8 things we can do for you @The Story Studio

We identify your Brand's True Character. Then we write the script for its actions on the marketplace stage.

What is True Character? When you first meet someone, what influences your initial impression? Perhaps how they're dressed -- that's often what we first notice. But what determines whether you want a long term relationship with this person? It is rarely the superficial and much more likely to be your experience of their true character: how trustworthy, genuine and authentic you feel them to be.

Brands are the same: if you think of your brand experience only as a logo or a website then you are only thinking about wardrobe. Your brand is truly given life when you go beyond the outfit and the first impression. We help you define and express your authentic values and attributes. Then we identity the actions that come naturally to you. This evaluation illuminates the promises you can make and really keep in the market.

What does knowing my True Character's promise do for me? The most successful brands create loyalty, trust and ferocious word-of-mouth. It is critically important that when you say you are going to do "x", you do "x" not just once but over and over again. This applies to services, products, corporations, leaders and personalities. This consistency and reliability creates powerful trust and a reputation for dependability.

Once we define your true character and promise, then what? We deliver into your hands a Character Brief that specifies your ethics, promise, values, attributes, market positioning, brand architecture, look and feel, talking points and your action strategy. The Character Brief becomes a working tool that will align the actions of everyone working for you and with you.

We name products, companies and business models.

What's in a name? Blood, sweat, tears -- and both enormous possibility and responsibility. This may be the hardest job we do and, in the end, the most gratifying. Sometimes great names come quickly. When they do, we're grateful, but suspicious. We still put them through a vigorous vetting process. Most often, though, the right name requires a great deal of processing time -- not just for us, but for everyone in the decision-making role. Naming is your true character giving birth: possibly painful, certainly messy, but with beautiful new life waiting when it's over.

Uh, and building your website is like having twins. :-)

We create communication strategies and presentations for executives.

Can you imagine the look of horror on many of our clients' faces when we suggest they blog? Maybe such an expression just passed over your own face! If so, don't feel bad. Writing a blog isn't what you or they do for a living. You probably don't write your own press release but those communications are essential and they must be authentic to the brand. The Story Studio can write your blog for you. We can also build skills in your employees and partners to make their own contributions to your blog. And if we've created your Character Brief, you can be sure what we write will accurately reflect your thoughts, in your authentic voice.

What else do you and your fellow executives need to say today? In today's splintered market, submitting your URL to search engines and memorably expressing yourself in social networks is all part of giving your brand a sustainable life. In addition to cyber-staging our clients' brands, we deliver speeches, PowerPoint presentations, executive summaries, media coaching, investor pitches, book coaching, sponsorship proposals, media scripts, brand narratives, press releases, website copy and advertising copy. Need anything else? Add it to the list!

We fix customer experiences that are not aligned with your brand promise.

Okay, you're already up and running in the market -- but why aren't your customers running after you? The reasons (and there may be many) usually fall under the category of alignment issues. The experience you are creating for your customer lacks relevance, clarity and often is inconsistent with your True Character's promise. Remember: loyalty is created by building trust. Trust requires meeting the expectations of your customers over and over again. And it is important for you to define those expectations.

Meet the brand chiropractor -- how we put you back into alignment. Once you have a Story Studio-created Character Brief, it becomes a powerful tool for alignment. Using the elements of your brand's True Character as expressed in the Brief, we audit your target markets, all of your customer touch points and -- this is essential for brand differentiation -- your competition. Then we develop a brand strategy for getting you back on track so the marketplace encounters only authentic expressions of your brand wherever it appears.

We identify the right markets and the right strategic partners.

How do we focus your brand for the perfect market? Sometimes our clients are preaching to the wrong crowd or to a crowd that is too broadly defined, forcing them to make a vague and inauthentic promise. Remember: every time you attempt to skew your message to yet another market segment, you are at risk for breaking your consistent, aligned brand experience.

What is the solution? Think Nike and Apple. We help you define and identify your market by defining and identifying the promise you can naturally and authentically keep. Staying close to your true character and the source of your passion means you act in a manner natural to your being, individually and corporately. The marketplace can smell the inauthentic coming a mile (or a half-dozen mouse clicks) away. We help your brand maintain its integrity.

