ADHESIVE BONDS
Behold the power of the sticker as a tool to sustain the stoke
For brands large and small, stickers are a marketing tactic not to be overlooked. They’re easy to produce in quantity at a cost that is cheap enough to give away free. As an audience touchpoint, stickers are more powerful than a branded T-shirt because they’re so accessible and evergreen, and arguably more visible and persuasive than a logo tattoo. They are always on, rarely out of sight, and if they are printed well, they barely fade over time. They’ve been around for five thousand years, and have adapted into the digital world.
We give stickers different descriptions depending on their application. If you put one on your car, it’s a bumper sticker. If you put one on fruit, it’s a label. If you put one on a motorcycle, it’s a decal. And if you use one in a meeting, it’s a Post-It note. But have you ever asked, “What is a sticker really?” Technically, any label that uses an adhesive on the back is a sticker. So wheat-pasting and stamps are in the sticker family and are part of sticker evolution.
A QUICK HISTORY OF STICKY
5,000 YEARS AGO: Egyptians use wheat-pastings to price goods in the marketplace.
1837: Scottish inventor and postal reformer James Chalmers lays claim to inventing the first adhesive postage stamp. English inventor and reformer Sir Rowland Hill disputes this and claims HE invented the postage stamp. Regardless of who deserves the credit, stamps start appearing on British mail.
1880s: European advertising begins incorporating stickers and labels onto fruit and fruit packaging to differentiate orchards and growers.
1935: American inventor R. Stanton Avery creates the self-adhesive label.
1940s: The bumper sticker is born.
Along with the advent and adoption of mass-manufactured automobiles during the 1940s, American propaganda and politics were also revving up. The perfect place to put your point of view was on a car bumper. This new application of stickers freed them from practical uses, suddenly opening up the ability for anyone to leverage a sticker to spread a story. This is the moment stickers became a medium for sharing.
Postwar innovations in materials and chemistry made this new adhesive medium even more accessible with the ability to print on vinyl, giving stickers a much longer shelf life. In the early 1960s, powersports brands began using them for sponsorships in auto racing. By the 1970s, music and pop culture brands started to incorporate stickers into their swag and marketing. During this era, stickers were embraced by the youth of the day. They became the customization platform for expressing personality. And over time, the “bumper” expanded to include school folders, lockers, skateboards, bikes, car windows, snowboards, laptops, phones and cargo boxes.
The DIY ethos of the 1980s and ’90s boosted an emerging anti-consumer sticker frenzy. It was a way for people to create and share their own art, brands and point of view. This time it was fueled by the US Postal Service—specifically their free Priority Mail labels, which were readily available at any post office. These street-level blank canvases (along with pre-LinkedIn HELLO MY NAME IS labels) were the new utilitarian way of creating and sharing sticker art. Why is this important? Because it officially democratized the medium. Now we can have labels on bananas, branded banana stickers and anti-banana stickers all at the same time.
Regardless of stickers’ specific usage today, they still do one thing really well: help share a story. People want to tell others who they are and what they stand for in a simple, visual way, and the quickest version of street-level shorthand (both physical and digital) is to slap a sticker on it.
When REI launched Opt Outside—the campaign to announce they were closing on Black Friday—it was a bold idea. Why close retail doors on the busiest shopping day of the year? To celebrate brand purpose with their community. When it came to expressing this idea, REI opted to pair the promotion with digital and physical stickers, helping their community signify to others their connection to the brand and valuing outdoor experiences over mass consumption. While stores remained empty, Instagram feeds, car windows and cargo boxes filled up with the iconic slogan, and each year these adhesive beacons of support have become a rallying cry for REI Co-Op membership.
So the next time you’re chasing campaign KPIs and ROIs, don’t forget to measure LBF (lifelong bonding factor), and remember that sometimes it’s the little things that stick with us.
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Written by Mike Schwoebel, Creative Director at Nemo Design
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