Marketing

Inside out: brand evangelism and the power of story

What is brand? For some, it’s simply make-up applied to the face of a company. For others, it’s an endless, intricate understanding of the profound role business plays in our social economy. It’s definitely one of the two. Marketers have understood the importance of brand for some time now; brand building is the topic of every second industry panel and every third business development podcast. But has our brand gun been pointed in the wrong direction?

STORY TIME

To quote long-time Marketing columnist and well-respected brand evangelist Sérgio Brodsky, “Brands are stories. Narratives that infuse meaning to otherwise inanimate commodities... such stories are just as real as the tangible products, services or entities they animate.”

Come down the rabbit hole for a moment, won’t you? Journey, narrative, soul and story are at the core of human connection; and according to neuroscientists, the human brain is not capable of distinguishing between the different platforms from which it receives stories. Which means, believe it or not, to be told a story feels just as real to the brain as it does to live it.

If we get into the nitty-gritty of what story means, a Jungian

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