The Iconist: The Art and Science of Standing Out

by Jamie Mustard Narrated by Jamie Mustard

Overview

Why do we immediately recognize art by Van Gogh and Warhol?

What does Beethoven share with Rage Against the Machine and Madonna?

What makes us remember the words of Churchill and King (and Domino's Pizza, for that matter)?

With the rise of digital media and advertising, a constant barrage of information makes it nearly impossible to be seen and heard. In The Iconist, branding and design strategist Jamie Mustard shows you how individuals, organizations, and brands can break through the noise.

The secret to standing out lies in creating content that the desired audience will “lock” onto and remember with little effort-simple, bold ideas that can be immediately understood. The Iconist reveals a set of primal laws in human society that explain why some things stand out and endure in the mind, while others are rejected. Blending relevant examples from history and pop culture with cutting-edge psychology, Mustard explores why certain things stick and others fade from memory-and gives you an owner's manual to make any idea, product, or service stand out and be remembered. Forget relying on luck or trial-and-error: Mastering this process will enable you, no matter your field or endeavor, to confidently craft messages that resonate with your target audience through simple, fool-proof methods.

For businesses, marketers, teachers, advertisers, artists-from thought leaders to anyone trying to write a resume-The Iconist shows how to grab and hold attention. Fair warning, though: This book will change the way you view your audience . . . and the entire world around you.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

"Human attention span is today and forever’s scarcity. Jamie Mustard saw the trend early. He studied and lived it deeply. He cracked the code. The Iconist is a must-read for all entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, CEOs and shapers of opinion."

—Rich Karlgaard, publisher for Forbes 

"The Iconist is a standout.”

—William C. Taylor, cofounder, FAST COMPANY

“A roadmap for each of us to be heard in the noise of our new digital lives.”

—Daniel H. Pink, New York Times bestselling author of Drive

“A powerful book filled with profound and pragmatic insights. Mustard single-handedly shatters the mystique surrounding successful branding and disruption. A must-read for those who aspire to be on the vanguard of change.”

—Rebecca D. Costa, author, The Watchman’s Rattle

“The tricky thing about simplicity is it’s hard. Making anything seem easy takes a lot of careful work. Connecting dots across music, cultures, genres, disciplines, decades and centuries, Jamie Mustard shows off the strength of simplicity—how it inspires, endures and can be applied every day.”

—Ryan White, author, Springsteen: Album by Album and Jimmy Buffett: A Good Life All the Way

“There is no one better at getting the world to understand what you have to offer.”

—Holt McCallany, star of Mind Hunters on Netflix 

“Jamie can make anyone STAND OUT in a transparent and iconic way.”

—Bibi McGill, lead guitarist and musical director for Beyonce 

"Jamie is a revolutionary thinker and a rare human being."

—Dr. Donna Schuurman, executive director emeritus, The Dougy Center for Grieving Children and Families

"My work needed power and clarity that would get noticed - Jamie’s understanding of Icons and Blocks changed everything."

—Jeanie Coyle, former SVP of HR at Bank of America and American Express, founder of Worktelligence, and author of Make Talent Your Business 

"Jamie is truly an Iconist. He can teach anyone to stand out and grab attention no matter what they do."

—Kevin Carroll, bestselling author, speaker, and social Change Agent 

“Jamie’s codification of Icons explain why all art works and generates interest, or fails to hit the mark.”

—Melanie Pullen, globally influential artist and photographer for The Getty Museum

 

"The Iconist, compels questions of great urgency and relevance to the health of the social matrix that gives our lives meaning and purpose. It is excellent."

—Dr. Shauna H Springer, PhD, world's leading authority on PTSD and Moral Injuries

"In a marketplace that's more crowded, noisy, and confusing than ever, it's harder than ever to stand out and be noticed—whether you're designing a product, selling a service, or marketing yourself. Jamie Mustard offers a remarkable set of provocative ideas and a collection of engaging case studies to meet the defining business challenge of our time. The Iconist is itself a standout, as useful as it is original." 

