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Storytelling has long been a topic of interest to brands, because, with the right stories you can convey your brand’s values, differentiate it from competitors, make it memorable, and give influencers something they can use as a springboard to create their own stories. What’s not to like?

Carmen Simon, PhD, author of “Impossible to Ignore: Creating Memorable Content to Influence Decisions,” has shared some of her thoughts about storytelling in a Brand Strategy Insider article. Good storytelling is founded in memory, she says, and “ … all memories include some combination of sensory elements, contextual details, cognitive processes involved when that memory was formed, abstract concepts, and meaning.” Appealing to emotion is particularly helpful, because it makes the search for memories easier. And considering all these elements helps in creating a formula for good storytelling.

That said, here are a few tips for creating memorable stories:

• Balance the concrete and the abstract in your communications and keep your audience alert by varying your pattern.
• Start with the generic and move to the specific. Degree of specificity depends on how advanced your audience is.
• “Text and graphics have the potential to be equals in memory. Make pictures easy to label and text easy to picture.” (Refreshing news to someone who’s been hearing a lot of shade recently thrown at the written word.)
• Use visuals to convey abstract concepts and avoid clichéd images.
• Activate different parts of the brain and create more memory traces by appealing to the senses. Sharing personal experiences will allow you to share more sensory details.

Which of the brand stories you’ve been exposed to lives in your memory? It’s freaky, I know, but I still remember one of the early Mary Kay ads, which pictures a dignified, silver-haired gentleman tanning a piece of leather and linking the process to the product line’s ability to create similar miracles for our skins.

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At the 2017 SXSW Conference, a number of pundits—from the former Obama administration to Visa and the Washington Post weighed in on the best way to reach audiences, to create disruptive communications. Camille Sheehan, a PR associate for Cision, who reported on the event, notes the need for brands to “shake things up” when their communications aren’t getting the results they’d hoped for. She says, “With rapidly evolving technology and new mediums of communication, we’re getting to a place where an insane amount of time is being spent on the packaging and overall delivery of what we’re saying but the actual message is getting lost in translation.”

This observation can hardly come as a surprise to busy brand communicators who fear that their expensive and presumably well-crafted messages are falling on the proverbial deaf ears. Haven’t we all felt that there’s so much noise out there that no one is hearing us?

Reflecting on what appears to have been a common theme at the conference—“Say what you mean, and mean what you say—Sheehan proposes three ways that communicators can do a better job of connecting with their audiences.

The first technique is not what I would call mind-blowing or new thinking, but it merits consideration nonetheless: “Disrupt the native advertising/sponsored content arena by shifting the focus away from your brand and more towards what benefits your audience.” In short, stop telling your market how wonderful your brand is and think about how you can convey “What’s in it for me?” Good content is important of course, but it must reflect your knowledge of your audience, what it wants, what you want it to take away, and the action you want it to take. And it should integrate the brand without taking away from the story. (The Budweiser Clydesdale commercials are a stellar example.)

Next is “Disrupt the connection with your audience: Speak to resonate with all, not just a few.” We’ve all been brought up on targeting and segmentation, so this idea seems almost heretical. The point speakers at the conference made is that inclusive language helps people identify with your message and helps them feel connected with it. Think about “Yes, we can;” the “we” was an unspecified group not, say,  fans of Ted Nugent.

Finally, there’s “Disrupt by making your brand’s voice heard on a particular advocacy, policy or political issue.” Ms. Sheehan notes that an increasing number of brands are “stepping forward or speaking up on issues that they feel are important to their audiences. (Check out the link she supplies to politically tinged ads aired at this year’s Super Bowl. ) I may be flayed for this, but I believe the recent Pepsi commercial, no matter how inept it was, represented an effort to make a “political” statement. (I’m thinking Miley Cyrus would have been a better choice that Kylie Jenner, but hey, the Kardashians give me the heebie-jeebies.)

OK, so these three ideas don’t represent revolutionary thinking, but I think they’re good reminders of our need to go back to marketing fundamentals in our communications and think about our audience’s needs, rather than our own.

