The
Fire of Brand:
Is there a story, in a story, in
a dream, in another telling?
Years ago I was talking to
a innovations forum,
a large confederated brand team at Procter & Gamble
about the layering of brand, in story —
this was downtown Cincinnati, Building One —
that grand Oz-like auditorium.
CEO Lafley was there, along with COO, Gilbert Cloyd. We talked about sequencing and layering. Stories have structure.
What is — in that telling — on the surface, and what lies beneath?
And these days, we all know that an engaged community will find out the truth, and what lies beneath. So in any telling, whether made, or found in the history of that narrative, truth be told.
Like the mythic odyssey that is parallel to the strictures of living — life’s journey — that a brand has a life, like a story — there is a beginning positioning, the foundation of the story’s background. There is the beginning of that flavor, the power of the voice — what style, that telling — and who’s that telling for, who’s listening? The point will be the drive to crescendo, the protagonist — that hero’s journeyer, that antagonist or the competitive player to the darker, shadowed side of the story.
Who in this telling is in the light?
And who is silent, hidden, operating on the unseen side?
Words that are unforgettable are emotional. Emotion is motion. Motion is the call to recognition, unforgettability and concretion in re-collection. What might be told, however, is that the story is an unending one — stories emerge, they shine, they find a broad range of listeners, they quiet and dim — they are rewritten and polished to a new shine, they rise again.
In the allegory of light, learning and journey —
brands have a life that shows in their leanings, and learnings,
in the journey of exposure and discovery.
Powerful stories are full of fire, miracle and spectacle, surprise and chance, joy and stumbles — in the broad range of their telling, and that promulgation of that narrative to their communities — they will thrive and be shared, or wither in the unhealthiness of dis-interest and irrelevance. Without the vibrational resonance of a synchronized listening and telling, aligned and magnetically enticing, it’s there, that the story will be shared. Grand brands thrive in the layering of their sharing.
People hold that brand in the context of tenet — it’s a principle from the origin of the word: tenet — the character of “holding.”
A brand well-loved will be held,
and told, bared clear and shared, built and reassembled
in the changing of the time, and language,
to those learned in their listening.
They, engaged, lean in to hear more.
As anyone knows, in the mechanics of attraction and human magnetics,
those that lean in,
do so to get closer to that telling.
Tim | Reykjavik, Iceland
BRANDS, ENTERTAINMENT, EXPERIENCE
–––––
THE STRATEGY OF RE-IMAGINING
HOSPITALITY & GUEST ENGAGEMENT
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