Brand storytelling examples showing how a successful brand story takes consumers on a hero’s journey

No one’s heart is wooed by product capabilities and financials alone. What you need is a good story — it’s the key to making your brand a living, breathing thing. Investors, employees, and consumers will rally around a story, and the best business leaders understand that storytelling has the power to change minds and spark action.

Take High Brew Coffee, for example. Its story could easily have been about its product: canned cold-brew coffee. But that’s not very original, and it certainly doesn’t capture the imagination. Instead, High Brew’s story is all about adventure — founder David Smith was inspired to start the business after enjoying cold-brew coffee during warm nights navigating the Caribbean on a sailboat with his family.

When investing in content marketing, it’s necessary to go beyond describing what…

How you can develop a brand which lets you stand out from the competition

A business can have the best product or service in the world and offer it at the best price and still fail. Why is that? Because they fail to differentiate themselves from the competition and show a clear and compelling reason why potential clients should do business with them. The key is creating a solid differentiation strategy that will set you apart in the marketplace and show prospects why it’d be foolish to go anywhere else. Business differentiation is the process of making your firm stand out in a crowded field of me-too competitors and a differentiation strategy is the guidebook for how to do it. As a digital marketer, you can do this efficiently and cost-effectively using a variety of digital tools. This blog post will show you how. Developing and implementing a differentiation strategy is a five-step process…

The top strategies for retail brands looking to compete online with the digital natives and pureplays

Last year Accenture’s Love Index report discovered that 4 out of the top 5 most loved brands were Digitally Native Vertical Brand (DNVB). These are 'online pureplays' brands which are born from, and function solely in the digital landscape like Netflix and Amazon. But surprisingly, the fifth company to have made that list was Walmart due to the digital experiences that it was creating. There’s a lot of emphasis on creating digital experiences and equally a lot of news around brick-and-mortar having hit a glass ceiling; It’s this dynamic that led the Huffington Post to recently report that nobody knows what’s going on with online shopping. We beg to differ. You do know what’s going on, the difficulties for a multichannel brand is knowing how to execute efficiently and track accurately. If you can relate to…

The Focus is now on Personalization across Various Channels to Drive Retail Business Growth

Ever tried going back to early nineties and visualizing how shopping used to be in those days. You would go to a store or a mall, preferably the one for which you don’t have to take a detour. Most of your shopping would be completed on weekends with family tagging along. You would rely on your friends’ advice, magazine reviews and TV ads for deciding what to buy. Your friends would also call to inform you about the latest deal or clearance sale. Fast track to the present day and you have Amazon Go. No Cashier, no checkouts; just visit the store, pick up what you want and simply walk out of the store. The shopping experience for customers has completely transformed over the years. The…

If your app marketing is reliant on a single channel, then you are setting it up to fail

When you develop a new app, all your focus on is how great your app is. But most of the developers forget that once the app is developed you need to have the right marketing strategy in place in order to reach your potential customers. This is the time when you need to decide if you are going to focus on a single marketing channel to promote your app or apply a 360 degree approach. This article will explain you why it’s important to exploit multiple channels for your marketing efforts, but before that let’s get to know what is Single and Multi channel marketing.

What is Single Channel Marketing?

Single channel marketing tends to focus on one type of marketing activity. Let’s say if you want to get more downloads for your app, you are…

Adidas just made a colossal bet that could be a game changer, or a catastrophic mistake.

Last week, Adidas announced they were going all-in on digital advertising. Chief Executive Kasper Rorsted said he was going to ditch TV ads and instead spend 100% of his budget on digital to capture younger consumers, a crucial demographic for the sports clothing line. This way, he said, Adidas would quadruple e-commerce revenues by 2020. “All of our engagement with the consumer is through digital media and we believe in the next three years we can take our online business from approximately one billion (euro) to four billion (euro) and create a much more direct engagement with consumers," he said. Predictably, the internet exploded. It was a hell of a time to bet all your chips on digital marketing, said critics. Digital ad giants Facebook and Google are now embroiled in full-blown scandals and a quick glance at today’s CampaignLive reveals…

An ineffective brand strategy is likely blocking your success in digital marketing, here's 3 factors for success

We take it for granted that digital channel management is a core marketing activity now, and yet our own recent survey highlighted that a digital strategy isn’t a ubiquitous component of everyone’s marketing plan, as much as we might think it ought to be. But, let’s say that it is, that we’ve all got a solid digital strategy, that we’re using frameworks like RACE - are we done? I’d suggest far from it - and that there is a bigger issue at hand blocking your digital success, which is often surprisingly "missing-in-action"  and that’s a coherent brand strategy. In fact, brand strategy is an obvious yet secret ingredient for modern digital marketing which most companies that I meet or work with simply don’t have an eye on, there’s no solution in place…

Rise above cyclical trends and avoid hopping on bandwagons - Remember the fundamentals of brand strategy instead.

The first two months of the year are done and dusted. Time to roll up your sleeves and get on with another 10 months of chasing the weekly releases of ‘must-have’ marketing fads promising to shatter disruptive technologies and methodologies (as announced as being disruptive the previous weeks). With so many fads from start-up Davids as well as established marketing Goliaths that promise to help show clients or bosses results, it’s going to be challenging... Just keeping up to date will force you to place marketing tactics before longer-term strategy considerations. However, before you totally write-off strategic planning, here are five branding strategic thinking tips that can actually help you assess whether the latest ‘big thing’ enhances, or detracts from your core brand messaging, philosophy and delivery.

1- Brand purpose

Beyond obvious platitudes such as, “the purpose of…

The term digital branding is often used, but what actually is ‘digital branding’?

As a strategist and brand planner, I find the use of the term 'digital branding' curious. Do we use the term ‘TV branding’ or ‘radio branding’? Digital marketing has emerged as a specialism over the last decade with its origins rooted in direct marketing. The increase in the number of personal devices and their use means brand marketers have many more ways of communicating directly and interactively with their target consumers or customers. Given this, it's no surprise that branding concepts should be applied to digital media and technology to develop brands through interactions with consumers on their digital devices.  We'll look at some of the leading FMCG examples at the end of this article.

Digital branding definition: So, how do I see it? Here's my perspective on "Digital Branding":

"Digital channels and assets are used to communicate a…

Why you need a plan to defend and improve your online reputation

In an online world of viral news articles and social media, your brand’s image is something that can quickly be affected by even the slightest misstep. That’s why protecting your brand’s reputation is more important than you’ll ever realize.

The Significance of Your Online Image

It’s easy for us to forget that the internet is still a relatively new business channel. When we look back on the history of the internet in 25 or 30 years, 2017 will still look very much like the Wild West. Rules are still being developed, concepts are just now being understood, and what works isn’t always clear. But when you cut through all of the unknowns, it doesn’t take an advanced degree to recognize the importance of maintaining a strong online image. Information spreads fast online and you have to keep up. The internet gives everyone a…