—William C. Taylor, cofounder and founding editor of Fast Company and author of Simply Brilliant

Product Details

BN ID:	2940177449302
Publisher:	Brilliance Audio
Publication date:	10/01/2019
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

WHAT IS AN ICONIST?

Boldness be my friend!

— William Shakespeare, Cymbeline

Imagine you are in a museum of ancient art filled with thousands upon thousands of old and beautiful paintings and you stop to look at one. Many of us think the reason we stop at one particular painting is random, but it is not.

The same is true for music. Say one evening you decide to walk down the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles and pass by every venue on the club-packed entertainment street in the heart of the city, between Crescent Heights and Doheny — the gateway between West Hollywood and Beverly Hills. If one band's sound made you stop, stay, and listen, there would actually be a reason — and it would have nothing to do with your musical taste.

You would almost certainly be unaware of the reason other than you "liked it" or it was "your kind of music," but the real reason is much more primal. And once you understand the laws of attention and attraction, you will not only see these laws working everywhere and all around you but can use them to get attention for anything you choose.

Despite the intense distractions of the modern world, certain ideas, art, advertising, scientific theory, and messages do stand out, while others are ignored. The reason we pay attention to certain people and ignore others isn't necessarily because their work is fresher, more beautiful, or more innovative than someone else's (though it may be).

The real reason is rooted in primal laws of human perception — how people take in and filter information. An "Iconist" is someone who has mastered these laws, and gets others to pay attention. He or she knows how people prefer to take in information ... and what makes them filter it out.

Iconists use massively oversized, bold images or phrases that can be instantly understood. They do this by counterintuitively using repetition to grab attention. While we're often taught that repeating ourselves is not effective, it actually allows Iconists to generate increased interest and support for their message. It sounds simple. But few of us know how to use these iconic techniques, even though they can help us earn more of the things we want in nearly every area of our lives.

The Iconist centers around the concept of Icons and Blocks, which are similar ideas, but with a key distinction. A Block is a succinct, clear, bold, monolithic image, statement, melody, physical structure, or piece of design. Throughout the book we'll explore examples, but what makes a Block a Block is that it can be immediately understood by any onlooker. By definition, a Block has not yet taken hold in the mind of the viewer or audience. It is an Icon in the making or an Icon about to happen. With consistent, deliberate, and upfront repetition, the Block grabs attention, stands out, and imprints itself in the minds of those you are trying to reach. In fact, if done correctly, it gives your intended audience no choice. That is when your Block becomes an Icon — once it has been accepted and imprinted in the minds of others.

When I use the capitalized word Icon in this book, I am refer- ring to an Icon that has been made with a Block. Since these two terms are so closely related, it is not uncommon for my clients to refer to using Blocks as "Iconing" something, or to say, "I Icon'd it!"

Blocks, as tools to create Icons, work in all mediums and can be used with anything from art, music, design, or architecture to business and product design. In other words you can make anything stand out in any medium once you understand these timeless rules of human perception.

We often have no idea how simple a concept needs to be to stand out and how much repetition it takes for a message to demand attention, sink in, and then endure with our desired audience. People tend to think that once we have said it once, the message has been received and there's no need to draw more attention to it. This is because most people are, for reasons we will explore, uncomfortable truly standing out and being consistently obvious. It can be a catch-22 — we want to stand out and get others to champion our work, but it can also be awkward to have all eyes upon us. A true Iconist pushes past this discomfort. Distilling a message down to its most simplistic, elementary ideal can be difficult because people are complicated. Our thoughts and emotions combine in ways that make it hard to break down what we want to say into a few obvious points. Yet human beings can best digest information when it's presented in a few simple points that they can latch on to in an instant, no matter how complex the idea or product may be.

When we lead with radical simplicity everything changes. We make connection happen purposefully through deliberately crafted approaches that gain immediate attention, rather than by chance. By following the examples in this book, you'll learn to transform yourself into an iconic thinker, and you'll likely become more fulfilled personally as a result.

There may be moments you are using the laws laid out in The Iconist when you will be tempted to make your message more complicated than it needs to be. Don't give in. We often feel uncomfortable being bold, but we're also much happier people when we embrace fierce simplicity. It is instant understandability and instant comprehension that facilitate connection.

