THE SAVORY OBSERVATIONS AND USEFUL ANECDOTES OF AN
Artful Realist
My name is LAURENCE VINCENT. I'm a brand strategist, author, speaker, photographer and lovable nerd based in Los Angeles, California. When I'm not writing here about brands and things that inspire me, I look after The Brand Studio at United Talent Agency. I believe brands must stand for real value; and that people value brands that fulfill a promise through artful experiences.
Posts on brand
Happy Face by howzey on Flickr.
I was recently asked a question that probably seems painfully obvious to answer. Why do so many serious brands create whimsical brand campaigns? You know the type — the old Washington Mutual Woo-hoo campaign for banking is a good example. The answer is: because they want you to like them.
Favorability is one of the most frequently used measures of brand health. We measure the degree to which a consumer likes or dislikes a brand because it is a somewhat reliable indicator of brand equity. In fact, a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research found that consumers consistently made better judgments about brands when they were in a positive mood. Thus, making a potential customer smile might encourage them to try or buy your brand.
While advertisers often rely on this strategy by delivering humorous campaigns that make us laugh and smile, too many brands forget the lesson when they deliver their brand experience. A great campaign won’t save the day when a customer is waiting for 20 minutes on a phone tree, getting lost in the bad information architecture of your website, or wandering aimlessly through a retail store trying to find your product. Experiences like those—which are so close to the actual moment of choice—often have people frowning. Which begs the real question: what are you doing to put your customers in a good mood when they’re ready to buy?
TweetStorytelling Architecture
At their best, brands tell stories. Sometimes it is overt, such as when they advertise, and sometimes it is subtle, such as when they cue a story already in your head with a brand interaction. Because stories are fundamental to the richness of our experiences, it’s no wonder that brand managers talk a lot about brand stories, brand storytelling, brand narrative, and the like. Storytelling has been en vogue with brands for years now, even before I tackled the subject in my 2002 book, Legendary Brands. The trouble is, while brand managers want their brands to tell stories, they don’t know how to systematize an approach.
Over the course of the last year, I’ve been paying particular attention to the practical demands of brand storytelling—looking for ways to help my clients express a brand voice and execute compelling storytelling on their own. On a few recent assignments, we introduced a new tool for clients: storytelling architecture. What is it? At the most rudimentary level, it’s a flexible framework designed to help writers bring brand copy into voice. It does this by suggesting structural patterns that fit the brand. So, for example, if we had a client with a brand story rooted in personal experience, we might suggest one architectural pattern that uses personal anecdotes to humanize the brand and connect it to the bigger story.
The best example of story patterns in action is the MasterCard Priceless campaign. The storytelling architecture relies upon telling the story through purchases. Each purchase builds dramatic tension. The denouement occurs with the final element, which has no price. That example is heavily tied to the brand advertising, but there’s no reason the pattern could not extend to other brand touch points. In musical notation, that pattern could be expressed as A-A-A-B, where the A’s are the verses and the B is the chorus.
But that’s only one pattern example. We’ve also looked at genre. A genre is a meta-pattern. It is storytelling architecture that defines the conventions of the story to be told. Audiences like genres because genre sets expectations and creates a shared set of knowledge. For example, if you were to tell a vampire story, the audience would have a number of pre-conceived assumptions as a result of the genre. They would expect that the vampire needs blood to live. They would assume the vampire cannot be exposed to daylight. And they would probably assume that the vampire was averse to religious symbols. Certainly, many vampire stories have shunned these conventions, but that’s why we love vampire stories—to see how the new storyteller plans to deal with the genre. That’s why True Blood is gaining an audience.
Brands can take the same approach. Their storytelling architecture can rely upon genre to familiarize brand audiences with the bigger story, then the brand can choose which conventions of the genre to observe, and which to break. W Hotels has chosen a very specific genre in which to build its brand. It is linked to social currency. W defies some of the standard conventions of upscale hotel branding in order create its own unique storytelling approach. The architecture uses genre to structure the brand experience.
This work is ongoing, and requires a lot more illustrations than I have space to present. But the work in the subject area is proving helpful to clients and engaging for our team.
TweetWhy I love the Miller High Life campaign
Too many brands and advertisers try to sell you on cultural norms — you should use our product because everyone else does. They try to pander to social paranoia. There’s nothing I love more than a brand that says, “maybe you’re not for us.” The new Miller High Life campaign achieves that goal. It takes a decidedly strong point of view with a comic twist. It’s tied to sports and manhood and common sense, and it delights in every way. I may actually be thirsty for a Miller.
Copyright 2012 by Laurence Vincent
