We need to familiarize ourselves with what these are and then relate them to the branding stories that we tell so some of these conventions are first a central premise. The central premise is the whole point of telling a story in the first place. Basic story, premises are things like power corrupts or bad people can be turned good or saving the world is worth the effort or even love.
Conquers everything premises tend to be easily identifiable universal human themes. A clean premise is when it’s easy to say what a story is about in just a few sentences when it comes to branding the premise, will always be an aspect of a brand’s promise or value without a premise, a story just doesn’t have a point. The second convention – strong three-dimensional characters after the premise has been nailed down the story.
Development process moves to developing strong, engaging and believable characters who an audience will come to care about in even Route 4 and branding a character can be a little character that you develop to represent the brand think about things like the Pillsbury Doughboy Ronald McDonald. The compare the market meerkats, the Green Giant, the Michelin Man in the PG, tipps monkey or a character can be a brand’s personality.
The cheekiness of John Smith lager the irreverence of tango, the elegance of Jaguar, the integrity of the body shop or the no-nonsense nacinda pendant newspaper. A third convention is something that I call the confined space and few things are as confined as a hundred and forty characters of a tweet or the standard. Five hundred to a thousand words of a blog post or sheet of a4 for a press release or three to five minutes of a YouTube article for a story to have a chance of making a point and has to eliminate all extraneous details.
Focus on one points and a character or a group of characters who has a good reason for existing a story that wanders around is aimless or unfolds into a series of unrelated circumstances will only confuse an audience with useless details. The fourth storytelling convention is having a protagonist. Traditionally in storytelling, a protagonist is someone who is on some sort of a quest or undergoes a transformation.
The role of the protagonist is to carry the audience through the story, which is why this is the most important character. The protagonist sees more clearly understands things sooner, makes the good guesses more often and takes the right path when everyone else says he’s crazy. Harrison Ford has made a career out of playing protagonists characters we or other characters initially may not like, but who ultimately changes for the better han Solo.
Decker from the Blade Runner Indiana Jones are all classic protagonists. Brending doesn’t have this kind of protagonist and branding the protagonist. Is the problem the need the requirement or want that your brand promises to solve for satisfy a brand protagonist in this light can either be explicitly or implicitly stated if Brent X wants to convey the convenience of international banking having branches all around the globe? I’m stressing this too globe-trotting explorers a business people, the inconvenience of not having such a bank is usually an explicitly stated protagonist.
Most service companies explicitly state the protagonist in their stories. Luxury beauty and fashion brands typically use an implicitly state. A protagonist Brand X will make you feel youthful what’s implicit is that its audience feels insecure about their gray, hairs or wrinkles or weight or whatever it is? They feel insecure about that and security is the implicitly stated protagonist. Think of these as the elephant in the room that no one wants to actually say is there.
Another story convention is called an antagonist. An antagonist is someone bent on stopping the hero or the protagonist of a story. Your antagonist s, –, are your main competitors. Few brands actually name their rivals in their stories. However, they’re usually clever clues in clues about their identity at aardvark. Our antagonist, unsurprisingly, were major labels. All we had to say was we listen and we learn and our audience knew exactly who we were talking about and how we were different.
Another story convention is called an arch. An arch is like a bridge. It gets you from point A to point B. Your story is about fulfilling a need or a problem or a desire. If your brand satisfies a problem, the arch is a person going from having a problem to understanding that your brand will solve that problem. If your brand is fashion-related, for instance, the arch is going from not knowing what to wear to the office party to seeing that dress, causing a stir.
Another arch is someone who is bored of all their article games in thinking that your article game is just what they need to relieve their boredom. Every story needs an arch. Another convention is conflict. Typically, a story needs conflict for branding. I say a story needs resolution. If the arch is the bridge resolution is the final destination, it’s the engagement with the brand, whether that engagement is a purchase or acquisition of certain services.
Well, this isn’t a story element. It’s the outcome. A branding story always aims for as a set of conventions. Each one of these seven has its role to play in conveying relevance and uniqueness to a brand story’s audience. So, to recap: the story is comprised of seven elements: a central premise, a three-dimensional character, a confined space, a protagonist and antagonist an arch and resolution. We will be exploring these in this lecture, as well as the following lectures within this unit.
