At a time of increasingly intense competition between cities and regions for talent, funding and resources, a broad consortium of companies and organizations representing the Toledo Region has adopted a platform communicating the region’s unique appeal from an economic development, quality of life, education and leisure tourism perspective. Applied Storytelling led the ten-month initiative.

“For those of us who have a stake in this region’s well-being, its strengths have always been clear,” says Joe Napoli, President & General Manager of the Toledo Mud Hens and a member of the Toledo Region Committee. “Until now, however, we literally haven’t been on the same page in communicating those strengths. Now we have the ability to do so.”

A consortium committed to adoption

The newly defined regional brand was introduced to local media and a group of more than 100 business leaders and local media on June 16. The committee is currently developing a plan for large-scale implementation. Significantly, each of the committee member organizations has committed to integrating key messages of the brand platform into their own communications.

Adopting a best practices approach

As part of the development effort, Applied Storytelling conducted a series of six community forums throughout the region, convened six work sessions with regional opinion leaders and conducted a public survey that generated several hundred responses. At the same time, Toledo-based Great Lakes Marketing conducted a research effort geared to gathering opinion and insight from more than 100 regional business leaders.

“From the outset, the committee was committed to pursuing a best practices approach,” says Dave Nolan, President of Destination Toledo, the region’s tourism and convention marketing organization, who convened the committee in early 2009. “We knew that the keys to widespread adoption and long-term success rested in an effort that was as inclusive and transparent as possible.”

The communications platform developed by Applied Storytelling included distinct positionings, messages and storylines for economic development, quality of life, education and leisure tourism, with economic development identified as the lead component of the region’s overall brand story

“On one hand, the region will benefit from a cohesive story that is emotionally engaging and easy to understand,” says Eric La Brecque, Principal of Applied Storytelling. “On the other, the days of one-size-fits all messaging to serve the many agendas of an entity as complex and diverse as an entire region are long gone.”

Competitive research validated the committee’s decision to focus overall brand positioning around leadership in the New Manufacturing Economy—manufacturing enabled by digital technologies, sophisticated systems and processes, and a highly-trained workforce. In addition to being highly differentiating, the clarity and sharp definition of this positioning reflect a level of brand discipline that relatively few regions have been able to achieve.

Creating an open, accessible content hub

The Toledo Region brand platform will be placed on the initiative’s initial web site together with other background materials. Initial implementation plans call for developing a robust site as a dynamic communications hub and content-rich resource for any individual or organization seeking to integrate the region’s story into their own brand marketing initiatives.

Seeking “to revitalize and expand…so that it may live up to its potential as the region’s indispensable hub for connecting people and nature”, the Natural History Museum has embarked on a capital campaign to re-imagine key exhibits, restore landmark architectural features and inspire visitors and others to make deeper and more meaningful connections to a changing world.

Teaming with Los Angeles-based KBDA, which developed the museum’s overall brand platform in 2008, Applied Storytelling first developed the campaign’s communications framework and has since gone on to collaborate on communications geared to securing contributors as well as inspiring the public. These have included concept development and writing for an overview video that first aired in August on the museum’s YouTube channel as well as an awareness campaign displayed throughout the museum itself. Additional communications are forthcoming.

The public will begin to see the first enhancements to the museum made possible by the campaign later this year, with the effort slated for completion by 2013.

The museum’s NHMNext fundraising initiative comes at a time when charitable giving to cultural institutions has declined, a casualty of the current economic downturn. More broadly, museums are asking hard questions about how to remain compelling, vital institutions in an increasingly media-driven and digital landscape. In this landscape, a strategic approach to communications becomes even more vital to a campaign's success.

“Ultimately, the museum experience itself must engage many different types of visitor who come to the museum for many different reasons,” says Eric La Brecque, Principal of Applied Storytelling. “But the campaign story has a vital role to play in exciting the imagination—and, to donors, communicating lasting value—long before that experience takes shape.”

Guided by criteria established at the assignment’s outset, the campaign messaging framework builds on the museum’s own overall mission and strategic plan. Messaging elements include a campaign vision, mission and promise as well as supporting value propositions and a call to action. Applied Storytelling also developed the NHM Next campaign name and Join the evolution slogan.

In the young but rapidly growing executive concierge industry, most leading players are focused on the rapid scaling and diversification of services. Beverly Hills-based Mint has opted for a different path: an intensive focus on performance and individual consideration.

In terms of operations, this focus has led Mint to build the infrastructure, grow the talent and foster the service culture that will support stable, ongoing growth as well as to cement the loyalty of existing members.

