the Civil War ended.
 
Sparrow’s other findings are a bit ho-hum as well. For example, I learned from the NYT best-seller Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything, by Joshua Foer (a good read, by the way), that our memories are designed to work visually and spatially. Think about it…you’re struggling to recall the name of a song and all you can do is stammer through a description of where you were and who you were with when you last heard it. In Sparrow’s study, people could recall where they placed a fact (which computer folder it’s in) better than they remembered the fact itself. All that shows is that when we know we can retrieve a bit of data, our minds tend to let that info go and apply the free cycles to something more pressing, like trying to find our way around without a damned GPS.

What is the most enduring logo?  Not the Apple or IBM’s iconic logos, but the skull and crossbones.  According to the New York Times it’s the “Jolly Roger” skull and crossbones that first appeared in the early 1700s and was rapidly adopted by most pirates.

“The key to its success was clarity of meaning, which is an essential element in every effective branding project, and any other form of communication design. Just as Nike’s ‘swoosh’ logo makes us think of speed and the horse-drawn carriage in Hermès’s identity screams posh, the sight of a skull and crossbones on a ship’s flag signaled one thing to 18th-century sailors like those on the Poole or the merchant vessels they were protecting: terror.”

The pirates’ strong brand caused the ships that they targeted to surrender out of fear, so the pirates used less ammunition, incurred less casualties and could pillage their victims more quickly, then they could presumably attack that many more ships, increasing their profit margin.

Evidently the Jolly Roger was also a very adaptable logo like the Nickelodeon and Google logos are today.

“A black flag signified that the pirates would ‘give quarter’ or spare the lives of those who surrendered, and a red one signaled ‘no quarter.’”

“Wynn’s hourglass declared that time was running out for his victims. Other pirates added macabre motifs such as skeletons, daggers or spears. One of Black Bart’s flags sported two skulls, each representing an enemy against whom he was plotting vengeance.”

Alas the power of the Jolly Roger logo waned quickly. By the mid 1700s the skull and crossbones had moved from being a icon of lawlessness to being adopted as a British regimental emblem and later the symbol for poison.  It’s still a icon of the rebel and outlaw, but more cheeky than fearsome as it can be found on biker’s jackets and infant’s onesies.

Today is the 50th anniversary of humans entering space. This was a huge accomplishment that opened opportunities for new research, which led to many of the discoveries of the last half-century. It yielded deep national pride for the Soviets and an imminent sense of the need to capture the moon for the Americans.

This is an analogy for brands: where’s the new frontier to cross? Who’s leading the way? Who needs to catch up? What are the new discoveries? What’s the competition doing?

And now fast forward to today: the US space program is winding down and humans may for the first time in history be moving slower than in previous generations (walking to horses to trains to cars to air flight to space to ???).

So what do brands need to do to keep the momentum moving? Was your brand’s last campaign like a sustained rocket ship? Or did it fizzle out?

Shout out to Google for the cool landing page today and NPR’s article!