Keeping these seven elements in mind in this lecture, we will be exploring two critical aspects of storytelling, developing an understanding of why storytelling establishes audience, connections and developing an understanding of strategic storytelling element. In addition to seven storytelling elements, strategic brand stories conveys six levels of meaning and I’ll briefly introduce what these are now.
The first is the attributes of a brand, in other words, what it is that makes a brand different and unique. The second level of meaning is the benefits of a brand. The third is a brand’s values. The fourth is a brand culture. For instance, a pehoe Apple has a culture about innovation. Jaguar has a culture of luxury and elegance Minnie’s ministry of sound has a culture of fun and hedonism. The fifth is the personality of a brand in the 6th level of meaning is understanding its audience through tone of voice vocabulary.
Images, music – in other words, all of the things that a brand story uses to convey, meaning. So, let’s spend some time exploring brand attributes brand attributes address specific aspects of a brand. In other words, they signify the basic nature of a brand. They are a bundle of features that highlight the physical and personality aspects of a brand attributes are developed through images, actions or presumptions.
They are a collection of characteristics, personality elements and associations that make a brand uniquely yours boiled-down. It’s what you bring to the table that no one else can attributes convey. Uniqueness attributes, convey uniqueness and distinctiveness. Attributes can also convey a brand’s value and its promise understanding your brand’s attributes helps you define the confined space. Your story must work with them.
You can think of this element as a filter filtering out everything that is extraneous to your brand story. To keep it on point. You can also think of it as a boundary or a frame for a conversation. Keeping your basic story focused and concise within a brown story. Attributes will always be the central premise. Specific attributes can also be the three-dimensional character, or sometimes even the protagonist, which one it is will depend on the story you want to tell and that story’s point the attribute you wish to tell a story about may also influence how you want to tell that story.
In other words, determine whether you’re confined space will be a short article, a blog post, a press release an image, a some of the form of communication. With your audience, understanding your brand’s, unique combination of attributes helps you establish it convey the following things: you are different. The clarity of the message you want to deliver to your brand story, the perception and audience has of your brand.
This perception should be heightened and strengthened, strengthened by every brand story. You tell or brand experience that you share two-way loyalty. Your end of the bargain is not wasting your audience’s time. Each and every story you tell or experience you share has to be meaningful and relevant to your audience. Your loyalty to your audience should, in the medium to long term, result in your audience being loyal to your brand.
To illustrate the point about Brown difference on the screen or two very popular brands, of coffee, keeping the concept of difference in mind. They are at the end of the day, both just cups of coffee and your opinion. What makes one different from the other, what Association do you have for each one of them think about the brand messages and their advertising, which one do you listen to and why? How does the branding messages for each influenced you do they do their messages influence? You spend a little bit of time thinking about this pause, the article here, if you want to spend a few minutes just thinking about these, your answers to these questions you’ll be answering similar questions these in the scenario and the template exercises that accompany this session brand Benefits are about what it is.
Your brand does if a brand exists to solve a problem than how exactly does it solve that problem in a way that no other brands can if it exists, to fill a void or a need or desire, then how does it fill this in a way that A similar brand can’t what positive experience action or outcome can your brand provide. This is another aspect that relates to the central premise, part of the story. It is also the arch that leads to a resolution.
Brand values explain how you can prove what you can do and why you can do it better than your competitors without a unique value proposition. Your brand lacks focus and leaves an audience confused. The more value that your Brown brings to the market into an audience. The stronger your brand can be. This needs to be something beyond a profit motive. Why are you passionate about what it is that you do? Brand values relates to the protagonist element of your storytelling.
Remember in branding the protagonist is the problem the needs requirement or want that your brand promises to solve or satisfying solving or fulfilling is its function and its value to get to the root of your brand’s value. Ask yourself these following questions: who are we? What do we stand for? What do we do for our audience? How does our audience see our brand and what do they think it stands for now enter your story’s protagonist who solely exists to answer just these questions, the central premise of your story solely exists to allow the protagonist to answer a specific question.
