Your Brand Storytelling Checklist: Everything You Need to Craft Your Brand’s Story
On the first day of her high school journalism class, Nora Ephron’s teacher gave the class an assignment. The students were to write the lede of a news story, adapted from the following information: Kenneth L. Peters, the principal of Beverly Hills High School, announced today that the entire school faculty will travel to Sacramento […]
Emotional Branding: How Consumers Make Subconscious Choices
David Hume had his work cut out for him as the title of his 1739 masterwork implied. The British philosopher’s “A Treatise of Human Nature” surveyed the work of ancient and modern thinkers with a skeptical eye. Chief among Hume’s criticisms was an insight about our bias when assessing human choice and action: We give […]
5 Common Mistakes in Building Brand Trust
In July of 2016, Wells Fargo was the envy of many financial institutions. Relatively untarnished by the post-Recession ire directed at many of its peers, the company’s stock had surged 26% since the depths of financial crisis. Merely 15 percent of consumers felt negative sentiments towards the brand, while 60 percent viewed the brand positively. […]
Achieving Trust Through Action: How to Build Brand Trust in 7 Steps
It was just days before the wedding, and Jay was poised to attend shoeless. To make matters worse, he was the best man. He’d ordered the shoes the groom had selected from Zappos, but they were routed to the wrong location in a cruel postal error. When he called UPS, begging them to reverse their […]
Successful Brands Begin with Strong Values
There is a heightened focus today on how to align touch points in every channel to create a powerful and seamless brand experience. However, despite all the talk about marketing and IT converging, Big Data and the like, there is one inescapable fact that must be considered in order to create a truly meaningful omni-channel […]
Why Having a Brand Story is <br> Your Most Important Asset
St. Lucia has been called the Jewel of the Caribbean, and it is indeed an island that perfectly embodies all the ideals of an island. However, a sparkling location and glorious beaches are only small parts of why The BodyHoliday is one of the most unusual stories in the annals of Caribbean tourism. The hotel’s […]
Building Brand Loyalty: <br> Start with Customer Communication
Back in the year 2000, during branding’s medieval period, I authored a book called “Emotional Branding.” It was met with reasonable success, probably because it was the first book ever written on the crazy notion that brands are all about feelings rather than mere transactions. Perhaps it was ahead of its time, but to paraphrase […]
It’s Marketing, Not Magic
There have been a lot of meaningful examples recently of the ways in which behavioral economics can change consumer behavior. When The Economist offered consumers two subscription levels, the majority of people kept choosing the cheaper, less ideal version. Yet when they introduced a third, more costly option, people suddenly began purchasing the slightly more […]
The Brand is Not Part of the Business; It IS the Business
People don’t invest a lot of time on details. They sort out the promise a brand makes and the meaning it evokes. That’s it. That’s all you get, nothing more, and nothing less. They create a short, simple mental model of how your brand enhances their own identities. To them, the brand they have in […]
Every Brand is a Story. How Will Yours Be Told?
Storytelling is the most elemental form of human communication. People pass along their brand experiences to others in the form of a story. This is how the human brain processes and defines information. It notes something, pulls up the name, attaches meaning to it and uses that information to define the value of that thing. […]
Higher-Purpose Branding
IBM is an example of a company with integrity and authenticity, and as the best business leaders know, these are the two words that most draw any of us to a great brand. IBM’s mission is to show us how technology can improve the world. British retailer Marks & Spencer promotes more than the goods […]
Doing Well By Doing Good
An effective brand’s most important reason for being comes in the articulation of its purpose or mission. A mission is no longer an exclusively internal consideration to be shared among the brand’s personnel. It is not something you write casually and pin on the boardroom wall for occasional reference. If it is to be pinned […]