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Russell Working, who writes for Ragan, has compiled excellent tips for improving photo and video. Drawn from professional photographers and videographers, they are a boon to writers who may not have a lot of experience with visual expression. Here goes:

1. Use your shots to set the scene. Shoot close up, far away, and at medium distance. That way, you can capture a scene, like Saturday morning at your local farmers’ market, in just a few shots.
2. Get closer. This helps give your photos and video the emotional immediacy that draws your audience in. Try different angles. Professionals often shoot from a higher elevation, looking down on their subjects, to create drama. (One photographer remarks that this is a great way to photograph kids and pets. Kneel or lie down if necessary to get the right perspective. If you’re concerned about getting dirty, use a small blanket to protect your clothes.
3. Use light effectively. Light can make all the difference between a shot that’s ho-hum and one that pops. The best way to use light is to move closer to it. Put a window behind you and then position your subject close to it but not in direct sunlight.
4. Shoot a lot. A lot. You’re working digitally, so there’s no need to be stingy. Besides, it’s always great to have a lot of options to choose among. Try different perspectives and also horizontal and vertical shots of still images. If you’re working in video, shoot vertical and square video for more sharing options.
5. Fill the frame. Crop and filter, too. Use the whole frame, but crop your shot to remove elements that make it look busy or poorly composed—that trashcan in the corner, for example. If you’re doing a headshot, try to avoid putting your subject in the center of the frame, mugshot-style. And try some filters.

Bonus tip: If you’re shooting a video, steady your camera, so the finished product doesn’t come out like a video of Uncle Bill’s Fourth of July barbeque. For amateurs (like me), use a tripod. If you’re more far advanced, try a drone or a Steadicam.

Arguably the best suggestion is to have fun. If you’re having fun, your subjects probably will, too, and that will come across. These five tips, and the others in Mr. Working’s post should give you a start in tackling the wonderful world of visual content.

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Paying attention to punctuation sounds a bit prissy and fussy, but in content creation (which we used to call writing or copywriting), it’s still essential.

And Maeve Maddox, who posted “10 punctuation tips for every writer” on Ragan, is a genuine voice of authority.

Here are her ten rules for excellence in punctuation. They are worth mastering, and the examples she provides in her post really bring them to life. (In this post, examples of correct and incorrect usage are mine.)

1. Follow introductory words, phrases and clauses with a comma. For example: At the end of the day, we were all tired.
2. Set off nonessential information with commas. For example: The chef, who had trained in Italy, was famous for his Caesar salad.
3. Don’t set off essential information with commas. For example: President Trump who created “covfefe” is known as a colorful communicator. (Is this essential information? Hmmm.)
4. Place a comma before a coordinate conjunction—such as but or and—separating two independent clauses. For example: The boys heard the train barreling toward them, and they ran to put a penny on the tracks.
5. Don’t join two independent clauses with a comma. It’s not strong enough, as Ms. Maddox puts it. Such comma splices result in run-on sentences. For example: Thank you for your business, please come again. (I’ve seen this in front of a couple of businesses in my neighborhood. Always makes me wince.)
6. There’s no need for a comma before a noun clause “in ordinary narration.” Whew! For example: The tourists discovered, that the museum was closed for the day. The noun clause is “that the museum was closed for the day.” And as Ms. Maddox points out, it is the direct object of the verb “discovered.”
7. Use a comma before a direct quotation. For example: Her doctor advised, “Avoid foods that contain trans fats.”
8. Use a colon after a complete sentence—not a sentence fragment—to introduce a word, phrase, clause, list or quotation. For example: She lists three favorite things in life: sunrises, sunsets, and rainbows.
9. Use an end stop, such as a period, to separate main clauses that are not part of a compound or complex sentence. Whew! For example: The pouring rain flooded the garden it washed away the newly planted grass seed. You need a period after “garden.”
10. Refrain from using multiple exclamation points. Maddox notes that they “don’t belong in mature writing.” For example: Before my horrified gaze, the car was swallowed up by a sink hole!!!

As I’ve said so often, we’re all in a hurry, and our communications reflect the speed at which we live. We text. We send email. Now, texting may give us a little more latitude to be loose with grammar, but email does not. Think about it. We use email to persuade, give direction, and request information—all of which we used to do in more formal communications, such as memos—so it makes sense that we should try for punctuation elegance and precision.

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We live in a hyper-competitive society, and branding strategy is often informed by our predilection for winning by crushing the competition. (An unsavory visual, eh?)

In “Strategy Is Not About The Competition,” an article contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by Ken Favaro, this concept and a countervailing view are concisely and elegantly examined.

