The Brand Narrative process — Ryan Kutscher // Circus Maximus

If you can’t say your brand description simply, clearly, and compellingly, then you’ve not nailed down your brand narrative. Your brand narrative is a combination of the brand purpose, brand positioning, persona, tone of voice, the things you can credibly speak about with authority, and your brand's values. How do you discover these and create that brand narrative? Listen to Ryan Kutscher, CEO of Circus Maximus, as he discusses the brand narrative process.

About the speaker

Ryan Kutscher

Circus Maximus

Ryan Kutscher is CEO at Circus Maximus

Part 1 The Brand Narrative process — Ryan Kutscher // Circus Maximus
Part 2Content that gets to the heart of things — Ryan Kutscher // Circus Maximus

Show Notes

01:47

How Ryan Kutscher started Circus Maximus

Started the company at the beginning of the social era as there was an opportunity to help a new generation of brands that were going to market and putting their story to market in a new format.
03:27

Becoming the Small Agency of Gold winner

There are a lot of fantastic agencies out there but by virtue of applying what they are good at, and the way that theyre able to help brands, they were able to execute a bunch of stuff that got recognized/
05:03

Getting to discover your brand narrative

If you cant say your brand description simply, clearly, and compelling, then youve not nailed down your brand narrative. It's a combination of what is the brand's purpose? What is the brand positioning? What is the persona? What's your tone of voice? What are the things you can credibly speak about?
07:35

The brand narrative creation process

Step one is stakeholder interviews, you'd be surprised how many brands have management teams that have very different understandings of what that brand is all about.
10:54

Keep it simple

No point in going through a brand discovery process that ends up as a book that never gets executed.

Quotes

“Circus Maximus's POV in the world is that we help brands get their story straight and tell it interestingly, so we help them with that brand narrative process. And then we also help them create the content that may live in social media, email marketing, television, online video, connected video.” - Ryan Kutscher
“Your brand narrative is a combination of the brand purpose, brand positioning, persona, tone of voice, the things you can credibly speak about with authority, and the truths and values. Those things are absolutely non-negotiable.” - Ryan Kutscher
“These days, because brand communications are a dialogue, you have to incorporate the consumer, and you have to have the consumer create that narrative with you. But you have to have that brand narrative as a starting point. So that all of the people that work for the brand understand exactly why they're going to work every day, what they're doing, what their mission is, and how they're supposed to accomplish it.” - Ryan Kutscher
“If your internal team isn't all saying the same thing, pretty much verbatim, you don't have a very clearly defined brand narrative. And it probably means that the stories that you're telling your consumers are either confusing or disconnected, and suddenly this thing that should be very clear, concise, compelling, and universally understood is fractured and confusing.” - Ryan Kutscher
“Over the past handful of years, as more data, more analytics, and all these tools have come into the world of advertising, we've sort of psyched ourselves out a little bit. It could get so esoteric, and I think that we like to make ourselves seem so smart when, ultimately, we're trying to simplify. Simplicity is when it's really successful.” - Ryan Kutscher