The penny has probably started to drop why this approach is more powerful, more effective than merely bombarding people with just the standard by this message and why we’re spending so much time in the first in this first lecture for this session, covering story to storytelling, hopefully, you’ve Begun to see the relevance between the seven storytelling conventions brand attributes and how strategically produced brand stories can use these to create associations about a brand that links to memory.
If not, don’t worry this, this is a theme that will be developing far more fully over the next couple of slides. So what is this thing? We call brand culture. Let me spend a little time answering that by outlining what creating a brand culture actually accomplishes, a brand culture creates a sense of community with this audience. It’s the shared aspect of storytelling and all of the elements that go with that story.
Each element speaks about your brand’s: they create associations that should mean something and stand for something. It’s the act of sharing, whether it’s experiences, knowledge time, advice, ideals, beliefs or things. All of this creates a culture or an environment. A brand culture creates an experience with its audience. It’s actually audience focused. It develops a sense of empathy. A brand lets its audience know that it understands what it is they want need or requires.
A brand culture also defines your brand’s ethos. It is the proof that you walk the talk. It’s the proof that your motivation isn’t all about the money that there is a genuine passion on your part for doing whatever it is that you do this aspect links to your stories, central premise. It can also be your story’s protagonist and also its character, which one will again depend on the story that you want to tell and the reason why you want to tell it okay, so what’s brand personality, all about then Brown personality is it’s a set of human Characteristics and attributes that are attributed to a brand name, it’s something to which an audience can relate to you at an emotional level, and this is the added value that our brand gains, apart from its functional benefits.
Think again, back to that Dyson example that I gave just like any other Hoover, but when you really start drilling down into it, it’s all about the lifestyle and actually not just owning a Dyson but having a Dyson home brand personality is a hundred percent about the Three-Dimensional character aspect of your storytelling: this is something we’ll be discussing in greater detail over the next few slides.
Why is having a brand personality? Important? It’s about establishing a perceptive difference in uniqueness, using personality archetypes gives your brand to personality and a story that everyone can understand and relate to both internally and externally to your business or your service. Art fork records personality was kind of like the older, older brother or sister. You want it to be when you group, when you grew older or a cool, older, cousin or a hip uncle most families have one of these.
Their tastes are a bit ahead of the times, but they’re unquestioned when they speak. Everyone listens to what they have to say. They don’t follow trends, they make the trends they had, that undefinable and unquantifiable it or x-factor, and yet they remain very grounded and very down to earth. They’re, not arrogance, which kind of makes them even cooler. They also like to share. It was the right character for the company and one that worked and still works incredibly well, once established, it was a brand personality that worked across cultures and geographies that cool family member personality is universal.
Considering the majority of record labels, don’t even have a brand personality. The fact that aardvark had won much last one that worked well, may the label stand out in a very positive way even more. It was no accident that the label attracts the audience that it does. We were very clear about who we were as a brand. What we had to offer and why we were passionate about the business that we were in our brand stories in character clearly delivered the message.
There are five basic dimensions of brand personality which you can see here on the screen, and I apologize again. This is part of the reason why I split this overall lecture into two halves. I’m heating you with rather a lot in this one so between you know, seven but storytelling elements, six levels of meaning, and now we have five personality dimensions in the table. You’ll see a dimension name like sincerity and the traits that are most often associated with that dimension.
In the case of sincerity, the traits most often associated with sincerity are dermis, disa, t, honesty, genuineness and cheerfulness. This is an area that has undergone extensive research for decades. Hence the identified traits associated associated with each one of these five dimensions. You are quite literally looking at the results of hundreds of millions of pounds worth of marketing research.
While this money and interest spent on brand personality, people make purchasing decisions based on any number of associations, they have with an individual brand and companies spend millions on advertising and marketing activities so that they can influence what those associations might be. Just as we each choose. Our friends, based on their personalities, brands, can elicit the same sort of response and consumers understanding your brand’s personality will transform how you approach an audience.
