What’s your story?

Grant Leboff: Shirra, one of the things you talk about in the book is stories. I just want to know, where does narrative and stories fit in and how important is it when you're putting something experiential together?

Shirra Smilanks: Well, today's customer... if you look at millennials and the emerging Gen Z audience have increasing purchase power and importance for brands and businesses to communicate with. One of the most important factors for actually engaging those audiences effectively is being transparent, being authentic and being true to who you really are.

When it comes to brand storytelling, I think the brands that are really winning today are the brands that are looking back into their own history, their own provenance and understanding what is true and authentic to them. What is that DNA all about? Where do they come from and how do they take some of that behind the scenes and heritage piece and bring that stories to the forefront - communicating it through an immersive narrative, an interactive narrative - a way where they can get that audience to actually participate and interact with that storytaking them on a journey, so they can feel a bit closer to their customer. Ultimately that is the goal, it is to bridge that gap between a kind of a passive brand communication that maybe, was popular in the eighties and through the proliferation of TV, it was very much a  one-way brainwash style, communication from the brand to its consumer.  Now we're looking at a much more involved process of taking the consumer with you on an interactive journey of understanding who you are, where you're from and where you are going and bringing them with you, so maybe they can influence that? Maybe they can co-create and help shape the evolution of the brand as it grows?

Grant Leboff: That's really interesting, obviously, because there's lots of brands out there with rich histories and heritage that they can draw on and make sure it's authentic and do that. If you're a brand new business and you're just launching into this new world, as it were, what are the things you do you think of business needs to start to think about in terms of starting to create that story?

Shirra Smilanks: It's understanding what is your vision and what brought you to take action and actually create this brand in the first place. Looking at how you can share some of that inspiration with your audience, because that is very much an infectious thing to see that enthusiasm from a founder and so, looking at brands that have actually taken that startup culture, whether it be 'Innocent', had very much a startup feeling when it first came out. It brought that to the forefront of its tonality, of it's communication. How it actually spoke, as if it was still in that shed or in that festival where they were a-b testing, smoothie flavours and deciding whether to go to go to at all.

Also, something which is important to look at is how do your values translate into not just fluffy, big picture brand values like honesty and integrity and some of the things that you might see in a big corporate brand values sense, but actually brand personality. How does your brand characterise itself in human like characteristics? This is something which I touched upon in the 'Brand Personality' section of my book where I look in the 'BETTER' creative model at how you actually identify these three core pillars, which you can then use to activate around. So you don't necessarily need a longstanding brand heritage, as long as you do stand for something. What is your personality? Is it sophisticated, intelligent and witty? That's slightly different to, maybe, your values as a company.