STORY CRAFTING
A LANDSCAPE OF STORIES
The goal of your brand storytelling may be to deliver results, better engagement, higher traction, higher sales, and/or increased revenue. You may see a gap between the potential of your product and the story that your team is telling. You may see a discord between executive communications and social communications. Either way, the key thing to recognize is that the most overlooked brand insights live in the stories of your leadership, your customers and your team.
So we use the Retellable approach to gather stories as data, condensing, distilling and aligning into a greater collection and a deeper, more cohesive brand experience, resulting in clearer differentiation and relevance to today’s customers. See here for a case study on how a brand story can result in many different outputs across the organization.
Here's the Retellable Approach:
Strategy and Landscape
We will study the various forms that your story shows up in the world, including communications, copy, social media and customer reviews, as well as studying the landscape of your competition. We will work to understand the needs of your key stakeholders, learn your storytelling goals, and begin charting a plan to help you get where you want to go.
Intake
Through a series of interviews, we will do a 360 degree study of your brand storytelling. We'll look for the best stories and storytellers, gathering a sense of who you are and why customers and team members value your brand. We'll look for the most valuable insights and metaphors. And exploring through both a customer and leadership lens, we will dive into your origins, your impacts and your visions as we gather the collection of stories and that make up your brand and inform your greater story.
Shaping
We will work to shape the ideas and data we've gathered into a Brand Story Guide which holds the following: key story insights, poignant quotes and rich metaphors, a collection of retellable stories that give life to your objectives, and one retellable core story direction that connects all the rest. We will iterate with key leadership until we have the right story that carries your brand, and begin work on the right media and application to bring that story to life through various channels. Here's one example of a brand expression that we created for LinkedIn.
Joelle Edwards-Tonks, Chief Sales & Marketing Officer chez Sunlife Mauritius
"I am so grateful to have had the opportunity to have been coached by you Jay! You are an inspiration and a great professional."
Rachelle Diamond, Global Employee Experience Director, LinkedIn
“The idea of a developing a global story with so many moving parts at first seemed impossible, but your approach really worked. First, it brought our team together on a common goal - and then provided such a great group learning experience, with a memorable output that will be shared far and wide. Thank you for everything you did! It was a pleasure working with you.”