At the same time, Mint has strived to strengthen the way it engages with members, underscoring its distinctive approach and providing a clearer picture of the services it offers and the many ways members can make use of them.

Engaged by Mint to define its point of difference and tell its story in a crisp and compelling way, Applied Storytelling first worked with company founders and key staff members to understand the company’s own unique culture. Afterwards, the Applied Storytelling team worked directly with members to understand their specific, and surprisingly diverse, needs and preferences.

In addition to brand positioning, personality and promise fundamentals, Applied Storytelling developed a simple, streamlined system for organizing and presenting member services. Applied Storytelling also recommended a number of new tools and channels for reaching out to members.

Brand insights have informed everything from the company’s new web site, member materials and client and partner presentations to a companywide employee training program.

"Our brand development initiative has been instrumental in helping us to develop a stronger and more focused membership development effort,” says Mint co-founder Gordon MacGeachy, “as well as to achieve a stronger market position among partners and member development prospects.”

“Additionally,” he notes, “the effort has set the stage for an enhanced sense of pride and value among our employees."

In addition to laying a long-term foundation for Arena’s communications, Applied Storytelling and MiresBall helped Arena with a much more time-sensitive challenge: creating a compelling way to talk about the theater’s 2008-9 and 2009-10 seasons, which will take place in temporary venues far from Arena’s original (and future) location. This effort resulted in Arena Restaged: a two year festival of American Voices, a distinctive positioning and identity for a singular moment in the theater’s history.

MiresBall has served as Arena Stage’s brand design consultant of record for more than a decade, bringing a distinct visual presence to every season, and creating an immediately recognizable tone and manner across the sum of Arena’s communications. In 2006, this effort extended to a concept and identity for Arena’s successful capital campaign effort, the most ambitious for a regional theater to date. Applied Storytelling has supported these efforts with powerful messages, themes and ideas. Today, taking a longer view of how it connects with subscribers and audiences than a season-by-season approach allows, Arena Stage stands to remain at the forefront of regional theaters in yet one more new way.

Allergan, a global leader in several pharmaceutical categories, has grown and diversified in recent years. As it has done so, the company has felt an intensifying need to articulate what it does and why it does it in a simple and distinctive way.

Allergan’s corporate brand initiative began in earnest with the company's 2006 annual report. In early 2007, Applied Storytelling joined Santa Monica, California-based Baker Brand Communications in developing an updated brand platform for Allergan. Scope of the platform extended to positioning, brand personality targeted messaging and array of additional tools and insights. The effort culminated in the public introduction of its new tagline and mission early this year.

In addition to playing a key role in tagline and vision statement development, Applied Storytelling provided messaging insight for the company’s new web site and wrote key sections of its award-winning 2007 annual report. (See also Going Live, September 2007.)

Companywide introduction of Allergan’s new tagline and mission statement followed a December 2007 preview to director- and executive-level management. Insight, the company’s magazine, reports an enthusiastic worldwide response.

Incredibly, confusion still reigns about these building blocks of brand expression—so much so that some practitioners even consider them to be one and the same. We certainly don’t, though we acknowledge a close relationship between the two. Here’s how we explain the difference—and define the two terms—in the simplest, most rule-of-thumb way:

Imagine that a product or service could speak. The first sentence it says is, “Choose me because___________.” That because is the positioning. Of course, the product may have many reasons for you to choose it. The positioning will be the one it states first—the one if feels it must state in case it doesn’t get a chance to speak again.

Of course, you’re only going to choose the product if what it’s saying sets it apart in a uniquely compelling way from the clamor of other products asking you to choose them.

Now to the promise. The promise follows from the positioning. Suppose you like what the product is saying. You might then be prompted to respond, “Okay, let’s say I do. What’ll you do for me if I choose you?” The answer, that’s the promise: “Choose me and [I’ll help you to] __________.”

As long as the answer to the sentence is clear, confident, distinctive and relevant, chances are you have a good promise. We arrived at this insight after causing a bit of a debate among the various members of a project team. They were trying to arrive at a normative definition of a promise. They felt they needed to because the candidate we provided was pithy to the point of being catchy—too much so for their liking. At issue was whether a promise so snappy could actually be a promise. The catchiness, we explained, was incidental. The meaning was what mattered. We understood the different between a promise and a slogan. And no, we weren’t suggesting our promise as a slogan. If, however, they accepted it as such, would it have really been such a bad thing? Maybe not, as long as they could say why.

We’re not in a position to share our subversive promise yet, but here’s a good stand-in for coming to your own conclusions: Just do it.

