brand story

What is a brand story and why does it matter?

There is no more important tool for rolling out brand positioning than a great brand story. The best brand stories can create gravity around a brand and also help build a strong brand community. They show the concepts behind the brand positioning in action, making it more than words on a page.

Does your organization have legends or stories that have been told and retold over the years? How the brand got its name? How the founders of your organization first met? The original problem they were trying to solve by developing your product? Perhaps your particular worldview or internal values became very clear at one moment in the organization’s history. Most organizations have internal legends, stories, and fables that are already being told. Your existing stories and legends are powerful because they are illustrations of who you are and why you do what you do. Often, these stories serve as building blocks for a larger brand story.

A brand story is an attempt to articulate the brand positioning by answering the deepest truths about the brand, things such as:

– Who are we?
– Why are we here?
– What do we care about?
– What do we do?
– Why does it matter?

In all likelihood, your brand story is already partway being told in the form of these stories and legends that follow the brand around everywhere it goes. Consider collecting as many of these stories as you can as background research and inspiration. An authentic brand story won’t just be made up on the spot. Great brand stories have a lineage and a heritage that are built over time and with the hard work and perseverance of many people.

In attempting to articulate the brand story, your job will be part historian, part archeologist, and part sculptor, taking the existing building blocks that have been provided to you by those who built the brand and merging them with the new brand positioning you’ve developed. You’ll need to mold these two views together into an overarching brand story that is both authentic to the brand’s past and relevant to the brand’s future at the same time.

It is hard work creating a great story that will get passed on from person to person. You’ll need to recruit the best storytellers you can find to the cause, including your organization’s top writers, designers, and poets (or if you work with an outside firm, bring their best folks in, too).

But based on my experience helping develop brand stories for organizations over the past decade, I can tell you that the effort is worth it. A great brand story will not only help you attract new people to your brand community, it will become a powerful guiding force within your organization as well.

If you’d like to learn more about the brand stories we created during my time at Red Hat, take a look at the following posts:

– Sharing your brand story (and here’s ours)

– Truth Happens

And here is an example of one of the original Red Hat “legends” that we collected during our time building the brand.

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If you found this post helpful…

Consider taking a look at my new book The Ad-Free Brand (not an advertisement, mind you, just a friendly suggestion:). It has some nice tips for how to build a great brand without the help of… you guessed it… advertising!

Only $9.99 for the Kindle, but available in each of these formats:
Book | Kindle | Nook | EPUB/PDF

Brand positioning tip #13: embedding positioning internally

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? I don’t know the answer, but I can tell you that brand positioning not effectively communicated and embedded both inside and outside your organization will definitely not make a sound.

So how do you ensure your brand positioning exercise isn’t in vain? How do you communicate your positioning both inside and outside the walls of the organization? In these next two brand positioning tips, I’ll try to answer that question. Today, we’ll tackle how to embed the brand positioning within your organization.

So here we are. Your positioning exercise is complete. You’ve identified one or more competitive frames of reference. You have clear points of difference distinguishing you from competitors. You’ve articulated the points of parity you need to achieve. And perhaps you’ve even decided on a brand mantra. Now what?

For most organizations, the next step is to build a plan to embed the positioning internally. Unless you work in a small firm, I’d recommend you don’t build this plan alone. Instead, convene a strategically-chosen team of folks to help you build the right plan for your organization.

Who should be on this team? I’d pick a group of 10 or less people from the following two sources:

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Top 10 Dark Matter Matters posts of 2009

Benjamin sez you all deserve some props!

Ah, late December. The time when bloggers get lazy and start reposting their old crap rather than writing new material. We here at Dark Matter Matters are no exception. For the Dark Matter Matters top 10 posts of 2009, I’ve split the list into two categories. First we have 5 posts that were popular with readers, followed by 5 posts that were popular with, well, me.

Five posts popular with readers:

1. Brand positioning tip #1: points of parity and points of difference: Perhaps it’s the combination of analyzing Mexican food and brand positioning, but this post, the first in a series of tips that I wrote starting in June, is the most read post I’ve done yet on the blog.
2. Tom Sawyer, whitewashing fences, and building communities online:  Written in September, this post was the first in a series about community-building where I talk about the difference between creating communities to do your work for you and being a humble member of a community larger than just you.
3. Brand positioning tip #3: the brand mantra: A short post explaining Scott Bedbury’s concept of a brand mantra.
4. Maslow’s hierarchy of (community) needs: Comparing a company’s community motivations to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, introduces the Iain Gray hierarchy of community needs.
5. The top 10 books behind Dark Matter Matters: Exactly what it says it is. Books that inspire me.

Five posts that hardly anyone read. Give them a chance, people:

1. Tom Sawyer Part 2: where can your company pitch in?: As usual, the sequel isn’t as good as the original, but I still like this post, which has really helped me focus some of my ideas on corporate humility.
2. How to conduct a symphony of communications: Compares the role of a 21st century communications professional to a conductor in a symphony.
3. Sharing your brand story (and here’s ours): Introduced the Red Hat Story book (including a downloadable copy).
4. Why did I just write a post about Viking longships: Compares the job of brand manager to the guy at the front of a Viking longship. Yeah, I wouldn’t read it from that bobo article title either, but this is the kind of post that makes me happy.
5. Markepoetry Part 2: It turns out I have needs: Talking about making (only) myself happy, no list of the Dark Matter Matters posts that no one reads would be complete without including one of my pieces of markepoetry– the language of marketing, made beautiful. Basically, I take real statements that I find in marketing copy and transform them from ugly marketing-ese into poetry. I thought this one was nice.

So as we close out 2009, I just want to say thanks for everything.

I’m approaching one one year of writing this blog, and it sure has been a lot of fun. I still can’t believe I’ve written over 100 posts. What has made it the most fun for me is getting to meet lots of new people, while also becoming closer to people I already know.

I’m looking forward to 2010. I’m sure we’ll have lots to talk about.

How to conduct a symphony of communications

The communications profession is in the midst of a revolutionary change (you might have noticed). In my mind, it boils down to a simple concept:

Old model = company has one voice

New model = company has many voices

Mr Conductor sez: we can make beautiful music together!

Ah, the good old days. It used to be easy to go to the “official company spokesperson” to get the scoop on what “the company” was thinking. Now, with the advent of Facebook, Twitter, blogs, and a bunch of other stuff that probably hasn’t even been invented yet, and the blurring lines between people’s personal and work lives (damn you, Google!), it’s a lot harder for us communications folks to stay in control of how the corporate message comes out.

If you are the head of communications for your company, what should you do? Lock all the doors, scare the employees into online silence, and continue the status quo? This is what some companies are doing. There are very real concerns with how and when employees use social media tools in a work setting.

But ultimately, the shift toward a company of many voices rather than one voice is going to happen whether you like it or not. As Bob Dylan said, “You don’t need a weather man to know which way the wind blows.”

So rather than forcing yourself into a sucker’s choice of “Should I communicate my corporate story well or allow my employees to be using social media at work?” perhaps there is a better question:

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