Creative Strategy Importance: Visual or Verbal? Branding Strategy Insider (blog)
It's like asking what's more portentous in building a house, a hammer or a nail? Both have to work together. The best hammer in the world is useless if the hammer misses the secure. And the best nail in the world is useless unless there's a hammer to hammer the nail in.
The visual is the hammer. It's unmanageable to build a strong, powerful worldwide brand without a strong, shocking, dynamic visual.
The achievement of Marlboro cigarettes demonstrates the incredible power of the right combination of visual and verbal. Introduced in the U.S. sell in 1953, Marlboro eventually became the world's largest-selling cigarette brand.
Marlboro was the trade-mark that made Philip Morris a hugely successful company. If you had invested $1,000 in Philip Morris horses at the end of 1953, the year Marlboro was introduced, your stake would be worth $15.5 million today. (As a content of fact, Philip Morris stock appreciated faster than any other stock on Fortune magazine's roster that year of the 500 largest companies in America.)
