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

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.

#     #     #

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

*   *   *

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.

“The Humble Hound” is a great editorial in the New York Times (April 8, 2010) by David Brooks on leadership styles. It ends using theater as a metaphor.

The metaphor relates to the people who work behind the scenes, whose satisfaction comes, not from the applause, but from working with others towards a shared higher purpose.