Your brand tells a great true story about your company that deserves to be told well. Leadership brands represent the relationship and common understanding between consumers and companies. When this is done well it is more valuable than any other marketing or management investment.

Remarkably, if you are in business and you tell someone you tell stories this might seem to be something bad. I have to come clean and tell you I love stories, especially commercial stories. I am proud to be a master storyteller, a brand magician, stories excite me. Consumers love stories too.

Today on Breakfast I watched Brian Richards, an Auckland based Brand strategist, reiterate the importance of brand story development in the role of developing successful brands. This statement was in response to the Auckland Super City running a quick fire competition for a new logo to represent the city. The point is can you have a logo symbol without the story behind it? The answer is yes you can. You can design logo’s until your hearts content.

What you cannot do is fake a story and get away with it. You cannot throw a logo together and then create a story later because they wont match up. The brand story and logo originate from the same place. They represent the essence of an organisation. One should not exist without the other, though it does happen and when it does everyone senses there is something missing.

Great agencies get to the heart of what your organisation is about, where it has come from, where it is going, and they craft a grand representation of this through the art of design. Brand logos may often be seen as the final design output by clients, though the enlightened know they live more passionately when secured by a properly interpreted and understood brand story.

A brand tells a story about your company. When creating that story put yourself in the position of the customer, think about what you would like your customers to think of when they hear your name or see your logo.

You should also be developing a set of values with a brand story that elicit particular feelings. One way of developing these values is by working back from the unique benefits that your company offers through its products and services. Having gone through this exercise you can then create a unique selling proposition which guides graphical output and media elements. This is a great way of ensuring that you are being consistent to your brand image over time.

Whenever you begin to doubt the validity of a communication go back and check to see if it is consistent with your selling proposition.

If not get rid of it because it isn’t communicating what your company is about.

A great exercise when developing a new brand identity is to consider a brand in the form of a living human being. A concept called brand personality is useful to conceptualise otherwise intangible elements. You develop a brand personality by asking a series of questions that personify a proposed brand. For example, if myth was a person what kind of car would they drive? Would they be male of female? Young or old? You can see straight away how this kind of questioning begins to build a character that can be more easily translated into marketing communications.

Finally, let’s go back and touch on this topic of feelings. Great brand advertising evokes powerful emotions that impact memory and associations that last well into the future. Thinking about the end result of your company messages, what feelings and emotions should your company evoke? This really depends on the type of product or service you are selling doesn’t it. Do you want to make people cry with joy, or fuel determination through aspiration?

Another important thing to consider, when thinking of brand creation, is what stories already exist in the market. Stories and legends that already have human feelings attached to them are ideal brand building blocks. Many companies don’t start their brand building from scratch because they have harnessed the power of existing stories to leverage their own value through association.

It’s easy to get tricked into thinking that the more types of services or products that you provide your customers the better off financially you will be. The more products that you offer your existing client base the more opportunities for making a sale, yes. But we believe that there are some major pitfalls you need to be aware of.

First of all, take this scenario, you are a leading accounting firm who has developed an established client base, you have decided to diversify into business advisory services. If your current customers perceive your brand as meaning “Accounting” for example, what are you telling them if you start up aspects of your businesses such as Human Resources or Marketing?

At a very basic level your organization may be able to sustain these associated services in terms of the resources you have available and through leveraging of intellect across professions. However, I would be doubtful if you could perceptually develop these functions professionally to become perceived as the leader in each field. Simply because the consumer doesn’t see you as a professional “Human Resources Company” or “Marketing” company. You also leave yourself more open to innovative competitors who are selfish enough to sacrifice and specialize in one area. Imagine fighting for the perceptual mind space of a variety of professional services against specialist and focused competitors.

If your organization has a very large proportion of the market and that markets level of sophistication does not demand advanced levels of expertise in these associated services then it may be advisable to offer rudimentary levels of support services in order to compete with your competitors but be prepared to source outside relationships and more specialist advice. At the end of the day, stay true to who you are. Do not try and be everything to everyone. Your business has got where it is today by doing very specific things and doing those things well. Your long term customers respect you for this. Don’t give your customers an opportunity to be confused about what you do and don’t do well. Focus.

A company brand is an idealized representation of self. Physically in its simplest form a brand is best defined by its logo. A brand story is depicted by images and words that imply personality and values.

Beyond this brands start to get confusing. For example, we could consider the people, buildings and almost every aspect of consumer interaction a part of the brand experience.

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