Creativity Unlimited: Thinking Inside the Box for Business Innovation

19

Associations

The colour red might make you think of red, the colour of passion. Out of this associative network, a kind of staked-out pathway is formed which results in consumers understanding and being attracted to brands and products. By drawing attention to and accentuating certain connections through this network, you can lead people to understand and accept a new product to which they might otherwise find it difficult to relate.

In the disucssion on physiology (Chapter 14) we described how the brain consists of dendrites – the threads that connect its different parts – which, combined, would run several thousand times around the Earth. All those dendrites mean that all the knowledge in your brain is connected in some way. Our entire brain and all our collective knowledge forms a gigantic network of many smaller networks. As soon as you come into contact with a person, a phenomenon or an object, you start thinking about apparently unrelated things. This is because your associative network has been activated.

Figure 19.1

Figure 19.1 is an example of an associative network for a brand or product. The brand or product is the hub of the network and links a variety of associations that are activated when we think about the brand/product. If you think about Coca-Cola for example, ...