Archive for category branding
Manifesto
Posted by Peter in branding, leadership, positioning on June 2, 2011
Everyone should have one. Explain your concept and how it works. Share your worldview, and what you believe in.
Manifesto
Care and Dare
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Art
Paradox
Metaphor
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Concept
Rehearsal
Performance
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Listening
Learning
Stretching
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Authenticity
Passion
Humor
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Look for beauty…create it if you can
The big hard questions are found in art and the answers to most questions are found in nature.
Create contrast or the clash of opposites–go to extremes and see what happens
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Don’t be too literal or logical…the facts and truth of it aren’t necessarily the same
Keep the facts change the context
Invite objective and creative outsiders look to at it and give you fresh insight
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A Leader uses Story as Strategy and uses Design to tell the Story
Don’t be too attached to “strategy”
Strategy and logic are over-rated
There is no one right way…keep finding what works
Look for patterns
Find the fringe
Find a place where failure is encouraged. In theater we call it rehearsal
Exploit the forces of change
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Give big and take small
Buy low and sell high
Baltimore Branding Workshop
Posted by Peter in branding, leadership, positioning, storytelling on May 16, 2011
Back by Popular Demand — The Creative Alliance presents
The Power of Stories: A Crash Course in Branding
Baltimore, MD—June 4, 2011—Peter Davis, brand strategy consultant with Better Brand Story, returns to Creative Alliance to deliver a third crash course in branding workshop.
WHEN:
Saturday, June 4
1pm – 4pm
WHERE:
Creative Alliance At The Patterson (3134 Eastern Avenue)
FEE:
Advanced registration $100, $85 members. Walk-in $115, $100 members.
TO REGISTER:
Call 410-276-1651 or visit
http://www.creativealliance.org/events/eventItem2571.html
The class is hands-on and limited to ten people who each get personalized attention elevating their personal or organizational story.
Testimonials from the last branding workshop include: “transformative,” “I’ve been thinking about it ever since,” and “in the 6 years I’ve been attending workshops at CA this was by far the BEST experience out of all.”
This workshop is designed to help you understand what branding is and what a high-performing brand can do for you. In this workshop you will:
- Identify what is interesting about your story to the people you do business with
- Learn how to tell a more compelling story about what you do and why it matters
Leave with a killer workbook and a head buzzing with actionable ideas.
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Archetypes
Posted by Peter in Archetypes, branding, positioning, storytelling on March 9, 2011
What system do you use to manage the meaning of your brand through good times and bad?
What archetype is most like your brand and how can you harness the power of that eternal and universal truth to deliver your brand promise to the front line in tact and with impact?
The best system for the management of meaning is the first system–mythology.
Mythology is the most powerful form of storytelling. All societies use mythology and archetypes to deliver meaning. Archetypes are forms or images of a collective nature which occur all over the world. An archetypal brand identity speaks directly to the deep psychic imprint within the consumer, sparking a sense of recognition and of meaning. The unconscious power of an archetype is immense. If the archetype is a conscious system of categorization, then you must be in the correct category or you will lose to the competitor with the better story
The excellent book, The Hero and The Outlaw: Building Extraordinary Brands Through the Power of Archetypes by Margaret Mark & Carol S. Pearson outlines 12 archetypes that are applicable to brand building and how to leverage the one that is most like your brand. Buy it. I’ll help land on your brand archetype and teach you how to anchor your communications strategy with it.
The Power of Stories
Posted by Peter in branding, leadership, storytelling on March 3, 2011
Your company story changes many times before it reaches your employees, customers, investors, and stakeholders. Your message gets weaker as it moves farther and farther from the source.
As a leader, you are your company’s principal storyteller. Employees, customers and investors all look to you to set the theme and develop the plot. Tell a great story and they all want to be characters in it. Every business transaction becomes charged with meaning and drama. In a good story, threats and setbacks are sources of narrative suspense, motivating the protagonists to fresh feats of ingenuity and daring. If you want your employees to act like heroes, you’ve got to provide them with an epic.
Your story brings people together. Crafting a compelling story and nurturing it over time is your most important job.
So what story are you currently telling? Is it keeping your audiences on the edges of their seats? Is it inspiring your employees, enticing your customers, holding your shareholders in thrall?
Anchoring a brand in story isn’t buying into the latest management fad. The client isn’t buying a proprietary process and at the mercy of agency “experts” to translate the process. By emphasizing story (mythology and archetypes) you’re harnessing a living force, primal impulses as old as humankind. It is both old school and cutting edge. Bold yet familiar. It is profitable because the modern world is based on logic and practically fetishizes efficiency and homogeny. Now more than ever people crave the experience of being truly alive and relentlessly search for meaning, even if they have to ritualize it in the form of commerce.
