(Editor’s Note: This is the second of a series of pieces that will approach the problem of carcinoid/NETs not as a medical problem but as a marketing problem. If we are going to increase funding for the disease, we have to think of it as something other than a medical issue. We need to make it a human issue for the general public. In my next post, I’ll discuss the importance of individual patient stories.)
Image and substance
“Image is everything,” Andre Agassi used to say in an ad for the Canon Rebel camera when he was a well-known tennis player. The phrase used to make Jane and I cringe every time we saw it. And we saw it a lot. Jane loved tennis the way many people love football–and every tennis match we watched played that ad over and over again.
We need an image that will get the larger public to take us seriously.
For us, as teachers, substance always outweighed image. We didn’t care how people looked or dressed or what car they drove. We were concerned with the quality of the person’s mind and ideas, not the image they wanted to present to the world.
Image matters
In marketing, ideas and substance do matter. You can only sell a bad product so long before people catch on and leave. But no matter how good or important your product is, if you don’t project the right image–an image that grabs the public’s imagination and takes them where you want them to go–you won’t have much success either early or late.
For us, as teachers, substance always outweighed image.
For a retailer, that means you go out of business–or at least see your sales slump considerably. In the case of an illness like carcinoid/NETs, it means you don’t have much success in attracting donations. Without donations, basic research doesn’t happen. Without basic research, new treatments don’t get discovered. Without new treatments, people continue to die.
Powerful images
The creation of a strong and positive image–from a marketing standpoint–begins with the visual image associated with the product or service. The Jimmy Fund logo depicts a small boy in a baseball uniform in the act of batting. It calls up the vibrancy of youth, reminds the viewer of the organization’s long history with the Boston Red Sox, and underlines the tragedy of pediatric cancer. The figure is active and determined. While it draws on caricature, there is nothing humorous in its portrayal.
Without donations, basic research doesn’t happen.
The St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital is radically different, but creates a powerful initial image as well. It is dominated by the silhouette of a small girl praying. It reminds us that its founder was fulfilling a promise made to St. Jude for an answered prayer. It underlines for the viewer that these children–often hopeless cases when the hospital was founded–had–and too often still have– little beyond prayer to rely on without our help. It is a serious logo for a serious organization with a serious cause.
The problem with Netty
I like Netty, the zebra caricature that festoons many carcinoid/NETs sites. She’s cute and playful and reminds us of the excuse doctors always have at the ready for failing to find our disease–or anything else rarer than the most frequent cause of the symptoms. But Netty is exactly the wrong logo for an organization trying to raise public awareness of our disease. It lacks seriousness or determination. It turns the disease into a joke–and it is anything but a laughing matter.
The figure is active and determined.
We have enough trouble with people saying to patients, “But you don’t look sick.” Netty exacerbates the problem. She is an inside joke that the outside world doesn’t get the irony of. That cute little zebra is kicking people to death. We get that. We understand that. But Netty undermines the message we need to be sending to the general public: This is a serious disease with serious consequences.
A sunny image
Caring for Carcinoid has its beautiful sunflower logo. From a graphic design perspective, I can’t find fault with it. And I understand it was a favorite flower of one of the founders. But it doesn’t tell a story to the general public the way the Jimmy Fund and St. Jude logos do. It lacks, at least for me, visual power as well.
That cute little zebra is kicking people to death.
Unlike the zebra, a sunflower is a relatively passive thing. It grows, it flowers, it waits for the bees to come pollinate it. And maybe that’s the point. It is an idea waiting to be born but needs outside actors to bring about that birth. There is at least one very successful organization that uses flowers very successfully: cystic fibrosis–which connects the disease to a small child’s miss-pronunciation of the disease’s name–sixty-five roses. But even they have to tell the story in every mailing they do.
Every image tells a story
The most successful logos tell their story without words–the way a successful photograph does. That’s what I set out to do when I sat down with two graphic artists to design the Walking with Jane logo. We went through dozens of photographs until we found one that was both the essence of who Jane was and what Walking with Jane was designed to do–aggressively go after a solution to carcinoid/NETs.
…it doesn’t tell a story to the general public…
Jane was an active human being. She was also a person of vision and a person who was not uncomfortable pointing out things that others did not see. She was a serious person in pursuit of serious things. I wanted to put a human face on the disease we were going after–but I wanted it to be a serious face–a vital face. I wanted an adult version of what the Jimmy Fund logo did–talk to people on multiple levels at once.
Letting people see themselves
But the logo had to be more than a photograph of Jane. It had to be capable of representing all of those battling the disease–and all those who died of the disease. That meant working to turn the photograph into something at once more abstract and more personal. The image shows, I think, all that we lost as a result of her death–and all that we can gain as a result of the way she lived her life. It is the story of every carcinoid/NETs patient writ large on a mountaintop.
The most successful logos tell their story without words…
People in marketing have told me it is among the strongest images they have seen associated with anything–that it really does tell the story we need it to tell–and tells it eloquently.
The image we need
We need such a logo as the visual identity of the disease we are trying to get people to pay attention to. It needs to portray the seriousness of the disease; it needs to portray the lives it destroys; it needs to portray hope; and it needs to portray leadership. The Walking with Jane logo does all those things–and I am willing to hand it to whatever carcinoid/NETs organizations want to use it. Free.
It is the story of every carcinoid/NETs patient…
But if people don’t want to use it–it is, after all, strongly associated with Walking with Jane–then we need to come up with another logo that does the same job at least as effectively. We need an image that will get the larger public to take us seriously.
