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Storytelling: Branding in Practice By Klaus Fog, Christian Budtz and Baris Yakaboylu Edition 2005; Publisher: Berlin: Springer; translated from the Danish edition by Tara Siemens; Price: $49.95; Pages: 238; ISBN 3-540-23501-9
What is the role of storytelling in building a brand? What are the differences between using storytelling as a general tool of communication and using it, more specifically, in building a brand? Fog, Budtz, and Yakaboylu, who are experts on storytelling at SIGMA, a communications firm based in Denmark, argue that the purpose of storytelling is to identify the 'core story" that animates a company. This process of identification is however not an end in itself. It is a means to build in the values embodied in the core story into the company's branding strategy since differentiation through product attributes has become increasingly difficult. To differentiate their offerings in a situation of technological equivalence, companies need to tap into the emotions of the consumer. One way of doing this is to 'tell a captivating story' about the company or the product. But, in order to do this, brand managers need to understand the rudiments of both the story and the art of storytelling in a manner that is broad-based enough to include the traditional elements of advertising, marketing and public relations.
The book is divided into two parts comprising five chapters each. The first part is titled 'The Toolbox' and the second, 'Storytelling Applied'. Both the parts begin with a conceptual discussion of the issues involved in storytelling and are illustrated with brief case studies of American and European companies. The first part sets out the basic elements of storytelling: The authors spell out the notion of a company's core story and the modalities for initiating a program for storytelling in organizations. The last five chapters illustrate the applications of storytelling to brand building, which include advertising and the role of the media as a partner in the act of storytelling. The book ends by arguing that storytelling can help to integrate the functional divisions in a company by generating a core story to anchor its branding strategy.
There are, according to the authors, essentially four elements to storytelling. They are: The message, the conflict, the characters and the plot. The specific set of...