It’s also one of the fundamental foundations of creating a branding community. Let’s look at the first dimension sincerity. Consumers interpret sincere brands, is being down-to-earth, honest, wholesome and cheerful so using, I don’t know julia roberts as an example of a actor or actress brown, but the house sincerity associated with it sure some people will find julia roberts annoying, but most people find her endearing.
The kind of woman you could sit down with for a chinwag at the kitchen table next up is excitement. The most exciting brands are daring, spirited, imaginative and on the cutting edge of things not only are Burton Snowboards on the cutting edge of technology and performance. The products bearing the burden names are designed with their audience and minds, funky, graphics and for thinking designs make Burton a leader in their competitive industry.
Next up is competence, reliability, intelligence and success are the traits best associated with brands associated with competence. Even in these trying economic times, there are a few financial service firms that still manage to play well in in an audience’s mind, Ernst & Young is the stable, successful smart guy next door. Who can tell you how to transform your business? Sorry for the sirens? It’s just proven to be one of those days really.
Next up we have sophistication a brand that is sophisticated, is viewed as charming and fit for the upper classes. When it comes to esteem, in seemingly eternal longevity, the chanel brand is unequaled in good times and bad. This brand remains strong as a symbol of life lived in all the right places, doing all the right things last we have ruggedness. Interestingly, an audience picks up on this personality dimension quite well.
Rugged brands are seen as outdoors in tough. The North Face has built an empire by outfitting people who actually do Chris carry things outdoors as well as those who just want to look good now. In most cases, a brand only has one dimension. There are others like aardvark, who have more than one and I’ll explain how this works overall, aardvark mixed sincerity with excitement, both of these dimensions captured its brand personality.
Now, where things get a bit, tricky was defining a dimension for aardvarks different audiences aardvark, not only releases albums within staggeringly different music genres. It sells music to the public and to other companies, so taking the first part of that first selling, music to the public. We couldn’t brand our alternative rock releases, the same way that we branded our minimalist electronica releases that it just wouldn’t work.
Alternative rockers, wanted, ruggedness and excitement. Minimalist electronica lovers wanted sincerity and sophistication with the Dasha competence. We reflected each tribes, dimension, preferences and all of our branding messages to each all the while making sure the overall look feel and style were congruent to the overall aardvark brand. In other words, we played with various aspects of the overall brand character and personality and tailored each to every genre of music that we released.
The fun was in developing an overall brand personality and character, an umbrella or master personality, as it were. That could enable us to do all of this. An additional layer of complication was licensing and selling our music Jude’s strategic business partners. Partnership deals with international music download providers, other record labels, other music publishers and people who rented our music for television, film and gaming game production companies was a large part of the overall business and it would have been really inappropriate to send another business.
The same kind of branding stories or have the same kind of branding character as those that we sent to the public when it came to our business partners. Competence was the defining personality dimension with a dash of excitement and sincerity, and if this sounds like having multiple personalities, it kind of is most entertainment. Companies do have multiple faces. We have to it’s all about understanding the wants and needs of the various tribes who make up our overall audience in what’s meaningful and relevant to each one of them.
If you go on to own or handle a company, that only requires one dimension, be very, very thankful and be very, very grateful. The point of the aardvark example is this understanding these characteristics for your brand’s, but, more specifically for your audience, support you in framing your strategic branding, storytelling, okay. So what is brand audience you’ve already done a bit of reading about this and you’ve heard it and wanted to the articles that you viewed already an audience is what we used to refer to as consumers or customers.
An audience is also composed of distinct, individual tribes. What we used to refer to as demographics, traditional marketers, still use the terms, consumers, customers and demographics? I don’t it kind of a lot of the kind of newer generation of marketers. They don’t either. Is that I’m not alone more and more marketing people have begun. Abandoning those old fashioned terms for audience and tribes, so why would we do that terms like consumer customer and demographics, dehumanize people? They turn living people into an abstraction and other that is reduced to use statistics or a percentage point they’re? Not us.
We can do horrible things to them like spamming in direct mail, because we no longer see them as being human. Like us, consumers, customer and demographics, traditional marketers, see them as just the life support systems for wallets purses or checking accounts. That’s all they’re worth audience and tribe’s is an affirmative view. People who think in these terms want to exchange experiences and yes, goods, products and services as well, but what we want to do these things in a more positive way, a way that isn’t reductionist.
