Kinesthetic Awareness

I stopped by the Cats gymnastics facility last night to see Harry and Charlie, my 6 year old sons, do a gymnastics workout. It was a buzz with energy. What a cool thing to see all of these kids workout. As an athlete myself, I was amazed at the kinesthetic awareness these kids had. I was especially struck by a ten-year-old girl as she stuck the landing from a front layout flip with 1.5 twists and then casually looked at her friends and said, "I'm just not sure about my pigtails." They all felt so comfortable as they hurled themselves through the air.

As I observed, I thought about brands and their kinesthetic awareness. Companies like Patagonia and Pangea Organics, hurl themselves through culture with such grace and connectedness yet other brands seem so unaware of how to interact with the world around them. Is it that some brands spend too much time gazing at their navels? Do they focus on the wrong things and become out of touch with their world? Whether it's an athlete or a brand kinesthetic awareness must be practiced regularly.

How kinesthetically aware is your brand?

Comments

[TomL]

Excellent post, John... this observation is really on to something about brand behavior, how they move in 3&4d space. Nau is a brand I'd add to the list, Architecture for Humanity as well. I'm hesitant to suggest Apple because they're at or past the point of needing to re-invent themselves... a test of their cultural kinesthetics for sure.

A few months ago I spoke with an instructor for Cirque du Soleil (another brand that personifies kinesthetic learning) and her interpretation of brands, how they operate in physical space and their connectedness (or lack of) with culture. Fascinating how she would roll ideas through physical space as though she were articulating and manifesting the abstract into physical and material reality... fortunately we had a design sketcher capturing this... without those drawings much of the conversation would have been lost... wish we had a musician to riff the session, maybe a scent-ist like Luca Turin to articulate the essence.

Brands and leaders within their midst who understand the varied learning styles of their prosumers, do indeed move through space with the greatest of ease... the gymnast, the diver, the modern dancer. Marrying the anthropology with learning styles is incredibly fertile ground for understanding how to connect with the human spirit. How many brands truly deploy their marketing and design resources informed by this deeper insight?

Somewhat ironically, communications brands particularly mobile service providers have been the poster children for dictating the terms of the transaction with their customers, not clued in to the deeper needs and varied learning styles of their customers.

Your insight on this suggests that successful brands will connect with their future customers visceral-ities, their haptic-ulatesnss, triggering the highly sought after response, "you get me".