Let’s say you have an incredible product and good distribution but you don’t have the emotion the brand needs to communicate. Then, I have no idea what you will communicate. I hope you won’t talk about the good quality only, because that’s boring and unoriginal. Boredom is a brand killer. You have to tell people the reasons why they should pick you and not some other brand.

Without emotions, products are lifeless entities lacking a soul and the way to give brand its life is through communication.

Communication is not necessarily the advertisement. No, the most immediate communication is the brand’s verbal identity – the name and the slogan and its visual identity – the logo.

What’s your relevant emotion that you want to convey to people?

When we were working on a brand of olive oil from Istria, the market was saturated with brands from Italy and Croatia. They were boring with their insistence that they were the real extra virgin olive oil from this or that enchanting villa as opposed to the other brand of olive oil with the less enchanting villa.

When brands compete on the same basis it’s like little kids telling each other who’s smarter. It’s a pointless and boring fight, where everyone’s a loser.

We identified a strong niche in the marketplace – the gourmet niche, and this was a prerogative in all our communication. We named the brand San Gurmano because of its three possible meanings: it sounds like an imaginary place in Istria – the Italian overtone because of the Istrian heritage, “san” in Croatian meaning dream – “gourmet’s dream”, as well as San meaning Saint in Italian.

The visual identity shows the halo above the olive – playing with the saint like connotations of the name. The slogan “Every gourmet’s dream” plays on one of the possible meanings of the name.

Another brand of olive oil we have worked on comes from the Dalmatian island of Dugi otok and we named it Nai3.3. The owners strive to have the best olive oil in the world. The medals they have won are the proof that their work was not in vain. Nature and man work together towards perfection.

The story of this olive oil goes as follows: Dugi otok is an island of enchanting beauty with century old olive groves. We work with nature to create a miracle. When it snows on the island, the olive harvests are particularly abundant. Snow is rare on this island, averaging 3.3 days. The name Nai means snow in Old-Dalmatic, the extinct language from these parts of the Adriatic. Nai 3.3 symbolises our effort as olive growers to create the top olive oil including the years when it doesn’t snow.

The slogan emphasises the aim to do everything in your power to create perfection; “Because you can’t count on snow.”

Targeted communication creates value in the minds of the consumers and the marketplace, without it you might as well give your money to the competition.