The new age of Branding: Stories, Values & Beliefs

Advertising, Marketing, and Public Relations are communications mechanisms, ways of screaming at anybody who is willing to listen, ways of talking to a particular person, ways to influence the influencer but what are we trying to say in all those messages? Who are you and why do you matter? Does your Advertising, Marketing, and Public relations, synchronized around a common concept? 

Since the beginning of Advertising, storytelling has been the buzzword used in Branding. It has been a part of Branding forever and used to be called Advertising. Through Advertising, fake personas, fake benefits were rolled out and people were made to believe the story by repeatedly screaming at someone who is willing to listen. With social media, people are paying close attention to details for every Brand’s promise, so the real challenge for Brands is to be authentic and not to circumvent the narrative to create fake stories. Not so long ago, advertisers had the luxury of telling whatever story they chose with little chance of negative consequences, but in the real world today Brand stories have to be real, that’s why in this new generation, branding is the new Advertising. Branding actually replaced advertising because now brands have to be real today.

So make sure that your Brand story is bigger than the Product.

Do you remember the days when you were the part of a school’s play, if not, being in the audience for that spectacular. I still remember my childhood days of being in an audience at my village for continuously 10 days to watch people enacting the Great “Ramayana” evoking all sorts of emotions from the audience watching the play. Obviously, the story everyone conceived was the triumph of truth over evil and at times people felt that emotion so strongly that they would immerse themselves in the adulation of the characters played by artists. Dressing up for the play is a great analogy for many educated consumers as to how they see branding: a fake persona is crafted to evoke emotions from a specific audience in order to achieve a predetermined goal.

But in today’s world, a Brand would never want to create a fake persona but would try to tell a story that can have an ever-lasting impact on the consumers in the same way that each character in the “Ramayana” play evoked emotions in the audiences as if they were real. 

Today we live in a very complicated world, it’s a noisy world out there, none of the Brands would get a chance to talk a great deal about them, so every Brand while communicating their story must be very specific about what they want consumers to know about them. Great Brands do not let that happen by chance, they don’t assume that people are going to understand their stories, they decide what Promises they want to make and what stories they want consumers to remember. They simply do not leave a chance. We are willing to suspend our admittedly less-developed cynicism to embrace brand stories we could relate (or aspire) to. Brands tell us what they “believed” in, and we believed what they told us and it never happened by Chance and that is the beauty of most of the Great Brands today.