Tell a story, strengthen the brand: an advertising executive explains how the basic components of story making can be employed to enhance branding and other marketing efforts.

AuthorSignorelli, Jim

Editor's Note:

At one time or another, many of us have assisted in formulating a: creative brief, a new 'brand or a unique selling proposition.

In this article, advertising executive Jim Signorelli describes a technique called StoryBranding, which uses the power of storytelling to enhance such marketing efforts as the creation of new brands or unique selling propositions.

Among other things, the technique uses "I am statements."

Signorelli has worked for national advertising agencies for decades, and his clients have included well-known national banks.

A FEW YEARS AGO, I WAS SUMMONED TO VISIT WITH A CLIENT'S MARKETING TEAM to discuss plans for a new brand campaign for a well-known bank. To protect the innocent (and myself), let's just call it the Last National Bank. I listened intently through eight hours of charts, diagrams, research summaries and shifted paradigms. My job was to sift through all this information to find the unique selling proposition, or USP, and articulate it in a creative brief. At the conclusion of the meeting, the client asked to see the start of the creative brief the next morning. I saw this merely as a test to see if I was listening. Since I had been writing the brief in my head all day and merely needed to play back words on paper, I responded with a confident yes, without hesitation.

The next morning, as I sat in my hotel room over coffee and the dreaded thought of another eight-hour meeting, I started filling out the brief. As I was writing, I caught myself asking questions like, "Will they prefer this word over that?" or "I wonder if they'll be tripped up by the way I paraphrased their diagram," etc. As I was tying myself up in rhetorical knots, the phone rang. It was my colleague asking how long it would be before we could show them their brief, It was in that moment that everything changed.

"Let me call you right back," I said. ...

Their brief. I was writing their brief, as I had so many times before, simply to win their approval: to assuage the client's concerns and let them know that "we get it." Not once while writing did I ask myself if my words would trigger creativity, inspire new thinking or truly help the creative team understand the prospective buyer's problems. For instance, this brief was asking for facts about the prospect, such as demographics, psychographics, ranked importance of features--things that could be assigned a number. And if there was anything said about the emotional state of the prospect, the description had to be stated as an explanation of how the prospect might be feeling (e.g., "the prospect is psychologically distressed, despondent and feeling a certain level of anxiety over his lack of control"). Beyond this, there was very little that would help anyone know what it was like to be this prospect or to help anyone empathize with his or her...

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