Mr. Favaro takes to task those marketers who think of competitors as the enemy, an idea first articulated by Michael Porter, whose textbook Competitive Strategy hit academia in 1980. (He notes that Bill Gates operationalized this concept when he focused on smashing Netscape.) Of course, we see military language everywhere in business. Think of “battle cards” for salespeople, marketing “campaigns,” and “blitzes.”

But businesses are not necessarily rewarded for declaring war on the competition. As Mr. Favaro puts it, “ … war is mostly a zero-sum game, and business is mostly not. Companies are disproportionately rewarded when they create new value for customers and grow the market for everyone.” (Italics mine.) So simple. So revolutionary. And so focused on what should be happening, rather than on the waste of effort, energy, and—dare I say it, creativity—involved in waging war. Think about the companies that have done well with this strategy and have revolutionized markets. I bet you can call to mind at least five in the next few seconds.

Companies that are more interested in destroying their competitors, says Mr. Favaro, tend to put delivering real customer value to one side in favor of “product-feature frenzy or predatory pricing.” He cites GM and Ford versus the Japanese auto makers in the ‘70s and ‘80s and Steve Jobs’ war on Google.

Clearly, a company ignores its competitors at its peril. In fact, spending some time in understanding their value propositions can help you improve your own. Mr. Favaro notes, for example, that JetBlue “systematically studied traditional airline offerings and what customers like, disliked, and didn’t care about them.” This led to a “focus on what really matters.” Which was comfortable seating with better legroom, individual media consoles, and a range of tasty food options for sale. (Goodbye free “airline food.”)

Companies that think about how to deliver what their customers value will probably end up doing pretty well in a healthy and growing market. Mr. Favaro says it best.  “Strategy in business is different than strategy in war and sport. … It’s about the customer, your value proposition, and the capabilities you need to deliver it better than anyone else.”

Have you worked for companies with different ideas about facing the competition? Which did you enjoy working for most?

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Let’s say you’ve been thinking about how to jazz up your marketing efforts.

One of the first things you may have thought of is strategic use of color. After all, color is everywhere. It’s baked into just about every marketing campaign you can think of and as well as logos, digital billboards, and so on. Think about that chain Italian restaurant you patronize—the one that actually serves good food. Or the flyers you get from your local hardware store. Or the promotional email from the company that sold you your domain name.

Kevin Allen, who writes for Ragan’s PR Daily, has (with the help of Market Inspector) taken a look at the use of color in branding and given us a quick rundown of its language.

Here are a few fast facts:

• Red—Youthful, bold, passionate. Think Coca Cola, Oracle, Netflix, and (shudder) Marlboro. Red raises the pulse rate, attracts attention, and stimulates appetite. (I once read an article where the author’s mother told her that “the girl who wears the red dress to a party always has more fun.”)
• Blue—Strength, trust, reliability. Think Facebook, Ford, IBM, and Samsung. (I’ll spare you the snarky comments about fake news and exploding phones.)
• Yellow—Cheer, optimism, warmth. Think Best Buy, Ikea, McDonalds, and Goodyear. It’s an attention-grabber and supposedly stimulates mental processes. Anyone remember the smiling Schweppes guy with the gin and tonic?
• Green—Tranquility, growth, and health. Think BP (!), John Deere, Starbucks, and Heineken. Financial brands and those that want to promote themselves as eco-friendly love green.
• Orange—Confidence, friendliness, enthusiasm. Think Firefox, Fanta, Harley-Davidson, and Home Depot. Orange may be the new orange. On the other hand, I’ve read or heard someplace that orange can be irritating to some. (My late mother could not stand Lucille Ball. Perhaps it was the hair.) I think a little orange can go a long way.
• Neutral (black, shades of gray)—Balance, calm, premium. Think Amazon, Audi, Louis Vuitton, and Nike. These brands and others whose logos are neutral color-based promote that top-of-heap image.

I love color and acknowledge its power over my thinking and decision making. Like many others, I’ve turned away from purchases if the color of the logo or the packaging just wasn’t right and turned toward them if the color resonated.

I’d be curious to know about the colors that turn you on and those that turn you off.

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Chances are not many of us reading this post has had to do a media interview. On the other hand, there are some tips in this post that may be helpful for the lives we live every day.

