Like it or not, emojis have become an instantly recognisable part of the way we communicate; cultural signifiers that imply and suggest rather than explicitly say. A 🍑might make us think of Call Me By Your Name. Think something (or someone) is great? 🔥🔥🔥And we all know what 🍆means.
In 2015, the Oxford Dictionaries recognised the ‘tears of joy’ emoji as its word of the year, while in 2021 Gen Z deemed it uncool. (If you think something’s funny, then go for a 💀 or even a ⚰️ to be down with the kids.) Queen Bey’s Drunk in Love video even has its own emoji translation. So if the rise in emoji is changing the way that we interact, then what does this mean for brands and how they can communicate with consumers?
The origins of the emoji speak to its benefits. In 1998, Shigetaka Kurita, an engineer at Japanese phone company NTT Docomo, innovated a new way for customers to communicate visually. Ever since, brands have jumped on the bandwagon, showing interesting levels of creativity. Remember the time that Dominos let you order a pizza by simply tweeting a 🍕? And we have Taco Bell to thank for lobbying the Unicode Consortium for a 🌮 to be made available for Android and iOS.
We can’t deny it, emojis can enhance words. They open up a world of empathy. As linguistics expert Tyler Schnoebelen puts it, in a New York Magazine report by Adam Sternbergh: “it softens things.” Emails and messages alike. But unlike words, without a truly universal codification system, emojis cannot be relied on to communicate fully. They sometimes miss context. They don’t cover cultural or generational nuances like the 😂 or 💀 debate . And critics have pointed out how slow they’ve been to address gaps in diversity and inclusivity.
Yes, emojis can be cute and all, but if you’re ever in doubt, use words. Good words. Chef’s kiss emoji.
The Advice
“These cute, colourful pictograms are also full of potential relationship building power. It is my personal belief that empathy is the most important aspect of communication. We may speak the same language as someone else, but if we are not actively trying to empathise with one another, it becomes difficult to fully understand each other’s meaning.”
Online bank Monzo loves an emoji. This is the app that allows you to send a 🥂 to pay friends back for the round they bought. But even when it uses them, it champions good writing as the foundation of successful brand building. Its TOV guidelines open with: “The words we put on screen and paper are one of the most important ways we have of showing people what we stand for.” When we spoke to Harry Ashbridge, a Writer at Monzo, he told us: “I don’t think you have a brand if you haven’t thought seriously about the words you use.”
It would be easy to create an emoji-led campaign that really didn’t land with customers. Even more so if you’re a condom brand – there are only so many eggplant emojis you can use. But we stumbled upon a past campaign from Durex that played on the ubiquitous sequence of sexual emojis and turned them into a case for a condom emoji to promote safe sex for World AIDS Day. The campaign video shows text conversations consisting of two or three emojis (some pretty inventive) that imply a sexual encounter, and finally shows a mocked up condom emoji. It’s a clever way of using a visual and digital language that everyone understands to raise awareness for an important issue.
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