Your Brand, too full of “stuff?”
What could you take away?
In the question of our search for full and robust brands, building them, finding the heart of them, it becomes a query — “when is too much?”
Sometimes, it’s better to stay at the heart — the work that resides at the center of that offering proposition. The heat lies at the heart — that’s the point of compelling magnetism for many: those that work within the brand and those that reside without, the circling and rippling community of relationships, the people that hold and carry away the story.
In a manner, brands will lie closest to the dimensionality of the core offering — what is the reason for being? Is that to fulfill a hunger on the part of a customer? A need to clothe? A need to change and transit? In erecting a pyramid of values and offerings, there will be a clustering that ties to the key premises of the offered promise.
“We feed people and make them feel better and happier.”
Which might lead to:
“We use the best and healthiest ingredients to make people healthier, stronger and more resilient.”
“We clothe people that keep them looking the best to their own sensibilities of personal style.”
Which might lead to:
“We keep people warm — we design and create clothing for people that like to get out to the edge, thrive and explore in extreme conditions and feel that they need clothing protection and safety.”
In these two incidents, a foundation that speaks and spreads out to detailing the layering of experience. People generally regard brands as a statement — supremely simplistic in intention:
“This tastes really good, I like it, and eat a lot of this product — I feel good about it.”
Or, to clothing:
“I stay really warm, I know I can go further and rely on this line of gear.”
In the modeling of these two simplistic framings, it will come down to what feels right at the heart of the brand, the promise and mission of its offering, and building stories and activations around this center of the brand universe.
To expanding that, it might be said that a brand universe becomes a world of worlds — there are, in the case of food, as noted above:
ingredients,
people that farm and make products,
the teams that work around the brand,
the experiences that one senses at retail, at shelf, and out in the fielded events that bring the brand world, in its quintessential universe, to life.
The point would be, stay close to the key binding amalgam that generates the alchemy between
the idea,
the making
and the outcomes in delivery.
Don’t forget where, and why, your brand started and hold that as a braided attachment to the key points of embrace in the brand storytelling.
Hold that knot work close at hand — and then allow a journey.
People will embrace the journey to the Light of your Story, or they will discard and forget it.
Fill the layering of that telling in a manner that, in whichever way a person comes in contact with a brand, they hold and understand the core premise, emboldened with stories that keep reaching back to that premise.
So if, for example, it’s about feeding — most of us know that our continuing relationship to feeding is what tastes good. So to feeding and taste, these become the central point of activation. Everything comes from that, all stories reach back and support that storytelling hearth. That is where the fire is, and for those that gather around the fire for the hearth-told tales of brands — and fire and brand are inextricably linked — find the center.
Kindle that flame.
And relegate and remove the rest as distractions.
Personality and brand attributes need to sync up and synchronize with
that foundational synthesis of layered storytelling.
Everything else becomes a distraction.
So in the instance of clothing – if the ware is wholly about warmth and protection from the extreme, everything has to come back to that — materials, stitching, detailing, closures, buttons, snaps, garment structuring — the story always goes to the center of the premise.
Imagery, messaging, promise, delivery.
That formula becomes the foundation of how all the worlds within worlds are built, rippled out as a wave of sound, meaning, form and content.
Focused.
Simpler.
Cleaner.
Clearer.
Faster.
Tim | GIRVIN Anaheim, Disney Studios
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WEAVING BRANDSTORIES
CROWD MIND | EXPERIENCE DESIGN | MEMORY STRATEGY
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