PBL 4

What is a brand story and what makes a good brand story?

Brand story has become the new black of marketing.

“A brand story is more than a narrative. The story goes beyond the copy on your website, the text in a brochure, or the presentation used to pitch to investors. Your story isn’t just what you tell people. It’s what they believe about you based on the signals your brand sends. The story is a complete picture made up of facts, feelings, and interpretations, which means that part of your story isn’t even told by you.
Everything you do, from the colours and texture of your packaging to the staff you hire, is part of your brand story, and every element of it should reflect the truth about your brand back to your audience.
If you want to build a successful, sustainable business, a brand that will garner loyalty and, if you’re lucky, become loved, you have to start with your story.”

Source: What Is A Brand Story? (2014, April 13). Retrieved from https://thestoryoftelling.com/what-is-a-brand-story/

What is storytelling and how does it affect people?

"Fundamentally, branding is a profound manifestation of the human condition. It is about belonging: belonging to a tribe, to a religion, to a family. Branding demonstrates that sense of belonging. It has this function for both the people who are part of the same group and also for the people who don’t belong. The roots of branding are profoundly related to the nature of the human condition. A tribe is a brand—religion is a brand. When it manifests itself in a modern, contemporary form, you are likely referring to branding that began in the late 19th century. Then you are probably talking about this in relation to fast-moving consumer goods. But that is a distortion of what branding is. That type of branding is a manifestation of differentiation. It is an attempt to differentiate one fast-moving consumer product from another. When the functional differences are negligible or hardly exist—for example, in terms of price or quality—there is a requirement to create an emotional difference. That is how branding began in relation to fast-moving consumer goods."

"A brand is a promise of a certain kind of consistency and continuity over time. But that’s very different if you’re talking about a long-standing brand like Gold Medal flour or a newer brand like Nike or Apple. What is the promise of Gold Medal flour? The promise is that it’s consistent, it’s reliable, but it’s still flour. Whenever I talk about brands, I always start talking about Gold Medal flour. It’s important to remember that mass consumer brands began as a way of assuring basic quality. But it’s no longer valuable to think about brands in that way, because we have so much quality in the choices available to us now in the United States. Today, value is less about brand attributes, and more about brand meaning. Brands like Nike or Apple associate themselves with a lot of cultural benefits in addition to promising consumers certain brand attributes. And that’s where conscious branding comes in: How do you make these cultural benefits cool at a given moment?"

Source: Understanding How Brands Affect Who We Are & Who We Aspire to Become – Motivated Mastery. (2015, November 16). Retrieved from http://motivatedmastery.com/understanding-how-brands-affect-who-we-are-who-we-aspire-to-become/

What is the role of community management in brand building and how to engage customers?

Analyse or design a brand story for a chosen company.
How could the chosen company build the brand in social media?