If you drop the famous Coke bottle on the ground, and it smashes into a hundred pieces, you would be able to pick up just one of them and still recognise what it is. Lindstrom lists some other brands of which the same is true. A bit of a Harley-Davidson, a scrap of an iPod, a drop of Guinness, Lego. These brands are all smashable.
But the Conservatives? I suspect there’s only one sense in which anyone thinks they are smashable, and it’s not Lindstrom’s.
A smashable brand is consistent, the same through and through. Its values guide every part of the design, its identifying features suffuse everything, there isn’t a detail that is left out, that isn’t true to the whole. And all appeal to the emotions. One study, using brain scans, shows that smashable brands light up the same part of the brain as religious imagery.
These brands share something else. Their owners understand that there is much more to their appeal than one simple function, however good that function might be. In fact consumers purchase the product as much for what it says about them, and how it makes them feel, as for what it does. The product is much more than functional, it is part of their identity.
