Corporate stories tool

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Question - how important are stories about the brand in communicating its essence?

Answer - many of the big brands have ‘foundational stories’ and research has long shown that stories are an excellent viral way of communicating key concepts

Key action points

While many stories a brand wants to tell are of the minute, it is perhaps no coincidence that many of the biggest brands have ‘foundational’ stories which are told repeatedly over decades.

Nike even invests in licensed internal branding storytellers recounting the ‘waffle iron’ tale.

So IBM and Johnson & Johnson have the “Fire you? I have just spent $10m training you” story, 3M used to have the ‘15% rule’ story and probably still has the ’10% rule’ story. Dell has the ‘supply chain radical re-engineering’ story. Sony has the ‘Walkman’ walkabout director story. Virgin has the ‘illegal discounted price’ and the ‘man in a hot air balloon’ stories (defying the laws of man and nature). Google has the ‘magic algorithm’ story.

This tool is designed to help you identify any stories within the company that typify the brand and which you will want to be told by all employees for the next twenty years.

In more detail….

This tool is an adaptation of "PR Stories" designed specifically to identify symbolic / emblematic corporate stories to build into the brand.

1. Runthrough

   This runs you through a series of potential angles for your Corporate story. You can use them, adapt them or add to them as you wish.

   You can input several ideas into the same cell, because ……

2. Split

   …. then provides an opportunity for you to split several ideas within a cell into separate options for consideration.

3. Prioritise

   …. asks you to prioritise these ideas. You can then build on the prioritised stories

This tool can be bought here.

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