The other day we talked about noise in the communication process. The textbook defines noise as not only the clutter of competing messages, but also as a lack of clarity in the message or the choice of a wrong channel.
At first I started thinking about noise in the normal context – for example, how many ads during a commercial break do I really pay attention to? How many billboards do I actually see or remember on my daily commute? Then I thought noise could be expanded to even more examples.
Take books. E-books and Kindle are the way of the future, right? But for me there’s still nothing like curling up with a paperback or the solid heft of a hardcover. Most of the time, I pick books to read not because I’ve heard of the author or title, but because I was intrigued by the book cover. I’d never considered book covers as a form of marketing, but I now I think they definitely are!
What a cover does is try to communicate the essence of the story. The sender is the author, who created the book. The sender has to work with the transmitter, who may be the book cover designer or the publishing agency (or both?). The sender’s message is encoded into a visually-arresting cover design, sent through the print communication channel, and is hopefully decoded properly by potential readers, the receivers.
Noise in this case would be competing books on the shelf, or an unclear message. Feedback may come from book sales figures, or the number of times a book is borrowed, and so on.
For instance, take the cover of The Brief History of the Dead, written by Kevin Brockmeier, book design by Iris Weinstein. It’s a cool book with a cooler cover – the empty jacket with the hands makes you do a double take, effectively cutting through the “noise” of other books.
What I find interesting too is that popular books that appeal to different receivers also get different covers. The most famous example I can think of now are the Harry Potter covers. When the book is marketed towards children the cover is colourful and fantastic.
The cover marketed towards adults is darker, has one focal point, and most notably has a real photograph of J.K. Rowling on the back instead of Hogwarts. Perhaps kids want to submerge themselves into their favourite fantasy world, but adults be curious to see what the author looks like. Both books have the same content but different encoding approaches. Even the title font is subtly different, though still similar enough for readers to recognize a Harry Potter book when they see one.
