It’s time to look beyond our neat branding models to explore what really matters…
‘Brand’ is arguably one of the most contested terms in contemporary business theory and life. As Jack Simmons points out in his excellent book My Sister’s a Barista: How They Made Starbucks a Home from Home (2004), current brand discourse is beset by “logorrhea” in which the target word itself has sprouted multiple add-ons and modifiers – brand identity, brand personality, brand awareness, brand dilution, brand equity, brand focus, brand platform, brand positioning, brand relevance, brand resonance, brand strategy, brand synergy.
And, lest we forget, employer brand.
Volumes have been written about and around pretty much every variation of the term, and brand consultancies and recruitment marketing agencies alike have made a good living peddling complicated, multi-tiered models replete with Venn diagrams, conceptual pyramids, onion-ring structures and process maps.
Most of these models, however, are based on an implicit engineering paradigm. They assume that you can conduct ‘objective’ organisational and attitudinal research, distil the findings into an unambiguous problem statement, install the requisite systems and procedures, develop brand design guidelines, define the brand voice, monitor the feedback and continually tweak the system to account for change.
If only.
Life at work – life anywhere – is messy, complex, evolving and, to a disturbingly large extent, unpredictable. If the financial collapse of 2008 revealed anything it was surely the fallibility and limitations of plans, structure, systems, hard data and other elements of what Anthony Tasgal memorably defines as ‘arithmocracy’.
It turns out that what really matters most are the traditional ‘soft’ elements of business – people, emotions, values, relationships and, above all, trust (the same elements, according to recent research, that Millennials are expressly looking for in potential employers).
It should come as no surprise that Simon Sinek’s “Start With Why” concept is gaining such a huge international following. Potential employees don’t really care about your brand with its beautifully crafted vision, values, beliefs, personality, behaviours and positioning, important though they are.
Rather, they are looking for Meaning – and nothing encapsulates, conveys and sustains meaning more effectively than Story. To quote the great John Simmons: “The company with the best story will win, because that story will connect emotionally with customers. ‘Story’ in this context comes close to meaning ‘brand’.”
Beautifully expressed.
Successful brands don’t just differentiate themselves through storytelling. As Simmons suggests, successful brands ARE stories whose effectiveness, appeal and longevity depend entirely on the authenticity of their content and the power of their emotional connection with audiences.
Neuroscience plays its part here. Antonio Damasio’s extensive research has shown that human decision-making isn’t logical. It is irreducibly emotional. Indeed, he discovered that people with damage to the part of the brain that generates emotion simply cannot make decisions. So giving prospective candidates all the logical, rational, quantifiable reasons why they should join you isn’t enough. The challenge is to tap into the emotions of the candidate and help them discover for themselves what feels right and most advantageous to them.
And nothing does this better than story.
Of course, marketers have been telling brand stories for decades, but I would suggest that the effectiveness of those stories – particularly in the area of recruitment – has been undermined by the control which organisations seek to exercise over them (and I speak here as a copywriter who lives at the interface between corporate brands and their verbal and visual expression).
In other words, where stories are used – often in the form of employee testimonials expertly crafted and polished by copywriters, for instance – they tend to be shorn of complexity, ambiguity, conflict and flaws in order to provide a simple and straightforward celebration of the company’s employment offering. Too perfect, too complete, too ‘on-message’, they tend to read like scripts and in the process reveal their fundamental lack of authenticity. Worse, they betray their status as transparent marketing tools rather than narrative embodiments of organisational reality.
True, these crafted stories can work for a while – until, say, Nike’s narrative runs into the revelation that it has used sweatshops to produce its goods, or Disney’s magical working environment is undermined by allegations of unfair labour practices.
At which point the issue comes back to that most basic currency of organisational and employment life: Trust.
The point is that authentic and trustworthy stories about the organisation always reflect the complexity and messiness of organisational reality. Used correctly, they are imbued with conflict, rich characters and struggles. A corporate leader who is explaining the history of her company will be all the more persuasive for also addressing her miscalculations and meanderings on the way to success. A company hit by a major problem or scandal – the Tylenol crisis faced by Johnson & Johnson in 1982, for instance – will emerge all the stronger for dealing honestly, openly and transparently with its multiple audiences. A narrative about a particular organisational value will be infinitely more persuasive if it demonstrates how that value and its supporting behaviours survived real challenges and barriers to emerge victorious and intact.
Whereas conventional brand stories are typically created by agency copywriters, authentic brand stories are co-created by employees, consumers and the wider society. Authenticity isn’t about staying on-message; it’s about recognising that brand stories are always in process, always evolving and adapting to new realities, always engaging in active dialogue with people within and beyond the company walls. As Michael Beverland argues, brands don’t need positioning statements, but “open-ended and rich stories”.
These stories will of course take a variety of forms depending on their purpose. You will have values stories, founding stories, rule stories, culture stories, learning stories, change stories, vision stories and more – each with its own narrative patterns, structure and format.
So how do these different stories work? How can you harness and develop stories with the power to spark action, foster collaboration, share knowledge and lead people into the future? How can you use stories to engage emotions, hold attention and build trust? And what does it take to create and support a robust storytelling culture that encourages employees and customers to share their personal narratives?
These are great questions that I, for one, love to hear from clients and colleagues. Not just because they open the way to exploring intensely practical and focused ways of bringing corporate and employer brands to life, but because they draw attention to a single, shared and incredibly fertile starting point:
Stories matter.