Blog

Introduction - This Rebirth of Brand project is a ‘call to adventure’ for those brave souls that aspire to create iconic experiences that stand out...

What effect has technology had on our brand strategies over recent years?

This post explores how you can draw inspiration from the past when building your brand strategy.

How to overcome a dominant narrative with a better story...

This article on Brexit explains how deep cultural myths are used to achieve certain political outcomes. The issue is that if the "use"​ of these approaches is felt to be an "abuse"​, the effect can be divisive. It can be extremely negative on the unifying elements of culture that ultimately hold everything together, the unifying glue. We can learn a lot from history, namely during the Roman empire, of the dangers of what is going on, but also how we can navigate out of the storm, through unifying myths. I believe Brands can and should play a bigger role in these times…

The Journey to an Iconic Brand Identity Starts Within

A look into Brand Strategy through the mantra of "Advertising is most effective when it doesn’t try to persuade."

Using gift giving as a way to grow your brand identity is a large step in the journey to iconic.

Learn the eras and then learn how to position your brand

In this post, we explore the importance of keeping a consistent brand strategy over time

A look into ancient Rome and the myths they lived by

1. The best brand campaigns don't try to persuade 2. Practice the art of gift giving 3. Stay consistent to your brand identity… and then innovate 4. Use a foundational story to shape your narrative 5. Build great traditions to build your brand identity

In Thunder 2 we dive into how Decision Science can help you build your marketing strategies

In this Lightning Flash, we look into how narratives structures work in storytelling and how you can apply it to your brand

Here we explore the narrative of one of the most popular films of all time and see how you can apply the learnings to brand strategy

To really resonate with your audience, you need to move beyond customer needs and understand their motivations and longings.

Interbrand announces a big idea, “ICONIC MOVES"... Professor Mark Ritson writes a scathing review, calling it “pants”. Where do we go from here?

To illustrate emotionally driven rapid decision making in developing marketing strategies, we look at the role of the conscious and the unconscious mind.

As we explore the 6 essential elements of oral culture it will become increasingly clear how relevant these techniques are in modern brand strategy. This is Thunder 3 from our Rebirth of Brand project where we explore the relevance of oral storytelling, from classical to digital.

We know from Dave Trott that only 4% of marketing is remembered positively, 7% is remembered negatively and 89% is not noticed or remembered at all. In the first Lightning Strike from Thunder 3, we look at how marketers can leverage oral storytelling techniques to tap into familiar memory structures of their customers to create marketing strategies that resonate.

Myths don’t convey a cognitive logic, but rather an emotional one. A culture’s Myths are an articulation of the “goals” of that culture – its deepest fears, desires and longings. For a Brand Manager, in order to deliver iconic campaigns, it is important to understand the myths of our different cultures. The good thing is that these cultural stories haven’t changed over thousands of years. We can see this through our analysis of some of the top films over the last 50 years and how we linked them to Greek/Roman mythologies.

We go beyond Archetypal Roles to understand the stories that Archetypal Personalities live in across cultures and why it's important to marketers.

Mass communication is about world-making and specifically understanding the worlds people live in. Facts and arguments do not change anything. To use them is to cause a re-affirmation of the assumptions, beliefs and values of the world. The only way to change the “mass” is a better story (or myth!). We will outline two forms of persuasion, Red and Blue Rhetoric. Most are trained in Blue but increasingly the primary importance of Red is being acknowledged.

Here we honour one of the ‘great red rhetoric’ agencies in advertising history, Leo Burnett. Their advertising created an atmosphere or a world by drawing on cultural archetypes.

It was the French Philosopher and literary critic Roland Barthes who explored the signs, symbols, gestures and messages of everyday Western society, the language of mass culture. He asked “everything, then, can be a myth?” followed by the answer, “Yes, I believe this, for the immersive, is infinitely fertile in suggestion”. In this post, I look into how we can make compelling stories from anything, from wrestling to cleaning products.

Every communication has three levels: transaction, relationship and meaning. Most of digital communication is transactional. It is an excellent means of demand fulfilment which is all very well. That is when I know what I want.

The Santa myth is brilliant “world-making”. This is a story that has taken hold in the imaginations of the children of the world. It is passed from generation to generation. It is one of the world’s great icons.

This is a summary of the first four Thunders of the Rebirth of Brand Project.

Here we uncover US Politics and the 5 main stories that helped get Trump elected as the 45th President.

In this post, I dive further into the storytelling techniques he used, such as repetition, creating oppositions, the use of epithets and also his ability to blur the lines between fact and fiction. Many of these techniques can be used to reinforce positive messaging in modern branding, but there is much to be learned from this master storyteller.

This article dives into the importance of knowing your brand, its story and how it fits into the culture you are operating in, in order to stay consistent across channels, but even more importantly across time.

Two earlier videos explored the successful use of cultural myths and oral storytelling by the 45th President. They were the “Myth of Trump” and “Homer Trump”. Here we look at “Out Trumping Trump: How to Counter a Dominant Narrative”.