“Your self-image is your pattern! Every thought has an activity visualized. Every activity belongs to a pattern. You identify with your pattern or thought. Your patterns lead your life.” – J. G. Gallimore
Patterns exist everywhere. Our thoughts create our everyday patterns which in turn controls our actions. Everyone has their daily rituals that we rarely notice because they have become our habits. From Wikipedia, patterns are “objects used to make copies or a set of repeating objects in a decorative design and in other disciplines”.
If everyone has “normal” habits, then why is it difficult for some people to understand others even with all these patterns? The answer is because “normal” is actually different for everyone. We all follow our own distinct patterns. Every person assigns their own values for different variables.
Everyone has daily, weekly or yearly routines yet the routines themselves are unique for every person. The world is in balance because while everyone does similar things, people do them in a completely different way by putting their own meaning behind each action. For example, branding is about creating patterns, not repeating messages.
How Are Patterns Used in Branding?
Branding today comes from multiple media. Every business has a name and a logo/icon/avatar for people to recognize who they are. Today, these identifiers are used in multiple ways in marketing that includes business cards, flyers, stationeries, social media and especially your website.
Coming from that article, a brand should be dynamic and constantly improve for each release. With each new release, your audience should still be able to connect you with your brand identity using pattern recognition. How?
A brand must be transparent, consistent, responsive, communicative and social. These are all qualities that make up a multidimensional being, a human. Isn’t a brand supposed to represent the ideals and values of its owner? Don’t patterns control how humans perceive actions, thoughts, memories and behaviors that eventually shape other people’s beliefs?
What better way to understand others motivations than conveying the benefits they can receive from using your brand. Patterns in branding are a form of unconscious communication that is not directly mentioned, but has consistency throughout each medium. This consistency comes from ideas that form the big picture.
Company brands are more meaningful when there is unity among various smaller ideas. Every small idea is connected to one other and that creates a flexible yet focused solution depending on the conditions, contexts or current situation. The connection for each small idea gives deeper pattern recognition than repetition.
This allows your audience to remember not only what, but also how and why you do what you do. Your patterned branding is like a strategic plan that creates consistency from single ideas. With each pattern, the brand becomes more credible, trustworthy and allows it to keep growing.
How Are Patterns Used In Decision Making?
A pattern-based strategy is a “set of recurring and/or related elements (business activities, events) that signals a business opportunity or threat”. Examples of such elements include pieces of information that tells a change is coming and how it impacts the current business operations. To understand and recognize these patterns early on will help businesses make better decisions.
When we visualize patterns as a physical object, the best example would be patterns in keys. The jagged edges of keys are all different and match only one lock. Each lock can only be opened by one type of key. But it is one “type” instead of only one key because the key itself can be duplicated many times.
If the key can be duplicated, then the only distinct factor that really makes the key unique is the patterns. The patterns are both specific and also consistent throughout every copy created for each key. Similar to the brand pattern, consistency helps in the security of both the key and the lock.
Combining some of the previous blog posts and this new topic, have you figured out how to make complex ideas simple? How are patterns used in data management and web development? What do you think?
