Reading Time: 4 minutes Like most people I’ve probably tended to silo the financial value that brands generate from the story they tell. Purpose, values and story defined a brand in my view; margin and financial worth were the outcomes of a brand well executed. More recently, I’ve been wondering whether in fact these items are not so disparate […]
Tag: brand story
How would you like your brand story to end?
Reading Time: 2 minutes Bill Taylor has said that if your customers can live without you, eventually they will. Conversely, I’m fascinated by how so many industries will stick to business-as-usual for as long as they can before they have to change. In each case, the rules of supply and demand will at some point over-ride the sentiment of […]
Brand repositioning: Radicalising your brand
Reading Time: 5 minutes Comes a point in the lifecycle of most brands when they hit critical complacency. The marque has mainstreamed to the point where it effectively blends with its surroundings to form part of the amorphous middle. That’s the black hole towards which all brands are drawn. Competitiveness erodes. Prices start to fall. Comfort levels and intransigence […]
Telling the short (brand) story
Reading Time: < 1 minute Everyone has a story to tell. Not everyone feels they have the time to listen. Which is why brands need to become adept at the short story form. Increasingly, the messages that pass between brands and their customers will need to be articulated in 140 characters, 6 seconds, a shot, an update … But brevity […]
Brand expression: the fight against dullness
Reading Time: 2 minutes I’m a huge believer in stress-testing the expression limits of brands. And as a general rule, I’ve learnt that you can push language a long way – often further than you imagined – providing you demonstrate humanity, insight, humility and fun, and you connect in ways that people identify with and find refreshing. People can […]
Brands Beyond Functionality: 7 great lessons
Reading Time: 4 minutes Everyone talks about the need for brands to keep up with consumer demand, yet, curiously, some brands have lived on beyond their purely functional need, largely because they carry with them associations in the form of eternal ideas that continue to burn strong. Watches – for example. Who needs a Rolex today to tell the […]
Brand transformation: Don’t focus on the change, focus on the difference
Reading Time: 2 minutes I regularly refer to adrenalin as the chemical of change. To me, transformation must be radical and scary, because it pretty much requires the same levels of energy and momentum to get to a ‘dangerous’ place as it does to shift to somewhere a lot more comfortable. The only difference may be the time it […]
Are you airbrushing your brand?
Reading Time: 2 minutes In a world of choice, it’s tempting to retouch your brand story to make it more appealing.
How do you run a brand story you can’t fully own anymore?
Reading Time: < 1 minute It’s tempting to believe that our brand story is ours. It’s not of course. Today, it’s owned by everyone – in the sense that virtually anyone, anywhere can input. And that means you’re not the only one telling that story anymore. Once customers simply provided validation that your story was true. Now they are part […]
Layering your story
Reading Time: < 1 minute In this presentation from last year I talk about how great stories are structured and about the power of the nutshell of truth that lives at the centre of a great story. I show how changing just one word of that kernel can have dramatic effects. Towards the end of the excerpt I touch on […]
Brands as extended storylines
Reading Time: 3 minutes The temptation when you’re working with a brand is to continue to treat it just as a product or service. It’s simpler to do so. It’s contained. You can add features to it or introduce a variation to it. But I’ve wondered aloud with marketers in the past whether treating a brand as the personification […]
Declaration: Step 5 in building a purposeful culture
Reading Time: 2 minutes At some point, a culture that is serious about what it intends must put those intentions in writing. That’s about a lot more than documentation. Declaring what you come to work for collectively amounts to a commitment. So many companies squander this opportunity in my view. They market what is happening rather than explaining it. […]