The Big Vent

I've been banging my head against a wall for months now, literally. I mean I have a headache and my stress hacky sack is starting to leak all over my desk. I can't get this frustration out about how some churches seem to communicate so clearly and flawlessly (and in a fun, cool way) and I feel like we are at an impasse of uncoolness.

On the surface I would identify it as better design or more money but that's not it. They have something that seems like a constantly moving target- a unified message. Somehow these guys have figured out how to reduce the clutter and increase the impact.

I mean this is the most obvious communication principle in existence, concentrate the message to increase the impact. It's just like a water hose, turn the nozzle to jet and a single, concentrated stream of water comes and moves stuff, it has impact. Turn it to mist and millions of tiny droplets come out that have no impact on anything and barely get your feet wet.

I don't covet my neighbors car, house, wife, donkey, anything like that, I covet his unified message.

I'm sitting here swooning over the idea of designing for a concentrated brand message. It would be so easy. I would know exactly what it was about, who it was for, oh it would be so swell.

There's more to come on this topic. I want to explore it and I beg for input. It's a given that my organization isn't going to start doing fewer things so I want to discover how to continually unify those things into a cohesive message that makes sense.

P.S.- As I've mentioned in my other posts we are in the middle of a brand audit with Aspire!One. Our hope is the product of that audit will illuminate how to do some of this. Despite my feelings of no unified messaging during their focus groups they discovered that people actually know exactly who we are and can identify with all of our key messages. Maybe our frustration is just the byproduct of the filtering we do everyday.