In “10 crucial steps to great media interviews,” David B. Grinberg, a writer and strategic communications advisor who has worked with the White House, Congress, and national news media, offers up some effective tips for dealing with reporters. When I was briefly in PR, I remember one of the senior execs at Neale-May & Partners using them when he coached the CEOs of our client companies.

The first tip is to agree, in advance, on the focus of the interview. Do that during a pre-interview phone call with the reporter. Ask for a list of questions, though you may very likely not get them. As Mr. Grinberg puts it, “It never hurts to ask, because the more prepared you are, the more likely your interview will be successful.”

Here are four more of my favorite tips. (You’ll want to read the entire article. It’s worth the five minutes or so required.)

 Anticipate the questions

That is, if the reporter doesn’t provide questions in advance, anticipate the likely questions and your responses. Kinda like the presidential debates, eh? Whatever you do, don’t wing it, unless you don’t care about the harm you can do to your organization and its brand image.

 Create talking points (and proof points)

These are what you want to appear in the story. Don’t forget to talk to legal and the folks in corporate communications. Of course, you can use this technique in real life when you are explaining to your significant other or anyone else, for that matter, why you did what you did.

Establish rapport with the reporter

This is a really smart idea. Find out where the reporter went to school or where they may have worked before or notable stories they’ve reported. Mr. Grinberg adds, “Any sincere praise or recognition you can offer paves the way to smooth relations.” You’d certainly do this in the first five minutes or so of being introduced to someone you wanted to impress, right?

Take control of the interview

Not as Machiavellian as it sounds. Someone’s going to take control; it might as well be you. I think the best way to learn the art of deflection (of questions you don’t want to answer) and repetition (so that your interviewer gets your point) is practice. And the best way to do that is to practice with someone who will ask unfriendly questions. If you’re a parent, you may have this one down. Or not.

Perhaps the points in this article I found the most helpful were to avoid winging it and to practice. Without those two pieces of advice, pretty much everything will come to naught.

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Have you ever been involved in naming a company or a product? It’s an interesting adventure, and so many things can go wrong—or right. Consider the legendary Chevy Nova. A sturdy, functional little car, with nothing really bad that could be said about it. Except its name, which means “won’t go” in Spanish.

In writing of Kaui Farmacy, for example, marketing guru Marcia Yudkin extolls the company for choosing a name that conveys where it’s located, what it does, and its driving spirit. On the other hand, there’s Amazon, for which such a straightforward approach might not work. According to Ms. Yudkin, Jeff Bezos chose the name because “he did not want to signal what it sold.” Hmm. I’ve always liked the Amazon logo, because the company has grown into it. You look at the little arrow that sweeps from A to Z, and you think, “Yes, Amazon does sell everything from A to Z.” Although if you think again, you realize that the logo might not signal that unless you’d already visited the website and made a purchase or two.

In a recent “Marketing Minute”—How well named is that? —Ms. Yudkin recommends starting with a “solid, distinct idea of what you want the name to accomplish, indicate and imply.” She also recommends brainstorming and not rushing through the process. I’ll add to that by suggesting you check my recent post “Better than Brainstorming” for a brief intro to the ideas of Olivia Fox Cabane and Judah Pollack. Even better, you should hop on over to Catchword Branding for some truly dandy ideas about creating brand names.

I’ll end this post by with confession time. For about six months, right after I started my business, I operated with free Vistaprint business cards. You know the ones. Turn them over and on the back you’d see “Business cards are FREE at Vistaprint,” or some such. After getting shredded for using them by a thoroughly unpleasant person—who actually did me a huge favor—I went back to Vistaprint for the $29.95 special. Late one evening, faced with the prospect of running out of freebie cards and the need to come up with a card template and a company name fast, I plucked “Written Right” out of the ether. Still works for me.

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Basic psychology still works in marketing, so marketers in any category, even if they spend their days out in the weeds wrangling recalcitrant creatives, should all have a working knowledge of it. Why? Because “Purchases are 85 percent emotional and impulsive—and based on basic principles of psychology.” I’m betting that concept applies to B2B purchases like the routers and switches you just bought. (You know you liked the salesperson and not the super-fantastic throughput, don’t you?)

Here’s a quick rundown of the basics, thanks to Benedict Brychta (@BenBrychta), a dude from the Czech Republic whose mastery of English puts many native-born United Staters to shame.