First of all, in higher education it is very difficult to get anyone to do anything. "Buy in" is always the key to success. Although buy in is certainly important in the private sector, employees can be directed to behave and perform in a certain manner consistent with a branding program. If they refuse and the stakes are high enough (or their individual's value is low enough) they might lose their job. Higher education is at the opposite end of the spectrum. Faculty have tenure and hide behind academic freedom (mostly inappropriately), and staff have job rights that the average private sector employee doesn't have. On top of this, of course, are union contracts. Employees in higher education, regardless of job function, need to be inspired to support a branding initiative. They need to buy in to the proposition. Without that buy in they will perceive it in many negative ways including:

A) What a waste of money! Why couldn't the money spent on all this branding stuff gone into giving me a bigger pay raise or replacing my classroom equipment?

B) This is top down and I won't stand for it. Those folks in administration ("us and them" attitudes are prevalent) don't know the first thing about me, my program, and my students. This is all a bunch of BS.

C) Nobody asked me what I thought so it doesn't apply to me.

D) It's just one more passing fad. I've been here XX years (fill in the blank) and I've seen these things come and go. They never produce any results and there is always another new thing in a couple years. Why should I bother.

E) It's somebody else's job. I'm a teacher. I don't have to be concerned with all this branding crap and I don't have the time.

Of course the point they are missing is all this "branding crap", if done well, can help them keep their job, increase their salary, attract more and better students, increase their job satisfaction, and so on. To weave a successful branding campaign into the fabric of a college or university, there has got to be something in it for the employees, particularly the faculty. They have to want to do it. It has to be fun for them, not more work because they are already overworked and underpaid. It has to give them a sense of pride. It has to create a feeling of be left out for those who choose not to participate. They have to want to wear the embroidered shirts and put the stickers in the windows of their cars.

The basic premise of this book is that the very things that make successful companies with established products successful tend to work against them when new, disruptive technologies appear on the scene. For someone in an established company, this message is bound to be disquieting, even though the book offers some reasonable-sounding courses of action.

The author observes that the companies that are most successful in commercializing disruptive technologies view the primary development challenge not as a technological one but as a marketing one.

And what a challenge it is: Christensen demonstrates pretty convincingly that with a disruptive technology it’s not possible to know what the customers want beforehand: a process of mutual discovery must follow. This suggests that many kinds of market testing or validation may be useless or, worse, seriously misleading. It also suggests that marketers must design messages and campaigns that can be light and nimble, easily torn down and rebuilt, perhaps multiple times.

Another gem of insight, with regard to commoditization: “A product becomes a commodity within a specific market segment when the repeated changes on the basis of competition...completely play themselves out, that is, when market needs on each attribute or dimension of performance have been fully satisfied by more than one available product.” And its corollary: “It may be...that the product offerings of competitors in a market continue to be differentiated from each other. But differentiation loses its meaning when the features and functionality have exceeded what the market demands.”

Positioning with the gears stripped.

Looking to reinforce the North American International Auto Show’s pre-eminent position among other U.S.-based auto shows, in 2007 the Detroit Auto Dealers Association (DADA), the show’s owner, launched an initiative to adopt a more strategic approach to the way the Auto Show communicates.

The organization engaged Applied Storytelling to spearhead the effort, which has yielded a series of tools and insights that show organizers are now setting in motion. Attendees will notice the first changes when they come to the 2009 Auto Show. Additional changes will follow in 2010.

Insights that helped to shape the new communications blueprint came not only from Detroit Auto Dealer Association members and staff but also from dozens of interviews with manufacturers, media and Tier One suppliers worldwide conducted by MCorp (San Rafael, California) in conjunction with Applied Storytelling.

“The new brand platform is much more than a creative campaign,” says NAIAS Executive Director Rod Alberts. “It provides a filter and guide for looking at just about every aspect of the experience we provide and the value we deliver.”

Some of these changes will be obvious and highly visible. For example, the first phase of the Auto Show’s new web site, which debuted in late October 2008, introduced the world to a new look, feel and tone geared to conveying a stronger sense of the Auto Show as a top international automotive event. The new site and identity were developed by Cincinnati-based Openfield Creative.

Acknowledging the show’s strong media focus, the new web site has also been upgraded to provide more press information in a more timely and convenient way. Prior to the January event, site content will also appear in several languages in addition to English. Additionally, the Auto Show’s ShowTalk and NewsFlash publications are migrating to a digital format in response to media preferences.

“At a time of sweeping change in the automotive industry, the Auto Show has securely positioned itself around unique strengths based on real substance, not sizzle,” says Eric La Brecque, Principal of Applied Storytelling. “In this category as in so many others, the strongest brand is ultimately the most responsive. That’s the premise from which our work has begun.”