Plenty of interesting food for thought in this quarter's edition of Market Leader. I particularly liked Simon Glynn's look at the role of storytelling being 'at the core of building tomorrow's brands.'
Marketing theory has boxed itself into such a rarified corner that it hardly impacts on the majority of business owners, but the idea of storytelling interests me because I think it is relevant not just to big brands but to small businesses.
Glynn differentiates between the more successful 'brand legends', based on truth and customer experience, retold by customers, and 'brand myths' - great stories, but invented and therefore less likely to draw an emotional response from people. And it's this emotional response that counts, because that's why people retell the story and in so doing build up an attachment that some might call 'brand loyalty.'
My main take from all this is that we all love good stories, and if they're based on something real, that we've experienced, they are both more memorable and more likely to form one of the threads that can bind us together - not just to the brand in question but also to others who feel the same way. Worth thinking about when we're contemplating or going about engaging audiences and building community on the social web.
As Glynn sums up in his article, 'digital conversation tactics won't work without a 'worth-being-talked-about' strategy.'