As an Iconist you can communicate in such a way that your recipients will not be able to get your message out of their heads, regardless of how you currently see yourself as a communicator. Any art, political message, film, advertising, music, writing, innovation, or profession can rise above the competing environment and demand attention if you use the natural laws of Blocks and Icons.

Don't forget: the ability to express yourself and the ability to be heard are two very different things. We can express and fall on deaf ears. To get what we want, others must be listening. And as we will see, breaking through all the noise so that others can hear, without using Blocks, has become nearly impossible.

CHAPTER 2

FRESH AIR

Meaning and reality were not hidden somewhere behind things, they were in them, in all of them.

— Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

In the mid-2000s a courageous South American city government rejected media and messaging overload on an unlikely and almost unbelievable scale. In the process, it revealed the hidden life of one of the world's most vibrant cities. This bold, revolutionary policy was enacted by the municipal government of São Paulo, Brazil.

The government's startling new approach came from the city's desire to deal with pollution on all levels beyond its serious problems with noise, air, and water pollution.

In 2006 São Paulo passed the Clean City Law, which banned all outdoor advertising in Brazil's largest city. Over the course of the next year, every single one of São Paulo's fifteen thousand billboards, outdoor video screens, and bus advertisements vanished. With the elimination of the ads, the city beneath was laid bare — a jungle of concrete buildings interspersed with stunning historic architecture.

Brazil, as a country, is no stranger to controversial and innovative social and economic practices. In the 1940s, '50s, and '60s, the Brazilian government took extreme actions to reduce the country's dependence on imported foreign manufactured goods. This was a time when much of Brazil lacked a modern economic manufacturing infrastructure. The lack of domestically produced products left them stifled and struggling to become a modern economic nation; too much of their wealth left the country to import modern manufactured goods. To remedy the infrastructure problem the government set quotas on certain imports and imposed such high tariffs that it made it very uncomfortable, if not impossible, for Brazil's upper and business classes to have the modern conveniences they craved.

We decided that we should start combating pollution with the most conspicuous sector: visual pollution.

— Mayor Gilberto Kassab

The message sent to the Brazilian economic elite was simple: if you want fancy luxury items, then you have to invest in your own economy and build the infrastructure to make them yourself. It worked. These policies were the potent seeds of Brazil's current robust manufacturing economy, something rarely seen in postcolonial economies around the world, which tend to be dependent on modern imports at their own economic disadvantage.

Later, during the oil shocks of the 1970s, once again, in another bold effort to relieve foreign dependence — this time on foreign oil — Brazil expanded domestic oil production and other energy industry resources, leading to the creation of technology to produce sugarcane ethanol on a large scale. These efforts have resulted in the South American nation being one of the most energy-independent countries in the world today. It has surpassed most of its postcolonial economic pillagers in this way. So 2006's Clean City Law may have been shocking, but it was not at all that out of character for Brazil.

Digital, visual, and advertising pollution have been affecting us for more than a century now, diluting our personal voices and changing the way we interact with one another without most of us even recognizing it. It creeps up on us. It says a lot that São Paulo not only recognized the harm of it but audaciously did something about it.

After São Paulo implemented the Clean City Law, 70 percent of residents said the move had greatly improved quality of life in the city. The removal of the ads revealed a world of lost architecture and a calmer environment. The effort not only revealed long-covered buildings, it also revealed the city's long-standing poverty problems. Massive structures and edifices barren of advertising exposed many of the city's favelas (slums), many of which had long been hidden by billboards and signs.

When the ads came down, São Paulo natives first reported a feeling of disorientation. Mass messaging was such a part of the city's culture that billboards had become landmarks. "It's weird, because you get lost; you don't have any reference [points] any more," journalist Vinicius Galvão said in an interview with National Public Radio. In one part of town, the reporter had used a Panasonic billboard to orient himself. "But now my reference is an art deco building that was covered by this [massive Panasonic ad]," he recalled. "The city's now got new language; a new identity." Digital pollution, media pollution of any kind, vastly alters the way we see and identify with the world.

