Your Brand is the Stories People Tell About You

This weekend I saw a comment a friend had posted on Facebook: “[Husband] and I went to the Edina Art Fair today, in hopes the photographer who inspired our Italy trip would be there again this year. When we first started dating, we went to the EAF and stopped in our tracks in front of a huge panoramic of Positano, Italy. We each said, “I want to go there,” and then joked {because we’d only been dating a couple of months} that if we got married, we’d go there for our honeymoon. 2.5 years later, we stood in the spot we remember seeing in Darren Olson’s photo, and had another couple take a photo of us. A little surreal to think that joke turned into reality. Today, we saw his booth and I immediately started crying. What an amazing, adventure-filled three years it has been. I could hardly hold it together when I told Darren the story! I can’t WAIT to have one of his canvases hanging on our wall.” 

In marketing, we often talk about the power of story. While many brands have refined their brand story, it’s rare to find a brand that is truly listening and looking for their story through the lives and mouths of those who love them. Every time someone talks about your company, they’re writing a paragraph in the story of who you are. To think your story starts and stops with you (or ends at the point of transaction), is like only reading the prologue.

Your brand is the stories people tell about you. If you want to know who you really are…just listen. They’ll tell you.

How a woman named Thelma changed my views on marketing...and helped me clean up my act.

When I was little and we would leave a restaurant, two things would inevitably happen. My dad would pop a red-and-white peppermint in his mouth before we had hit the door, and as soon as we climbed in the car my mom would roll down the window, gasping for fresh air. I always liked the smell of mint so I never understood her aversion, but the day I walked face-first into a friend's vanilla candle-laden home, it all started to make sense. I felt like someone had smeared my nose in a cupcake. And while I love a cupcake just as much as the next girl, I'd rank artificial cupcake scent somewhere between "wet dog" and "dorito feet" on the olfactory offensiveness scale.

Among all the wonderful things I inherited from my mother, it seems  I also inherited her acute sense of smell.

Which is precisely what inspired my first purchase of Mrs. Meyers hand soap. Actually, that's not true. The design drew me in, the scent sold me. I'd like to say "the rest is history" (because that would make for an epically succinct blog post), but it wasn't so. That afternoon, standing in the soap aisle at Target, was just the beginning of a true love story about to unfold.

There aren't a lot of brands I'd profess to love. Even fewer I would say make me feel giddy with joy. Mrs. Meyers is both of those and more. And as someone who so feels enraged over paying $12 for a pack of toilet paper that she has to text her sister to express said anger from the store, pledging allegiance to a $4 bottle of hand soap is kind of a big deal.

Months after becoming a Mrs. Meyers fan, I finally moseyed over to mrsmeyers.com to check out Thelma's website...only to discover a mecca of marketing excellence. (I'm only sort of joking when I say I tiny digital branding and identity angels descended on my screen...)

Beautiful, clean, on-brand site design! Amazing execution of brand storytelling! A tagline that integrates the phrase "like the dickens!"

And that's when the music began. 

Had I found the Holy Grail of  marketing done right?

So here we are. You be the reader, I'll be the writer. And we'll spend the next couple weeks worth of blog posts taking a look at a company that is more than just another pretty smell.

Cupcake huffers need not apply.

When I say “Starbucks,” you say...???

What words or phrases come to mind when you see a Starbucks logo? What feelings do you associate with the Porsche seal? What do you think about when you pass a truck with the FedEx mark painted on its side? Here’s a fun little midweek find that will give you some insight on how other people are answering similar questions.

Brandtags is a crowdsourced collection of consumer brand sentiment. The premise is that a brand exists entirely in people’s heads, therefore a brand is whatever they (people/customers) say it is. Brandtags is a place where people can share their opinions about brands freely, and brand owners can learn how their brands are viewed.

Check out Brandtags to try out logo free association, or to explore how others define the brands that play a part in our daily lives.