We see audiences and tribes as humans they’re, one of us. They have thoughts and feelings and opinions and aspirations, as well as wallets purses and checking accounts. While they may all sound slightly hippie dippie a way to approach this kind of work. The rewards on many different levels makes the effort worth it. Audiences are loyal. Audiences can also advocate on your brand’s behalf numbers and statistics can’t advocate, and they never will before.
Listening to this last part of the lecture, I suggest that you refer back to your notes about the seven elements of a story which, just as a reminder, the central premise: the three-dimensional character, the confined space, the protagonist, the antagonist of the arch and the resolution, and Really understand what each one of these elements are and what they contribute to a story. I’d also suggest revisiting your notes about the six levels of meaning which, just in case you forgotten our brand attributes brand benefits, brand values, brand culture, brand personality and audience understand the relationships in the interactions between the seven story, elements and six levels of meaning.
You will need to relate what you learned in the first half of this lesson to the last bit of brand storytelling that we’re about to cover here. We will be building on that knowledge, which you will need in order to complete this scenario and the template exercises for this session. A good strategic brand story is also measurable. In other words, your brand’s story is the most important statement you can make to ensure it’s as powerful as it can be document your story and ask these three questions.
Number one. Is it relevant by relevant, I mean you can state what you think is important, but the only thing that matters is that it’s important to your audience make sure your language feels like it belongs to them. The second question: is it valuable by valuable I mean, does your brand story deliver real value to the lives of your audience if it isn’t immediately evident, go back and craft the statement, so it delivers the value third question: is it extendable and by extent extendable? I mean: can your brand story extend across your entire? Offering can it grow with you into the future, make sure that your story has enough depth and again think about the example that I gave for that umbrella personality for aardvark? That’s a good example of making something extendable here, I’m going to give you some storytelling secrets: have you ever read a corporate website, that’s so dry and so factual? It nearly puts you to sleep.
Conversely, have you read one of those about us page that was so painstakingly detailed? You know the ones that kind of say it started when I was born in a small town and college. I studied then, 10 years after that project we decided to, and it just goes on and on and on in my new detail, so much so that you’re utterly confused by the second paragraph. Another thing to keep in mind: that’s basically don’t do that.
Keep things nice clean and streamlines another secret. It’s a story! Writing have you accomplished something unimaginable overcome an impossible hardship over joy to find your passion tell your audience about it. These are evergreen ideas and emotions that will always resonate with your audience. It shows you’re genuine and it shows it again beyond a profit motive. You have a real passion for doing the thing that it is that you do challenge yourself to tell your anecdotes in two or three sentences to stay on course.
This is a topic will be going into far far more in depth than the whole kind of writing more effectively online course, but for now just kind of think about how you can put things in a very, very succinct way, some more storytelling secrets if you’re a New customer or new client met you in person. After reading your website, or blog with your, be a big disconnect between that and your real personality, showcase, your personality and unique style by telling your story in your own voice give your audience a glimpse into the kind of person or brand that you are this.
Should this will always show you and demonstrate your passion and the next one stumped on how to embrace your voice on paper risk? Looking like a crazy person and actually say out loud the story, you want to tell online even record it with your smartphone or one of those dictaphones transcribe it and then edit it just to round out the edges and make sure that everything is smooth. If you saw clothing, that’s primarily aimed towards professional twenty-something, women want to think about creating a blog or a blog series, at least that offers fashion advice and tips for dressing well at work or outfits that take you from the desk to drinks.
Afterwards, you get the idea, there’s kind of stories tell the stories your audience want in need to hear another little tip is um devote 30 minutes to getting to know your audience better. What are they reading? What do they comment most on? What are the biggest challenges? Craft blog posts addressing what you’ve learned and in doing so remember the personality dimensions, but also remember the six levels of meaning brand attributes, benefits, values, culture, personality and audience that wraps things up for this lecture.
I wish you all the best for your work on the scenarios in the template that accompany this session, and I will see you in the next session.
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