I was lucky enough to sit down for an interview with Eric La Brecque, one of the inspirational and creative minds behind Applied Storytelling. In this interview, he tells me about his experiences in brand storytelling and his efforts to articulate the rich stories present, but often unexpressed, in cities. Drawing from his work in developing the “D Brand” in Detroit, La Brecque gives us an insiders view into the process of discovering and spreading narratives on a city-wide scale. With the Reinvention Summit beginning in only three days, we are fortunate to learn from a true pioneer in civic branding. La Brecque will also be speaking as part of the Reinvention Summit today, Friday the 12th, at 3:00 PM (EST).
Over the past 18 years, Eric La Brecque has pursued an approach to brand communications that combines storytelling techniques from the world’s great narrative traditions with an ongoing study of marketplace dynamics. Viewing brand development as equal parts business discipline and art form, he and his team have successfully addressed complex communications challenges for everything from cities and retail destinations to beauty products and communications technologies. In addition to helping clients achieve their business objectives through helping to strengthen their connection with their audiences, he is dedicated to advancing brand practice through the ongoing development and refinement of tools and methods.
A leading independent brand and name development resource, Applied Storytelling has developed corporate and product brands and corporate and product naming systems for dozens of organizations ranging from startups to Fortune 500® companies.
What stories do you tell to convince people (clients) of the power of storytelling?
In our field, we’re focused on reconnecting clients to the power of storytelling in the marketplace, the power of stories to increase the perceived value of goods and services. And, in fact, we’ve developed a few little narratives for precisely this purpose.
Our favorite we call “The Chair”. It traces the journey of a single chair from junk shop to auction house. At each successive step its owner learns something more about the chair. When he first acquires it, the owner knows nothing about the chair. It’s just a dusty relic for which he pays x. Its story grows richer: First, he learns the chair is a good example of a certain, fashionable kind of design. Its value increases to 10x. Then he learns it is the work of a master, and its value increases to 100x. Next he learns it was once commissioned and owned by someone famous and its value increases to 1,000x. Finally he learns that this very chair played a footnote role in history and its value increases to 10,000x.
Extreme, yes. But the story drives home the point that as goods acquire meaning and emotional depth they increase in value. The chair is always the chair. Yes, few goods are objects of art or even luxury goods. But the operation remains the same. It remains in effect at all times, if usually subtly, for every good or service that is bought or sold.
The only real differences between our iconic chair and most everyday products and services are two: First, the increase in value is often a matter of fractions of x, not multiples. And second, the object seldom jumps from one marketplace to another, as does the chair in our story. It stays in place. The story happens around it.
Can you tell us a little about your efforts in Detroit? What is Detroit’s story and how is it undergoing reinvention?
Over the course of six years prior to our engagement by the Tourism Economic Development Council (TEDC), an organization operated under the auspices of the Detroit Metro Convention & Visitors Bureau (DMCVB), Detroit’s promotional campaigns had failed to move the leisure tourism needle. People were enormously frustrated. This situation opened the door for a new approach—an approach that involved building a brand slowly but steadily over time, not hoping for a short-term spike in revenues with a one-off campaign. Beyond that, our specific approach to brand-building involved storytelling. We couldn’t find a precedent for this in the other civic brand initiatives we researched.
In the beginning, many people were skeptical. They had been “branded” one time too many. We worked to explain that what we meant by a brand didn’t involve rah-rah logos and slogans, at least not as the main event. When they understood we were looking to develop a narrative that they could begin to use on their own, at a grassroots level, without waiting for approval, they became more interested. When we explained that the story already existed and that many people were already telling it, they realized they weren’t being sold out. Our job, we explained, was simply to sharpen and focus what we found to achieve specific tourism and economic development goals.
In brief, the story we developed over the course of many months working with stakeholders of all kinds was a story of Detroit as the place where cool comes from—whether you’re talking about music, sports, cars, culture or gaming. (Of course, one key to the story’s success was to avoid literally claiming Detroit was cool. That would be highly uncool.)
The story worked. For one, it resonated with a very specific target audience: young, mostly unmarried twentysomethings from within a five-hour driving radius of Detroit who could come there for a few days to have a good time with their friends. Until that time, the region’s tourism promotions had more of a “something for everyone” approach, which put it at a real disadvantage against cities with stronger family-oriented offerings.
For another thing, stakeholders picked up on the story. Other marketing initiatives aligned themselves with it. In all, some 200 organizations incorporated some aspect of the brand story into their own.
By the end of Year One, leisure tourism revenues had increased by nearly $70 million. Convention center bookings were doubled. These numbers far exceeded our own modest expectations. Incredibly, Detroit was also starting to receive a significant amount of favorable press, essentially mirroring the storyline we so wanted to hear.
And then things began to fall apart. First, Detroit’s promising young mayor became implicated in a sex scandal and coverup. Development initiatives slowed and many conventions, particularly those organized by faith-based organizations, canceled their bookings and went elsewhere. Then, of course, the automobile industry imploded. The region, just beginning to look like it was getting back on it feet, took the blow hard. Funding for tourism and economic development initiatives shrank to a fraction of what it had been. At an official level, the brand building effort was simply overwhelmed.
Now, to be honest, the story doesn’t resonate like it did a few years ago. Had things gone down differently in Detroit and the world, I’m sure it would still play—better than ever. Today it’s in need of a new draft. And here’s the thing about rewrites: You can’t rush them too quickly.
