‘Think creative’ techniques: What’s your story?
A brand storytelling creative exercise that helps people to build a powerful three-dimensional understanding of who or what a brand is, the journey it is on and of its ultimate destination or goal.
Following on from our ‘How do you turn a B2B brand into a fairytale?’ project, we’ve created a brand storytelling exercise.
You don’t need to be into branding or design to have heard of story or character archetypes. You just need to like stories and storytelling.
The widely accepted idea developed by many great thinkers over the years is that only seven story plots and twelve character types exist.* These are repeatedly found in stories across time, culture and beliefs.
Getting people to look at the features of these plots and character types to see which their brand most closely resembles is a common and useful creative branding exercise.
We appreciate this might appear fanciful to some. However, just as storytelling helps people to make sense of their world and events within it, so this exercise helps people to build a powerful three-dimensional understanding of who or what a brand is, the journey it is on and of its ultimate destination or goal.
The exercise – Spin the wheel
- Pick a story type (and/or literary genre if you prefer) and then a character that you think suits your brand.
- Next, write a short introduction that sets the scene for your story. The introduction should make clear your chosen genre and introduce your brand character and its key qualities (i.e., its offering or unique features).
We’ve created an archtetypes ‘wheel of fortune’ style diagram for you to use should you wish.
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NEO believes B2B brands deserve creative that doesn’t just make sense but captures the imagination as well.
Example/What we did
We NEOs picked three different genres and characters to match our brand:
- Cold war espionage/thriller + secret agent (clients) and trusted collaborator (NEO)
- Fairytale + hero (clients) and magician (NEO)
- Science fiction + explorer (clients) and intelligent lifeform (NEO)
It’s a fun exercise, but it is also interesting to see which genres and character archetypes best suit the brand and how these might be used to inform the brand story; or to illustrate how storytelling can help people to better understand the brand generally.
Exercise extensions
The exercise can be expanded to include other characters (i.e., the brand’s key stakeholders) and look at the brand character’s relationship to these. It can also be used to explore dialogue and action to see how the brand character might express itself to demonstrate its personality, offering and performance to better engage with its audience.
Of course, you can now also involve generative AI tools in helping to come up with ideas, to flesh out characters, build storyworlds and explore communication styles.
NEO believes B2B brands deserve creative that doesn’t just make sense but captures the imagination as well.
If you would like to book an ideation session, contact magic@neoposition.com.
Let us put the magic into your brand story.
[This content was originally posted on LinkedIn. Follow us on LinkedIn.]
*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seven_Basic_Plots
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jungian_archetypes
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