I can help you to craft a better brand story, elevate your brand promise, and signify the meaning of your story across a variety of integrated new world media.
New York Times: In Film And Life, Story Is King
Posted by Peter in branding, creative process, leadership, storytelling on February 27, 2011
What could be better than a successful business person making the Power of Stories case? From an article in the New York Times Business Section. Writer Michael Cieply talks with Peter Gruber (former Chairman of Sony Pictures Entertainment).
Excerpt:
But Mr. Guber, 68, who throws off ideas the way a storm hurls bolts at the prairie, has finally found a pattern in what can seem to be the brilliant disorder of his own thinking. Along the way, he’s also spotted a few things that the movie industry can teach the rest of us.
“I decoded it, I didn’t invent it,” Mr. Guber said — well, shouted, actually — as the energy of telling lifted him several inches above his seat in the second hour of a conversation about his voyage of discovery.
“It’s like a Seurat painting. Lots of dots,” said Mr. Guber, who talked of his wildly eclectic life in the sports and movie industries, as well as a decades-long commitment to teaching at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the dawning realization that something more than nervous energy held it all together.
“But the logic of it is clear to me now,” he said. That logic has to do with story, and how we are wired to organize our lives around it.
His coming to grips with narrative as a force in his own and others’ lives is the stuff of “Tell to Win: Connect, Persuade and Triumph With the Hidden Power of Story,” to be published on Tuesday by Crown Business.
Your customers/clients/audience own your brand
Posted by Peter in branding, positioning, risk, storytelling on February 21, 2011
Open Road
Stories connect author, actor and audience. They also connect business stakeholders, workers and customers.
Harnessing the power of stories is the most effective way to answer the questions: what do you do, why does it matter, what makes you different, where are you going, what stands in your way, and what does change look like when you accomplish your mission?
Theater is the process of signifying and cuing an audience to the meaning of the story. I bring the best practices of theater to business, in order to help you signify the meaning of your brand.
That’s what I think I do.
Peter Bruun, Founder of Art on Purpose, described what I do in this way:
“You’re an interventionist helping organizations with an identity crisis. You’re like an executive coach only for organizations. You help organizations find their soul. Your unique process allows everyone to speak. You synthesize the feedback and use your insights to ask the most difficult questions that the organization has been avoiding.
You’re focus on narrative (versus strategy) is important because the narrative helps the leader get internal buy-in. The narrative also acts like an external beacon to attract talent, funding and resources. I’m not sure what you do is branding. I’m sure that your process is the most valuable deliverable.”
Branding Lesson:
You’re audience or customer owns your brand. What you think is important pales in comparison to the experience they receive.
Story as strategy and design as story
Posted by Peter in branding, creative process, design, positioning, storytelling on January 6, 2011
Lately I’m thinking about design and trying to better understand the relationships between story, strategy and design. Those organizations that artfully weave purpose, passion, performance and aesthetic have high performing brands.
In theater the script is story, the Director provides the strategy, and design permeates every sight and sound the audience experiences. Nothing in theater is arbitrary…nothing. The fewer resources you have the more creative you are. Instead of creating realism on the cheap, you take away everything non-essential to the world of your play. It’s easier to maintain artistic unity with less clutter. What’s left looms large and the meaning of each symbol is clear, if not to the audiences brain, then to the universal subconscious. This is what you want your brand to do. Connect down deep where people make important decisions…emotionally. Value design, it matters. Design helps clear the path so customers can validate their connection to your brand.
Branding versus Rebranding
Posted by Peter in branding, design, positioning, storytelling on January 5, 2011
Ida Cheinman is the Principal and Creative Director at Substance 151, a Baltimore-based regional strategic brand communications firm. Her article, Rebranding: The Moment of Truth is excellent. I want to share it with you. The premise is that you need to “begin with the end in mind,” have a clear vision of the rebrand goals and outcomes. The story of change comes in many forms. This is one.
Ida and I got acquainted last summer over a cup of coffee. I like how her firm, Substance 151 integrates design, story and strategy.
Back in the saddle
Posted by Peter in branding, creative process, storytelling on November 1, 2010
I’ve always claimed that my background in theater is what makes my approach to branding unique. As time went by and I became further removed from the source, I became uncomfortable making that claim. Since moving to Baltimore two years ago, I’ve gotten back into theater. Now I claim that I am a theater person and invite clients to see the work.
The theater creative process is fascinating and I model my brand discovery process on it. It would have been interesting (and useful) to journal each production on the blog as they happened. I just didn’t want to explain it while it was happening. I preferred to stay immersed.