The elimination of ads in São Paulo uncovered a previously hidden world, which had been diluted due to content overload but that now shines forth its own new message. Ironically, the only compromise to the city's rigid outdoor advertising ban has been to allow approved graffiti and street art. The result has been a series of massive, iconic murals stretching the height of entire buildings. This is the city's true individual voice and expression: art and architecture — and the city can finally start to breathe as the distraction and dilution are vanquished.

Just like São Paulo's billboards hid the city's beauty (its historic architecture) and masked its poverty (the favelas), your message is similarly being hidden by the sheer volume and unrelenting force of digital communication (or pollution) today. When São Paulo made the city's slums clearly visible to all, more could be done about them. Similarly, when you understand and use Blocks you can essentially cause the overload of mass-messages to disappear from the mind of your intended audience, leaving just the individual message you want to convey.

CHAPTER 3

POPULATIONS

The excessive increase of anything often causes a reaction in the opposite direction.

— Plato, Republic

Like the city of São Paolo was crowded with billboards at the end of the twentieth century, these days the world is a crowded place.

There is a concept in economics, taken from a 1798 essay by English economist Thomas Robert Malthus, that argues the corollary relationship between population growth and food supply. Malthus explains that population growth in humans is strongly related to the amount of available food and sustenance.

For most of human history, our population grew steadily. But relatively recent developments — innovations made within the last three centuries — led to an explosion of populations. With the onset of the First and Second Industrial Revolutions and the emergence of mass production, an unprecedented capacity to produce food facilitated a staggering growth in the world's population. In recent years, the global population hit 7.5 billion people. As recently as 150 years ago, this number would not have been thought possible.

There are more people in the world than ever before — and that's led to previously unimaginable challenges that go far beyond food supply. When there is more of anything, the parts that make up the whole become less visible. (Kind of like if you had a puzzle with ten pieces versus ten thousand pieces.) Though you might not realize it, the exponential growth in global population is watering you down, making it far more difficult for you to stand out as an individual. Most of us can feel this.

A third revolution of digital technology has slammed us with messaging and communications without offering a constructive, healthy, balanced way of even attempting to take it in. Now, with this increase of billions and billions of people, these populations have a means of messaging at each other unceasingly, in real time, 24-7, 365 days a year. And they do. In many developing countries, even in villages with no running water, the people have smartphones.

With great irony, global connectivity, with ubiquitous all-the-time instant sharing, has left us more invisible and isolated than ever.

There are many reasons for this, as we'll see over the next few chapters. But the most obvious is the sheer volume of content out there — traditional media, social media, the news cycle, ads; it all adds up to make the world not only crowded but incredibly loud.

* * *

After the industrial revolutions of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries came the Digital Revolution of the late twentieth. The world changed fast, and it keeps changing.

Fifty years ago, we only had three main broadcast networks — NBC, CBS, and ABC — so we watched what was put in front of us. Before cable TV took over, audiences were happy with their limited choices. Now we're living in an entertainment culture of "more, more, more!"

The proliferation of new media channels has created a vast need for content to fill pages and airwaves. Print magazines, online magazines, a mass of cable channels, broadcast networks, satellite radio channels, internet TV and radio stations, revolving billboards, and the endless array of other modern entertainment devices all need messages and content to share with their audiences.

It is not a surprise that such a ceaseless demand for content results in a mass media industrial complex and a desperate need to fill twenty-four hours of content across tens of thousands of mediums. This unthinking machine just keeps propelling itself forward, despite how inefficient it is, or its negative effects. In the race to get content out there, the speed at which it moves degrades the quality of the information-further weakening, if not destroying, the credibility of the information endlessly hurled at us.

Even with more information than ever vying for our attention, the businesses that create this onslaught continue to consolidate. Just six companies in the American media landscape own the major media outlets, from television to film production and distribution, as well as significant holdings across the globe in publishing, online communication, and more. Think about that ... Six corporations own almost everything we listen to, watch, and read all over the world.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "The Iconist"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Jamie Mustard.
Excerpted by permission of BenBella Books, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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