Indescribable . . . Indestructible! Nothing Can Stop It!
—Tag line for 1958 screenplay The Blob
A well-composed, easily repeated Icon is kind of like the manifestation of the “Blob” from the eponymous pulp horror movie of the late 1950s. Each time the Blob consumes something, it grows bigger and more powerful. With Blocks, repetition makes your Icon grow bigger, more dominant, and more influential.
Blocks Repeated Exhaustively Everywhere Equals Demand = BREEED
BREEED, or the Snowball Effect, is my formula that allows us to employ Blocks and use them right away. You can literally BREEED an Icon using Blocks. Any person in any field can BREEED anything they are creating, sharing, or doing right now to generate attention and demand.
Deliberately repeat your Block everywhere, all the time, and your Block will become an Icon. If you create a Block to represent you, your product, service, idea, message, or art, and you repeat it everywhere, it will BREEED instant interest and engagement.
Any Block aggressively repeated will imprint upon the mind of any intended audience. It will BREEED an Icon.
Like a snowball rolling down a mountain, the more your Block is repeated, the bigger, faster, and more powerful it gets. This is equally true for a ten-minute speech as it is for a ten-year promotional or sales generation campaign.
Remember, repetition is counterintuitive—it works even if it feels weird and uncomfortable to be unduly repetitive. Yet, it’s always best to repeat the exact same (or a very similar) phrase or image. There will be times when it may sound weird or strange to repeat yourself. Do it anyway. If you want to be subtle because you feel that exact repetition would be too contrived, find different ways of saying the same thing to Block your concept—think of it as your signal.
Roadtec is a small company in Chattanooga, Tennessee, that invented a very big machine. Just a few years ago, the company was only selling one or two units per year and was barely scraping by, despite the genius of its innovation. Its machine is a rock crusher and gravel road forger, all in one. You can roll this machine over a rocky, impassable old logging road, and it will expertly turn it into a smooth, drivable road as it goes by grinding the rocks in its path into crunchy, dusty gravel. It can be used by timber and mining companies to make almost any sketchy pass crossable.
In just a few short years, however, Roadtec has grown from a small family-run company and managed to expand its product line and exponentially increase demand for its crushers and pavers. Its growth is in large part due to the work of PowerPR, a rare PR firm that has used repetitive Block headlines for decades. This is the Block they used for Roadtec:
GRAVEL ROAD REPAIR: DON’T BURY THE PROBLEM, CRUSH IT
This phrase may mean nothing to you, but to a person that is responsible for drivable roads in the forest service or in a logging company it is highly emotional. PowerPR takes one base article and repeats it everywhere across a range of publications that focus on a single demographic.
A PowerPR article consists of a single Block statement followed by an information-rich article, and they then run that single article in repetitively targeted magazines for three to six months at a time. The header for the articles they create—the Block—always matches the client’s offering to the primary emotional concerns of the client’s intended customer. They will put one article in a specific category of industry-related magazines—at the same time, with the same header. The intended audience is then more likely to see the same article and header multiple times across multiple locations. This repetition carries power, and helped to BREEED Roadtec into a prosperous enterprise, where previously it had been invisible.
Even though a Block is remarkably enhanced by the receiver’s emotional connection to the Block, there are plenty of symbols without an emotional punch that over time have become Icon’d strictly on the basis of repetition. Eventually, any statement repeated enough, as Orwell proposed, emotional or not, will create a connection. In the Western world, names like Kleenex, Band-Aid, Xerox, and Coke have all been repeated so often that they have become synonymous with the products themselves.
Language experts have a term for this: “proprietary eponyms,” meaning words that once were proprietary brand names or trademarks that are now used generically (like FedEx in the last chapter). But how do you become eponymous? Repetition. There is a shortcut, though. The reason for using BREEED is to speed up the process and control the outcome in moments—creating an instantly perceivable, emotionally resonant Icon with deliberation.
A Block can gain traction with an audience in a nanosecond for the same reasons that it will still be recognized over two, five, or even ten thousand years later. Smaller individual Block representations snowball into a larger singular representation, becoming iconic.
It is common to think that something has to be old or famous—a symphony by Beethoven, or a mysterious monument like Stonehenge—to work its way into our collective consciousness. But the age of something and its level of fame have little to do with why we remember it.
The way you communicate your concept determines how others view you and your ideas. It determines whether you have credibility and whether you are chosen above others competing for the same attention.
True Iconists shape and sharpen their Blocks so that they not only cut through the clutter of mass distraction and personal dilution but lodge in the minds of their audience as quickly as possible. Deliberate repetition of a bold, simple Block does wonders to speed up what for a long time was considered a random, uncontrollable process.
Even the simplest images can become laden with complex information with repetition over time—think of the Golden Arches. Before you can even recall Mickey D’s name, you can probably list its most popular treats and practically smell and taste the last thing you ordered there. You can recall the jingle or visualize one of its commercials. The iconic symbol of the massive Golden Arches delivers. When you’re driving down the highway and you see that Icon, you don’t need to be told anything else. The entire menu is already flashing through your mind. The Icon represents much more than just the name; it’s the entire menu of the McDonald’s experience. The fact is, one simple thing can pack a wallop of information. This truth is transformatively powerful if you choose to employ it.
When you see a picture of a loved one, you associate that person’s face with a sea of events and emotions that you experienced together. Those memories and feelings come rushing in, in an instant, whether we want them to or not.
An Iconist will speak in simple Blocks, but also, when possible, in an unexpected way. Uniqueness is like candy for the mind. An unusual Block that represents your unique self will intrigue the recipient, demanding even more instant attention and comprehension. In circumstances where it might be inappropriate to repeat the same thing over and over, Block the sentiment—the emotional subtext—of your message instead, and repeat that sentiment as your Block.
BREEED doesn’t just help your audience to find your product or idea. It also helps you. The act of funneling specific communication into a continuously repeating, finite point is very stabilizing and enhances your own personal composure significantly. You will feel more positive in your own self-promotion and communication, whether it is written, spoken, musical, or visual. Being consistent and repetitive makes us feel more certain of the ground we are standing on because it is also our own communication to ourselves about what we have chosen to do and say, and powerfully reminds us why we have chosen to do it. This is the purpose and integrity in a company or person, and the anatomy of a personal style in an artist. So when we repeat it, we can feel that it will cut through, and we like the way it feels.