In “9 principles of psychology for powerful marketing campaigns,” Mr. Brychta, who is an MBA student based in San Jose, gives us the skinny.

1. Give to get. – Give something away; get something back—like the loyalty that leads to repeat purchases. Think Amazon Prime and free shipping. I’m here to tell you it works. And yes, I know Amazon is making money, still …
2. Use color to appeal to emotions. – Red, for example. Don’t you feel jazzed up and ready to buy when you walk into Tarjay?
3. Promote exclusivity – Think Tesla and product shortages in the early days. How diabolical was that? Consider what you can offer for a short time or to a small group.
4. Highlight emotions – People want to get emotional, even your crusty old truck driver uncle. Consider the ill-fated Pepsi/Kendall Jenner commercial. (Probably well-intentioned but fell flatter than half a pancake.)
5. Promote urgency – As Mr. Brychta says, “Amazon does this all the time.” (And it works. I placed my last order the instant I saw the notice that there were only three left.)
6. Get your foot in the door – Create FUD and then offer a free trial. Then, tell your target how many others have signed on the dotted line.
7. Cut down on options – Offering many options creates confusion, followed by paralysis. The fewer the options, the greater the desired action. (Years ago, I read that a surprising number of the Russian dissidents to hit the U.S. decided to return to the USSR, because we offered too much choice.)
8. Get them on the bandwagon – Mr. Brychta says, “Everyone want to belong to a group. Make your customers a great group.” (During his presidential campaign, Donald Trump did a brilliant job of this.)
9. Educate yourself – This is great advice, though it’s not a psychological principle. And the great thing is that you can do a champion job keeping up through webinars, podcasts, and online courses.

On this last point—educate yourself—I am eternally grateful to smart folks like Mr. Brychta who scout out the information I need, digest it, and offer it up so palatably.

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An influential member of your team says, “Oh, we should brainstorm this,” and you can feel your heart sink. Brainstorming can seem safe, because no one person gets blamed for coming up with a bad idea. Still, it doesn’t always feel very productive, and often it’s just not very much fun. A few people may end up dominating the session, or ideas may not be that good, or you can definitely think of a better way to use the time in your overcrowded schedule.

Olivia Fox Cabane and Judah Pollack, authors of The Net and the Butterfly: The Art and Practice of Breakthrough Thinking suggest three ways to come up with good thinking.

The Ambassador Method

Divide the team in half—no need for each half to be equal in size—and put each half in a separate room. Team 1 members write their ideas down without discussion among themselves. Team 2 does a traditional brainstorm.

After 5–15 minutes, each team gests 5–10 minutes to organize its ideas. Team 1 can speak at this point. Then each team chooses an ambassador to present its ideas to the other group. That way, each team has the opportunity to both talk and listen, which Ms. Fox Cabane and Mr. Pollack describe as helping “light up different part of the brain and get more of the mind’s creative engine running.”

Ambassadors—and anyone who wants to switch rooms—then return to their rooms. Note that diminishing returns tend to set in after three iterations.

Fox Cabane and Pollack note that traditional brainstorming tends to bind our brains’ creative flow, because our ideas need time to percolate and “our creativity doesn’t run on a timetable like a train.”

The Sleepover Method

Start with a traditional brainstorming session for 30 to 60 minutes and give the notes to everyone, including those who couldn’t attend. Ask everyone to take the notes home, read them, and sleep on them. The next morning, give everyone 15 minutes to write down any new ideas they had. Then share the new ideas with everyone.

The reason? Our brains work when we sleep. A lot. When nodding off and waking up, they communicate clearly with our conscious minds.

The Strolling Method

As with the sleepover method, the entire team gets the notes and then goes out for a walk. (30 to 45 minutes is optimal.) Then everyone comes back together to discuss what occurred to them during the walk.

Walking is perfect because you get enough exercise to pump oxygenated blood into your brain, and your muscles don’t get it all. Walking “gives the executive part of your brain a task so it stays out of the way and lets you enter a state of mind-wandering.” (Hence creativity.)

When you think about it, we use these methods in our personal lives. We sleep on things. We write things ideas down in journals, we solicit the ideas of others—often several others. The idea of codifying the process seems supremely sound to me. I like the idea of explaining the methodologies in advance of putting it to work, so that teams are receptive and even eager to try them out.

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