Here’s a synopsis of what I’ve been up to since July:
My short play Bring a Shovel is a Heideman Award finalist for the Actors Theatre of Louisville’s National Ten-Minute Play Contest. This is as good as it gets in the short play contest universe. They will announce the winner in January 2011. Even if it doesn’t win the award it may be produced in their Humana Festival of New American Plays.
I directed Nice Things, by Ken Greller for the Baltimore Playwrights Festival. It was awarded best Play and Best Production by the judges.
I am acting in W by Georg Buchner at Glass Mind Theater in December. We’re in rehearsal now.
I had a staged reading of a one act play Girdle Bound at Mobtown Theatre.
I’m currently writing a one-act play called Just Like Your Mother.
And in between all of that I had a branding engagement with Baltimore Tree Trust. They are a start-up non profit dedicated to helping Baltimore achieve it’s tree canopy goal.
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In the coming weeks I’ll relate the relevant details of each experience and we’ll look for common themes. The point, as always, is harnessing the power of stories to transform people and organizations for the better.
Ideas on when and how to fail
Posted by Peter in Uncategorized, branding, creative process, leadership, risk, storytelling on April 8, 2010
The two most artistically interesting people I know are Liz Lerman and Adrian Danzig. Liz is the founding Artistic Director of Liz Lerman Dance Exchange, and Adrian the Artistic Director of 500 Clown. What do a dancer and a clown have in common? They ask the most daring artistic questions and risk their take on the answer in performance. For each, differently, failure is part of the bargain between them, their ensembles and their audiences.
Whatever question I ask Liz, she will answer with a different proposal and set of questions. This is how she creates art as well. Built into her creation process is the willingness to destroy her own premise, see what holds up, rebuild from there. Knowing what to jettison and what to keep is what distinguishes great artists. She has a book, Hiking the Horizontal: Field Notes From a Choreographer to be published by Wesleyan University press coming in spring 2011. I look forward to reading it.
Liz and I had a conversation about the difference between practice and rehearsal. Practice is skill-based. You practice the individual components of your art: plies at the barre, scales on a guitar, anatomy sketches in charcoal. The goal is perfection. Rehearsal is where you learn what doesn’t work. Rehearsal is where you try things. Where you go for the big “what if.” The goal of rehearsal is failure. If not in rehearsal where? In performance in front of an audience?
Liz and I wondered, if business is theater, then when do business performers (workers) get to rehearse.? If business is theater and process serves as the script, when and where do business performers learn what doesn’t work? When do workers get to build destruction into the business premise and come up with a better one? Unfortunately for customers, workers fail in performance when the stakes are highest. It’s hard to overcome a bad script and a lack of direction. Instead, managers often double down on the ideas and processes that got them in trouble in the first place. Management rarely questions their premise. Artists always do.
Branding Lesson–Build destruction into your own argument, see what holds up, and build around that. Repeat.
500 Clown (there are three of them), also asks big artistic questions. What makes them so unique is that their approach is to stage failure. Yes they use rehearsal to try things and fail, and they aim to demonstrate in performance that failure is part of the human experience, and survivable. A clown by nature subverts authority. To 500 Clown traditional theater itself represents authority. The script is authority. The fourth wall is authority. All must be subverted by clown-play. They’re clowns and clowns screw things up, of course, because they’re human. A clown by nature is also resilient!
The 500 Clown belief system goes like this…
500 Clown believes that life is worth the risk.
500 Clown wants to respect the actor as the primary artist, and not just serve as a mouthpiece for the writer and director.
In live performance it’s the actor, not the writer or director, who charges the moment. The objective is to feel something and do something authentic. 500 Clown wants to show that having a profound experience in public is survivable.
If we succeed, we show the respect for the audience and allow them to have their own profound experience.
* * * That is what good branding is and does! Oh, that business would regard their workers as the “primary artist” versus the owner (author) or manager (director) * * *
500 Clown recently performed 500 Clown Macbeth in Baltimore at the Creative Alliance. Their interpretation is based on a very simple premise: clown want crown. It takes them up to two years to develop a piece. It takes so long because they keep asking big questions and starting over. Their director doesn’t provide answers. She helps them decide what to jettison and what to keep. There is no single right answer. There is what works and what works more provocatively.
500 Clown deconstructs classic text, aims high and leaves no wiggle room artistically. They keep their edge by making the audience central to the storytelling. The risk of failure is high.
No one creates instant community better than 500 Clown. No one takes risks, and profits from doing so, more than 500 Clown.
Branding Lesson–Aim high and leave no wiggle room. Put your audience inside the story.
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