Strategic Brand Narrative by

What is strategic brand narrative?

Everybody talks and knows about branded content and storytelling. This is where we are now: companies keep making not always effective content in a massive way, saturating audiences with information and hardly connecting with the brand’s essence. Being that the scenario, we understand that companies might step back to rethink themselves. Unlike storytelling, a compelling brand narrative makes all in all for a consistent, clear and attractive strategy that connects all the dots with a logic and creates consistency across a brand transmedia communication. Crafting a narrative is essential for positioning a brand and bringing into a new set of paradigm.

Each brand needs to create their own tone of voice in order to inspire and transmite core values and personality. For capturing their essence, it is crucial to go beyond graphic design limits in terms of branding and dig deeper. By setting this mental framework, brands can connect with people emotionally and establish a human-to-human conversation between not targets but existing and potential audiences about things that matter to them, and that could change their perception of the world, with a special focus on prescriptors that could spread the word.

Everything is happening so fast, but we need to focus on what remains

Humans connect with stories. Since the dawn of time, stories have helped us build connections, relate to each other and understand more about the world and how it works, about who we are and what we feel by conveying and sharing our day-to-day experiences.

The world is rapidly evolving into a digital and complex reality and the way we communicate has radically changed. Today we are too overexposed to messages, news and images that our expectations as both customers and audience are way too far from being real. In the midst of this massive targeted-content overflow, brands have a golden chance to break through the clutter and address the communication with a tactical approach –this is, becoming their very own brand media and generating content that speaks about them in the way that social media has done so far.

So, how can we embrace strategic brand narrative?

Like many places around the world, Barcelona is dealing with global challenges and facing unprecedented issues. The City Council asked us to take part in a global campaign to improve the reputation of Barcelona. To break away from the one-sided story of the city,  we developed #AlwaysBarcelona, a series of mini videos in which the voices of the city speak in unison and shed light on the fragmented and dynamic nature of the city  – and therefore, a choral movement, a loyal and real portrait of citizens from citizens.

The urge to alter the notion of not only the local channel Barcelona Televisió but the city as well, through place branding, was the driving force and motif behind the rebirth of betevé. We realised that we had the possibility to redefine the mood of Barcelona by showing the other side of the coin, and that’s what we did with La Mirada Imperfecta campaign: portraying the beauty of the everyday life in each neighbourhood and reaching a greater cultural proximity.

With The Switchers, we wanted to reach and connect people through motivation. They made the cases into stories, moved institutional to inspirational and worked as a humanised communication tool for the institutional initiative SwitchMed is, funded by the European Union and together coordinated with the United Nations. Through their inspirational stories, they encourage the society to follow their good example and approach the Southern Mediterranean area, often mentioned in poor context, in a creative way, framing the beautiful nature, ambitious people and great initiatives.

For Arquia Foundation, within Arquia Caja de Arquitectos, we highlighted a new side of the architectural practice by creating an editorial line that could give new life to their precious archive of articles. For the new platform, Arquetipos, we featured interviews with creative personalities that influenced architecture without strictly colliding with the practice, such as Mariluz Vidal from Openhouse Magazine, or designer and founder of Apartamento Omar Sosa. This helped us broaden the communication to a new segment group.

We wanted WOUF to be seen as going hand in hand with creativity and travel –and this needed to translate across every communication channel. We opted for special mini stories, inspired on the travel experience of the brand ambassadors. As such, we increased their story’s lifespan, as well as gradually opening up the possibility for new, interseasonal stories created by other creatives from around the world. Through careful product placement, fleeing the obvious and instead embracing the authentic spots in cities such as Copenhagen or Berlin, we simultaneously showcased the brand in an influencing environment.

Born from a desire to explore artistic fields and expand our perception of the brand, Marset’s initiative Young Talents fosters meaningful collaboration with emerging artists, inviting them to interpret their designs in creative and exploratory ways to capture new meanings. These small collaborations cultivated a more frequent periodicity and gave the brand a more lively stream of content throughout the year.

For DOIY Gallery, we wanted to go outside the given territory to find ourselves on new surprising waters. The initiative #doiygallery offered carte blanche to emerging names to bring a DOIY’s object into a new environment. Our aim was to find the right artist that understood the values of the brand, yet could bring their own vision to life and put their own mark to the product. Through these collaborations, we could expand this periodicity to monthly releases, reaching media on a continuous basis throughout the year and giving life to the brand in between seasons.