Marketer a Storyteller

WE humans are living in a practical yet in a world of fiction. Every individual life is a story, a journey of experiences and memories.

A person feels touched when he is able to relate his experiences with other individual’s experiences; that point he feels closer to that “other person”. He then tries to befriend that stranger, give that stranger a space in life and hence form an association, which we call friendship.

What is a Brand? Is it just a product? Does it have any life and identity of its own?

Brand like any other human being is an individual that has identity, persona and motive in life. But hard point is that this individual has no friends, apart from parents, who have created him. Another miserable fact is that this individual cannot speak, he can’t explain his potential, he seeks one chance for an acceptance in society, and he seeks friends that can be loyal throughout his life.

Who explains the potential of the Brand to the world? Who takes the responsibility to get friends for the Brand?

A Marketer acts on behalf of a brand. He acts as a mediator between a customer and a brand. It’s the responsibility of a marketer to build relationship between a brand and a customer. A brand without marketer is an aphonic individual that crave for someone else to act on his behalf and introduce him to the world.

Marketer, who is acting as a mediator, has to choose friends for the brand very carefully because brand, an aphonic individual, is very gentle and seeks long term friendship. Brand with a disloyal friends do not survive for long and hence gets lost in the crowd. Hence marketer has to pay lot of attention while choosing right friends for the Brand.

Brand as an individual is capable of catering to the need of the customer; need that may not be visible; it could be emotional or it could be functional. But how a Brand can convey this to the customer, he is aphonic, cannot speak but can be a friend, who fills the gap in customer’s life?

To make customer notice, enquire and accept the Brand, marketer has to form a story of a Brand. A story is nothing but an insight of a customer. Marketer has to perform a tough task of first selecting some handful of people, who can become a loyal friend of the Brand, from the crowd; then he has to dive into the lives of the chosen individuals to gain insights of what they feel on emotional front. Since a deep rooted friendship has emotional attachment, marketer has to find that emotional need which is unmet or partially met; he has to find that gap which is not fulfilled by other brands. He has to find answer to the question how can I find friend/s for my Brand?

Once marketer has realised that unmet need, he forms a story on behalf of a Brand; story that has a same insight, touch, and emotions as that of the story of a customer. He makes customer realise that since the Brand has the same story, experiences, emotion as of customer’s Brand can be customer’s best friend.

Through a story, what we call Brand Communication, marketer has to make customer realize that the Brand can cater to the unmet need better than other brands because Brand’s life and its persona is the same as that of customer’s life and persona.

Message of a story should be so clear that it should touch the insight of a customer and should give customer an immediate “Ah” moment or a feeling of love at first sight, and affect of that message should be such that customer has to come forward and accept the friendship of the Brand.

Hence marketer has to play a role of a mediator, a professional that stand for his Brand, but most importantly he has to play a role of storyteller, the one who conveys the potential of a Brand to the customers and hence find long term and loyal friend for a Brand, who without a Marketer is like a lonely and aphonic individual.