As LBi discovers, there is literally no place where creating a sense of place doesn't count.
It seems like an oxymoron—the importance of place in a web environment. But brands in many ways are representations of place, tangibly and intangibly. We visit destinations, seek addresses, and evaluate sites. The lexicon of place is everywhere within our web vocabularies. And though web sites are literally nowhere, place ultimately resides in the mind of those who perceive it, more a sensibility and sequence of associations than the actual material world. In our work, we find that some of the same associative qualities of place are as critical in online environments as they are in the real world.
Eminent geographer Yi-Fu Tuan has written eloquently on the concept of place in his book Space and Place. In it he examines topophilia, the affective bond between people and place, or literally "the love of place." Tuan defines place as humanized space. As a person establishes an emotional bond to a space, corresponding sensibilities of familiarity and a subsequent sense of comfort begin to emerge, as well as an almost indefinable sense of "insideness." Yet these emotive connections are maddeningly hard to elicit if the individual feels no personal control over the space. Aside from the comforts of control, Tuan suggests that, if place is to truly evolve, the architectures of a space must forge powerful memories, enhance our notion of self, and embed additional layers of meaning within the contours of the space itself. A chilled pint of Guinness conjures all of the affinities of your favorite Irish pub, shouldn't that same power of association be replicable online?
Within LBi, we've addressed the challenge of translating place into digital environments by identifying the broader product equities that connect brands to consumers and by developing clear paths to mirroring those equities in online space. We've found that product attributes are often consonant with the virtues of place, enabling us to recreate one by expressing the other. After all, online brands inhabit a space, and within any kind of space the sensibilities of place are inevitably shaped.
As the introduction to Tuan's Space and Place suggests, at their core place is security and space is freedom: we are attached to one and long for the other. It is this inseparable dynamic, like that between space and time, that also informs the landscape of branding.
Freedom and security are in essence empathic values; they put us on a path to contentment. There are few promises or forms of empathy a brand can make or take more powerful than fulfilling a consumer's desire for freedom and security.
The dynamic is evident in the initial composition of our brand work for Newell Rubbermaid and The Cliffs. For The Cliffs, a luxury leisure real estate portfolio, we worked to communicate a pair of seductive and empathic promises: the freedom to pursue adventure in a pristine natural environment, and a safe retreat from the anxiety-laden confines of typical urban topography. Both promises are rooted in actual place, and had to be teased out through a rich design aesthetic and content that captured the awesome beauty of the properties themselves.
There is an element of escapism here as well. Tuan suggests that human culture itself is an expression of the idea of escape, a flight from fearful facts. Shelters guard us from weather, cities shelter us from nature, and our personal mythologies deliver us from fears of mortality. Tuan concludes that "A human being is an animal who is congenitally indisposed to accept reality as it is." Acknowledging this fundamentally escapist quality in human nature facilitated our work for The Cliffs, if only through our understanding of escape as a critical emotional cue of our demographic.
Likewise, Graco, a baby-centric brand within the Newell Rubbermaid portfolio, offers young parents a unique world in which the special concerns of parenthood—like finding the right car seat—are foremost in the mind of the Graco brand. Security is the primary value of place at issue here. We employed a two-fold approach to creating a space that reassured young parents and offered solutions consistent with their most pressing problems.
A guided car seat selector tool was created to help users narrow a selection of hundreds to a few targeted choices. Mining user inputs—whether or not a family is expecting, the child's current size, and the parental style preferences—not only narrows the selection but also assures users of Graco's careful consideration of parenting challenges. To reinforce the sense that users are in safe hands, LBi capitalized on Graco's rich trove of third-party content—child development consultants and an online parenting network—to develop a community of content resources aimed at new parents and provided by likeminded peers.
It is this twin formula of the adventure of the unknown and the safety of the familiar—the two possibilities of place—that will allow these brands to develop loyal constituencies within a web environment characterized by transience. These twin values must be balanced, though, as too much freedom feels threatening, provoking a need for security, while too much security is suffocating, generating a desire for freedom. But once that balance is struck, the emotive impulses are satisfied and users relax in a comfortable space.
The alternative is placelessness, the all-too familiar commercial wasteland in which brand identities are "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing," communicating none of the attributes of place, and ultimately vanishing in a marketplace of largely featureless commodities. Placelessness is a special threat to brands that face the commoditization of their product lines. Some brands have successfully evaded this threat by building a rich sense of place around conceptual platforms beyond basic product equities. In the case of Whole Foods, for instance, the company designed place around the ethics of good citizenship and subsequently generates a loyalty not fully attributable to the quality of its commodities.
Place, then, becomes paramount in the online space. Sites should simultaneously stimulate and reassure. These empathic cues flow through the sense of place a space collectively imparts—through the ease of its user experience, the familiarity of its taxonomy, the freshness of its text and graphics, the relevance and inviting nature of its content, and the viability of its product offering.
It is the whole—the rich contours of a conceptual environment—that offer far more than the tangible contours of a singular product. On the retail shelf product conjures place, embodying an array of associations. Online the inverse occurs—place conjures product. The associations of place are presented, leading consumers down a path whose destination is the product. If those associative values haven't been conveyed along the way, there is little compelling the consumer to purchase. This broader engagement is critical for brands to harness, as a pivotal step toward luring and developing continuity with qualified and engaged consumers.