Who are your people? Think of your business as a garden. The plants that grow well there do so because they are rooted in soil with the right nutrients, in a climate that lets them thrive, tended by knowledgeable gardeners that care. We look for the seed that blew there and grew organically because it was happy with all of the conditions in which it found itself. This "organic" customer or strategic partner represents the market with whom you can most effortlessly do business; they grow in your garden voluntarily because they find what they want there. Understanding what makes them organic lets you tap into a vein of gold that illuminates your unique value proposition, and this is the key to creating a consistent, dependable revenue stream. From this position of strength and self-knowledge it is much easier to grow and extend into new markets.

We brainstorm so you can go-to-market quickly with innovative offers.

Why do I need to brainstorm with a bunch of people? Can't you and I figure this out? Try asking yourself this question instead: do you want your brand, your ambition, your success to have every possible advantage in the marketplace? Of course you do. Before we send you into production, our goal is to add weight and power to our ideas, to find and fix any serious flaws in them and to unearth the surprising opportunities that lurk in the corners of our creative process. One stage of that process is charrette, a term that originated with the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. It is an intense collaborative period of creative exploration in the design journey. We've found that brainstorming sessions@The Story Studio profoundly accelerate any go-to-market project.

From our cast of supporting characters, we pull the talent and range of expertise most appropriate to your project. Whatever your story -- a product launch, a market extension, merging corporate cultures -- our roster of fearless creatives and smarty pants produces surprising and useful results when we apply their knowledge capital to your project. Our brainstorming on your behalf will be the most productive planning dollars you ever spent.

We help you create identity collateral and media for all marketing channels.

Is @The Story Studio a design firm too? Think of us as your turnkey creative directors. We can supercharge your existing design and support relationships and we can bring new players to the game as the project demands and as you approve. We will either work with your designers or connect you with a variety of print and digital designers and programmers that can best execute your look and feel as expressed in your Character Brief. We'll help you generate a budget and a Request For Proposal for all the design services you might require. In addition to providing our visual creative direction, we are able to produce your collateral, advertising and promotion copy. However we structure our services for you, our goal is to have your brand experience staged and operating on its own within 6 months.

What's up with all those video pieces we've done? We infuse our work with a dynamic sensibility of vision, sound and narrative, even when dealing strictly with print. Emily Aiken and many of the creative consultants she brings to the table have an extensive history in the entertainment industry. Emily alone has generated hundreds of B2C and B2B sales presentations for some of the most important and profitable properties and personalities in media. Among the Supporting Characters@The Story Studio you'll find sitcom writers, comedy performers and performance teachers, documentary producers, writers and ghostwriters, corporate coaches and media-trainers, multimedia directors and producers.

We manage brand and infrastructure aspects of culture change.

It's human nature to resist moving away from the way things are into new territory -- "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." But success in the marketplace is like being a shark: you move or you die. Our goal for you is to ensure that you move with purpose -- purpose that supports your ambition and produces results which constantly improve your competitive position.

We identify the changes that will build brand equity and enhance the mood within your business culture. We apply extensive brand audit skills to anticipate threats and opportunities generated by outside forces. We build structures and tools that help you preserve what works best in your enterprise and to enhance its effectiveness.

Change is inevitable and natural, so why doesn't it manage itself? Oh, were that it were so. Big corporations profoundly understand both the need and the hazards of culture change (often after painful lessons); for small businesses, whether you are 10 people or 150, the challenge is to identify and navigate the paths of change that lead you where you want to go. Some of these paths of change we've tackled for our clients:

Forging operational tools to improve how our clients report work progress to their clients -- to illustrate their value and manage expectations.
Designing a dynamic and memorable new name and stock ticker symbol for a publicly held company.
Creating a cross-functional internal think tank to enhance knowledge sharing and stimulate innovation.
Generating a fund manager dog-and-pony show to engage and inform the target audience, while swinging them to support plans for massive transformation across the enterprise.
Assisting small business owners in communicating to their customers and their employees the necessity and wisdom of selling their 27-year-old business -- and reassuring them that the sale is being conducted in the most stable and constructive way.

We pride ourselves in our skill and our track record in helping clients shift the change mindset of their constituencies: from dread of catastrophe to anticipation of great fortune.