Telling a Brand Story
Why is Nike such a strong brand? Nike's brand story is known around the world. Peak performance—that's the essence of the Nike brand and the underlying aspiration of Nike customers. The idea comes to life in any number of executions that show athletic superstars nailing the race, the basket, the home run, the hole in one.
A strong brand has a good story; brand communication is all about the telling of the story. The stories we tell and remember are the ones that intersect in personal ways with our lives. Brand stories do that when they are based on nuggets of insight into how customers feel and think about a brand. Figuring that out is the role of the strategies that you read about in Chapter 9. The execution of a strategy is the presentation of those insights in stories that ring true with the target audience.
There are essentially two sets of decisions to make in executing a brand message: what elements to use in the brand story and how to structure those elements. The execution elements include all the bits and bytes of a brand message—the words, the sounds and music, the photos and illustrations, the costumes and settings, the lighting—all the many physical details of a production. The structure is the way these elements are combined—the layout, the flow, the form of the message—how everything comes together to deliver the story.
