For Africans, story, especially the moonlight ones, teaches a great lesson. Many of us who had the privilege of learning great morals from them really do cherish that age long stuff. Today, story is subtly getting out of our daily lives. For successful brands, their stories are important. The way the story is told is also a major factor in brand emotional connection with its audience.

Brand as we know is not just about logo. Branding is the full complement of residual impressions resulting from all the experiences associated with a product, services or company. Today brand can get it wrong by crafting wrong or non-appealing story. Great stories have certain fundamentals before it can stand out. Jerry Bader outlines the followings and I want each brand owners to view their brand stories along this pattern

1. The story line: This has to do with plots and how it moves the audience to become involved in brand’s journey

2. Hero: Your brand story must also show a hero who should be believable by the audience and who satisfies their subconscious needs. The brand hero should be able to attract them to your brand. The brand hero is the bass of connection

3. Villain: This represents the problem identified by the brand. The villain must also be real or perceived to be real. This must stand on the niche way of enjoying a fulfillment in certain area.

4. A change agent: The brand must represent this ability to bring necessary comfort, changes, and solutions to the identified problem.

5. A story formats that resonate: The story should have a format, pattern that must resonates with the brand and its audience disposition.

David G. Morrison defines creativity as ‘knowledge times imagination times evaluation because when if any of these is missing, there will be no creativity’. Creativity is not a resident/citizen of any nation or continent. Research has showed that the most intelligent among us use less than ten percent of their brain values. The implication is that many of us are not using ours at all. That was my conclusion when I read the report because I did not see myself as a highly intelligent-No low self-esteem is intended here.

Major problems to the flow of creativity are preconceptions, fears, established societal rules, risk avoidance as well as desire for outright perfectionism. Let us examine what guarantee flow of creativity for a brand.

1. The ‘can’ spirit: believe it is achievable as everything springs from inner conviction.

2. Entertain several suggestions: no suggestion is foolish at the initial stage. To be creative, learn to entertain option, suggestion at the beginning of the process.

3. Reject expert opinion: sometimes we may need to ‘flunk; experts opinion to get to be creative. Great ideas have been promoted by so called dullards.

4.  Be willing to take risks: Anyone that is avowed to risks or do not want to make mistakes may not go far.

5. Be foolish, be silly: try out anything you can think of. Laugh at yourself as well as laugh with yourself. It is a new day. Only creative brands have chance of survival this year. The old ways may not work this year. See how you can cut cost and still make maximum impacts.

As we move on through the crunch, many brands will fizzle out due to huge marketing costs. Till now many brands depended on marketing activities to sustain their leaderships. According to reports, billions are wasted annually yet it appears that the noise being made by these corporate brands are becoming rejected. We live in an over communicated environment. We are all daily bombarded with pop up advertisements and yet many do not trust all these gimmicks again.

What most marketing activities offer these days are communicated from the ‘self, egoistic angle’.

The best option available to brands now is to join the conversation. As valuable as this medium is, many corporate brands still believe that doing it the old way will suffice. Conversation helps the other parties to trust you; it encourages promotion of brand’s goodwill. It also promotes active listening; getting adequate feedback which makes marketing in most cases a ruse. Why is goodwill important? Goodwill is a hard currency that brands can spend during crisis, economic crunch. Goodwill will help brands to remain strong in the face of hard times. We  need not doubt that brands are really in challenging times presently. When brands engage in conversation, goodwill that conversation promotes will help in brand’s likeability and over all believability. As we know, someone needs to believe in you before he invests in your brand.

With conversation, it is easier to persuade anyone than when it is believe that the motive is to sell. Conversation also promotes better understanding, empathy and adequate responsiveness.

Joining the conversation is great but it requires proper planning, sustainability and an understanding that it may take time to yield result. But the results will always pay much more dividends.

The need for corporate blogging has become necessary. The use of other vital social media has become mandatory. Interestingly, many of our brands here are not giving enough attention to these. I must say without a goal, the strategy can be damaged and the effect may be fatal on any brand. But there are ways to achieve success in all these. Knowing what to say, when to join the conversation, measurement tools is one of the major problems in joining the conversation. For over three years, our results here have been outstanding and any organization can seek our help.  

In times of recession, employee needs to know the ‘how’ of making impacts on the job that the company hire them for. This will guarantee them their position to stay while others are being lay-off.  David D’allessandro is much more correct today than when he published his book career warfare. For employees to retain their jobs now, individuals must manage their personal brands well. There is no gainsaying denying the fact that many will still lose their jobs in the coming year. Those who will retain theirs will be on the interplay of merits and knowing the ‘hows’ of the environments where they work as well as how well they manage their careers. That is why we keep saying: personal branding is the future of career and entrepreneurial success.

To retain your job as employee, I think we should consider the following thoughts that were shared by D’allessandro.

1. Be a “fedex”: as we know, fedex promise is overnight delivery. As an employee who cares about his personal career, individual must be prompt in the delivery of the service he is hired and paid for. If you are lazy and do not have ability to deliver on the terms which ensure your employment, your career may be on the line.

2. Excellent judgment: there are times you must shut up in the office and there are times you must speak out. Your brand must be noted for the use of high sense of discretion. Indiscretion costs you more. Be known for excellent judgment.

3. Be a coach: You have got to be a coach every other employee wants to play for.

4. Your boss: People need to play along with their bosses. In most cases, your immediate boss is a co- creator of your brand. Do not take the shine off your boss even if you are the one doing all the jobs. What that means when I say play along is that the management will always ask your immediate boss about you, if you are  in the  bad book of immediate boss, the way out is becoming too wide for you. This is especially true if you work in a multinational/multi branches company.

5. Good manners: take great care of your manners, attitude, and character. Remember that hard skills has gotten you the job, after that soft skill keep you going to the top.

6. Dress professionally: No matter the dressing culture in your organization, always dress for where you are going not where you are. Look at what most of your management staffs are wearing and be sure you are neat and corporately dressed each day.