Copying: Why you’re wasting your time, and doing it wrong.

“Weee-oooh, wooop, wwwrrrlll. Weee-oooh, wooop!”

“This was not the song of a bird, but the sound of a car alarm. He mimicked the medley of sounds with skill, always pausing for just the right amount of time to be in sync with the familiar tempo of the alarms that occasionally sounded on the block. Mockingbirds, as their name would suggest, have a reputation for stealing the songs of other birds, and my feathered friend was doing so quite convincingly, despite his poor choice of source material. But the bird didn’t understand the purpose of the sounds he imitated. I remember distinctly saying to myself that a bird’s gotta sing, but not like this. And in that moment, a brief little glimmer of insight came to me from the bird’s song: his efforts were futile, and to a large extent, mine were too. We were blindly imitating rather than singing a song of our own.” ~ Frank Chimero ‘The Shape of Design’

In the Real Estate industry, there’s a huge amount of copying going on.

I’m often inundated with requests to make a brand, a website, or a piece of marketing material look like a competitor’s. This desire to copy a competitor’s angle or their plan of attack comes from the effect the material had on the person requesting it. Either they received a strong emotional response to the message delivered by the material, or they could easily identify how their target customers would identify with the material.

I’m not saying there is anything wrong with copying the work of others. In fact if you look closely at the growth and changes in creative work it is immediately obvious that copying is everywhere, in everything we consume. From movies; both in the script, concepts and the movie posters to fine traditional art of modern and classical time periods.

Entire art movements grow out of the copying by artists of the methods and styles that were growing in popularity at the time. The benefits of copying utilise the importance our brains place on familiarity. The more familiar we are with something, the more we generally like it and the more we like something the quicker we identify similar things. Our ability to pick these similar items out of a lineup is our brain’s desire to be as efficient as possible, saving our resources for other tasks.

The problem I have with the copying I’m all too often requested to do is that the request is the copy the ‘how’ and not the ‘why’.

And this is evidently a common occurrence worldwide, for a lot of designers.

The ‘how’ is the techniques and elements you use to deliver the message. The ‘why’ is the purpose of the message. Getting more sign ups to an event, or get more responses to a marketing flyer.

It’s asking to copy an exact layout (the how), while trying to deliver a different message (the why). Or using a similar image (the how), when the image is tied closely to the purpose/message of the original design and the message the copier is trying to deliver (the why) is entirely different. In this case the image they are requesting to copy isn’t relevant to their message, or their why and as such minimises the initial effectiveness of their copycat flyer.

If you’re going to copy someone’s work, make sure you understand the why of the decisions they made, or you’ll miss the point entirely and end up with a sub par product.

“The earth has music for those who listen.” ~ William Shakespeare

The mockingbird copied the sound of the car alarm because it heard an alarmed car. But it had no reason to copy the car alarm.

It was neither a car, nor was it being stolen.

Whether or not the bird copied the sound exactly, and mimicked it’s subject matter well enough the purpose was lost.

A bird sings to defend it’s territory, or to attract a mate, much like can copy a concept to raise awareness of our territories, or attract a client or customer. But the car the mockingbird copied wasn’t encroaching on its territory, or a very suitable mate so it was a waste of energy.

If we fail to understand the why of a message we want to copy, we are wasting energy and money on a fool’s errand.

“For one thing, he was giving away his position to every cat on the block. Second, all that volume was generated by the laborious convulsions of Jack’s diaphragm and breast muscles, and the work took energy… No bird would spend that kind of energy unless it was critically important.” ~ WILLIAM JORDAN

In ‘The Shape of Design’ Frank discusses using the ‘why’ to help defeat his creative blocks. When he’s staring at a blank page he goes back to the why of what he is doing. Real estate agents could benefit from the same technique in their marketing, when you’re looking at the work of others, or listening to the thought leaders of the industry, it’s not enough to copy exactly what the competitors are doing or the influencers are recommending. Take a moment to think about the why of what is happening, and adjust that to fit your own goals and the messages you are trying to deliver.

This will save you from being the mockingbird, wasting energy trying to mate with a one and a half tonne hunk of metal, glass and plastic.

It’s important to recognise patterns and trends when communicating to an audience whose brains are wired to look for shortcuts to better understand and identify the things worth spending their time and energy on. Just make sure you’re utilising the right patterns to help deliver your message and not blindly following the leaders without understanding their ‘why’. The reason they stand out is because they nailed their own why, which isn’t necessarily always relevant to your target audience or current goals.