Running Head: HOW TO TELL YOUR BRAND’S STORY

Assignment 1:
How to Tell Your Brand’s Story: Four Questions You Must Answer
Pat Smith

MKRT 5000 - Marketing
24 January 2012

HOW TO TELL YOUR BRAND’S STORY

ARTICLE SUMMATION Beth McKenna writes an impressive article on bringing to light the nuance of telling your company’s brand story, which can be referred to as story generation. In the past, companies had only 30 seconds of commercial time to tell their story, using the same format with the big five: characters, setting, plot, conflict, and resolution. With commercials, companies only had a limited time and limited ways to advertise. Today, technology has expanded and changed the face of how to tell the story of a company’s brand. But what the writer discusses is how to “cut the clutter” and effectively “evoke feeling” and create a story which the audience can feel a part of the product. In addition to commercials, a brand story can be discussed in depth and length through the internet, on social media blogs such as Facebook and Twitter, allowing the audience to provide feedback and opinions. As the article progresses,, Beth McKenna elaborates on the need for companies to evolve their planning processes to follow four questions to be evaluated before a company develops its story. First, the planning stage is critical to the formation of the story. Beth McKenna’s main emphasis is how critical it is to have the right people which should include writers, digital experts and public relations together. How a company integrates responsibility through departments keeps the key players on the same sheet of music. Second, what do you want the story to be? Is it anecdote or historical. This will impact the emotions of the audience. The company needs to decide what type of emotion it wishes to illicit from the audience and the care value attached to the product. Third, what are you trying to tell about the brand and what medium will be used, such as video or info graphics? Deciding on what tools to use will ease the effort to communicate what the story is about. Fourth, consideration must include how the

HOW TO TELL YOUR BRAND’S STORY audience will interact with this story. What tools will the company use, such as e-newsletters, updates on company website, quick tweet or share on Facebook with links to updates on the internet? Careful consideration on how the information flows will impact the best way for a company’s story brand to be represented. In summation, Beth McKenna stresses repeatedly that the story generation has changed and it is critical that companies evolve with what is the best way to update the company’s brand story.
STUDENT REVIEW My experience in marketing is limited to the experiences at my current work place, Navy Recruiting Command, so choosing my first article for review, Beth McKenna’s “How to Tell Your Brand’s Story: Four Questions You Must Answer,” highlighted the need to carefully consider how you write the story of a company’s brand. Reading this article brought to light the commercials developed to recruit sailors into the Navy by quickly evoking pride in country, pride in uniform, and future opportunities in corporate America. This engages a younger audience with the latest technologies to be educated and to have a job. The article by Beth McKenna put together for me the need in Marketing to encompass these basic questions in order to sell the company’s brand via multi-layered outlets in order to convey the right emotions to the audience. Even though this article is only a page and a half, it effectively gets to the point in gathering three key components, in writers, digital, and Public Relations staffers. Once you have gotten your main ingredients, then it’s time to start asking the four questions discussed in this article. These questions get straight to the point; get the right people, with the right generation story, and how does the company want the audience to interact with the story.
HOW TO TELL YOUR BRAND’S STORY This article provided me with the basic questions I need to formulate in putting a marketing story together. With the group project labeled “How to market Webster University to the residents of Millington, TN.,” three key terms caught my attention: messaging, brand strategy and info graphics. As technology evolves in a split second these days, it was important for me to understand that messaging is a means to quickly communicate through social media; brand strategy is basically how you will communicate your story through media outlets such as e-newsletters, email, Twitter, commercials, etc.; and info graphics is the ability to take complex information and put into data (charts, graphs, power point slides, etc.) for the audience to discern with relative ease. To summarize, this article has enabled me to look at story generation in a new way and provides a template to begin the step stones for this class’s marketing group project.

HOW TO TELL YOUR BRAND’S STORY
Reference
McKenna, B. (19 Dec 2012). How to Tell Your Brand’s Story: Four Questions You Must Answer. Retrieved January 8, 2013 from http://www.marketingprofs.com/articles/print/2012/9739/how-to-tell-your-brands-story-four-questions-you.../