That said, the people working on the next version of the Detroit story are already hard at it. We’re keeping track of the effort and joining the conversation at times, as others helped us earlier. Here and there, survivals from the earlier brand story are still in place and still doing their job until something better comes along— a testament to the breadth of the story’s adoption and the inherent sustainability of a grassroots approach.
In the end, perhaps, what’s most gratifying of all is that people in Detroit now talk about their region in terms of its story. The patience, critical perspective and consensus building to do the job right, yet again, are firmly in place.
What might that new story incorporate? Much of the old, of course, but reframed. Emerging elements, too. To name a few: logistics, consolidation, urban farming, water.
How has this model been applied elsewhere?
We ourselves have applied a storytelling mindset to brand-building in Calgary and in the Toledo Region, about an hour south of Detroit, where we’re currently working. We’re excited about our work in Northwest Ohio. The committee of civic, business and community leaders that engaged us is committed to developing and disseminating the story in the most effective and lasting way. It should serve as a model for this type of work, and for the results it can deliver.
In civic and regional brand-building, the storytelling approach is not yet widely used or understood. We know this from the simple fact of the Requests for Proposal (RFPs) we receive from cities that say they need to be “rebranded”. The way the RFPs are structured leaves little room for our approach. The timeframes are too short, the budgets too small. What most cities are really looking for is often nothing more than a new marketing slogan, logo and promotional campaign, usually involving a banner program. These elements may be the visual expressions of a brand but they’re not a brand in themselves. They’re not even necessarily the most important expressions. In Detroit, we did without a slogan altogether and the logo played a very specific, limited role. How can a newly minted slogan hope to eclipse the Motor City (even if that deeply embedded handle is no longer entirely desirable or relevant)? How can a new icon hope to replace the Olde English D?
The very fact that most cities’ timeframes and budgets are so low suggests to us that their expectations are low. If they really believed that brand work could help to strengthen their fortunes, then why commit so little to it?
The storytelling effort in Detroit demonstrated a new alternative—an approach that a handful of industry insiders registered. Unfortunately, the city’s unhappy downturn limited the brand initiative’s ability to serve as a more widely used case study. That’s why, beyond our specific goals for the region, the success of our work in the Toledo Region is so important
Why is storytelling, in your view, central to reinvention?
With cities, storytelling is less an agent of reinvention than of revitalization. Most cities are simply too large, too complex and too desirous of continuity to be interested in reinvention. For a city—or, rather, the constituents of a city—to be interested in reinvention, the city would usually have to have undergone some kind of radical change. It would have to have been destroyed by natural, human or economic causes and then to have begun to be rebuilt. Not just rebuilt: repurposed.
That said, one case of a more purely image-driven story of civic reinvention does come to mind. Some years ago, Las Vegas shifted much of its tourism focus away from its Sin City roots to appeal as a family destination. At the time, this was a novel, surprising way to think about Las Vegas. It worked, up to a point, though the city’s promoters ultimately abandoned it for a return to the older narrative, as celebrated in the slogan “What Happens in Vegas, Stays in Vegas,” a version of which was developed by the advertising agency R&R Partners for the Las Vegas Convention & Visitors Authority in the late 1990s.
In some ways, the exception proves the rule: Las Vegas is a very young city with an element of reinvention built into its premise.
People in Detroit are beginning to tell a story of reinvention, by the way. It’s not yet the dominant narrative, but it might be someday. The seeds of this story were just starting to germinate when we were working there. We were certainly aware of it. The official powers were not yet ready to tell it, however, and their reasons made good sense at the time. But that is a story for another day.
Explain the concept of a “civic brand.” How do you go about discovering each city’s unique story?
We define a brand as a story told in the marketplace to influence a purchase decision. (This, by the way, is by no means the standard definition.) So, to us, a civic brand is a story or set of related stories told about a city in the tourism, economic development, talent attraction, education, quality of life and other marketplaces. That’s a lot of marketplaces with a lot of different kinds of customers.
It’s nice that you ask about a city’s “unique” story. The quality of a good brand is that it stands apart from all other competitors in some meaningful way. Too often, cities sell themselves using different versions of the same story, simply swapping out the details. A dominant story being told in several cities today is that of “The Creative City”. Go look at a sampling of cities’ taglines and you’ll begin to see what I mean. Admittedly, it’s a powerful story and one that lines up with many civic leaders’ desire to participate in what’s known as the creative economy. The problem is, far too many cities are telling this story to hope to win at it. So, to the extent this is the right type of story for a given city to be telling at all (and it very well might not be), that city must find a particular angle on creativity that’s solely its own to claim. Creative at what? In what way? For what end? For whom?
The process of discovering what’s unique involves several steps and brings together information from a variety of sources. In a nutshell, it involves understanding a city’s history and current events, monitoring its media buzz, looking at what “product” it has to offer its various customers today as well as what kinds of product development initiatives are planned or underway. It involves comparing all of this in a careful, systematic way to what other cities are saying and offering.
Above all, the process involves spending a lot of time on the ground, talking to people—a deep, sincere and ongoing engagement with a city’s constituents. While hardly unbiased, they have the depth of insight to make the story ring true. Since our approach involves encouraging them to adopt the story and tell it for their own purposes, this effort is critical. Given the disparity of views and agendas, you can begin to imagine how easy it is for this effort to run off the rails. The consensus behind any approved and widely adopted civic brand story represents a political achievement as well as a creative one.
