Brand Narratives is a method I have developed in a workshop format to enable brand thinking to go a lot forther than bunions as Jane Hamburger calls them - the whole paraphernalia of brand characters essences and onions. Don't get me wrong we need to structure the values which emerge around brands but the most common tools were developed primarily to produce and SELL advertising and can't do a lot else. We take the character as a starting point then write a screenplay around it in the workshop. Competitive brands are also in there - we write them into the screenplay too.

I've run this workshop for brands in the UK and in the Middle East. This year I've run a workshop with Diageo's innnovation team. In the Nov 2005 issue of Admap themed on innovation thy published a whole article on the methodology. And requests for the workshop are coming in every month now. Covering everything from NPD to the development of integrated marketing activity.

Summary of the brand narratives approach

Most brand thinking has been developed from brand models built around advertising and are limited by the constraints of advertising. Chief of these is the static nature of advertising brand characters. Consistency has been a time honoured way of buiding and sustaining brand personalities. However brands need to function dynamically in PR where there have to be many more than one single minded propositions. Promotions and the web require mechanics which are on brand. And lastly a core of brand loyalists in every market are so involved with the brand that they need storylines to sustain their interest in contrast with which most brands are as active as oil paintings.

Brand Narratives is an approach which uses filmic and storytelling methodologies to develop screenplays and storylines for brands. These are used as templates to build mechanics so the brand can continue to behave in character while responding in character to particular situations. The mechanics that brands use: promotions/website structures/promotional events become ways by which the storylines are implemented.

The heart of Brand Narratives is a workshop in which the screenplay for the next 6 months is developed. The screenplay functions as a template creative brief for the development of marketing activity to ensure that the brand story is developed in a way that is true to the brand and engages the audience. The brand character is prepared before the workshop. There should also be some preliminary work on the genre of the product category - the conventions by which competitors typically communicate with the marketplace. Early on in the workshop one of the fundamental decisions is to what extent the brand will choose to operate within the prevailing genre and to what extent they will jump out of genre and challenge the conventions.

One of the most liberating things about using the narrative approach is that it instantly moves brand thinking out of presenter mode where the brand appears more like a plaster saint that a real person. When Marconi had to lay off a significant proportion of the workforce and scale back it's plans you can be sure that the brand plans would make no over reference to this even though all the stakeholders whether in the press, the trade or end customers would have been well aware of it. Imagine using a Bridget Jones storyline where the Marconi brand comes clean and admits they got it wrong and they are going to have to clean up their act. This isn't apologetic behaviour, it is realistic and it creates the possibility of a storyline which Marconi customers would be keen to follow. Putting a brave face on it communicates nothing to anyone other than possibly a cover up.

Or if a brand decided to present itself though a programe of corporate philanthropy then it would be worth considering how a programme developed along the lines of an Amelie storyline - self discovery and transformation through secret giving would impact compared with the convention of doing good and talking loudly about it!

Back in 2002 I was working on a household cleaning range whose brand was drawn entirely from visual identity manifested largely through advertising. This was unusable for developing instore promotions and POS material. There was the additional problem that only one product could be featured at a time in the advertising but the brand needed to be able to leverage a wide and varied range. The advertising was using a creative device typical of cleaning vis a vis the visit to the laboratory to see the product being developed before it was put to use in the home. Using brand narrative thinking I drew on the motif often used in fairy stories of the hero/heroine being given magical gifts by a fairy godmother character. Gifts which on the surface don't look particularly useful but without which the character couldn't succeed. We used this storyline to re-imagine these cleaning products as magic gifts each of which needed to have a gesture associated with it's use (think for example of how you activate a light sabre - there is a characteristic gesture.) These gestures were to be communicated by field teams, diagrams and photos of the gestures were to be incorporated on the packaging. The point is that it was possible to evolve the brand from a noun into a verb in ways that were impactful, would be remembered and where the script for one product could still remind you of the scripts for other cleaning products.

Brand narrative thinking has many facets. Beyond brand development it is possible to use brand narratives to develop detailed tactical contact strategies much as games companies build storylines into computer games for customer acquisition and CRM. I can envisage a situation where complex brand communications can be orchestrated to a score built around storylines which can trigger mailing events, text messaginb, emails and deliveries. And finally event driven storylines can be measured in terms of their effectiveness. How this level of detailed implementation contributes to recall and response. Brand thinking has to evolve beyond the current static models to have any application to multiple channel marketing to fragmented audiences.