StoryBranding™ 2.0 (Second Edition‪)‬

Who is that masked brand?

StoryBranding 2.0 is a second edition of the award winning, best selling book that has sparked enthusiasm among marketing luminaries, CEO’s, entrepreneurs, and personal branding advocates. In this book, Jim Signorelli, a 30-year veteran of major branding campaigns, challenges the myth that causes brands to hide behind a mask of ineffective artificiality. It is the myth that pushes brands to be something they aren’t, or something they simply will never become.

It is the long-standing myth that the customer is King.

Every year, brands spend billions of dollars fashioning their identities in order to walk, talk, and act the way customers want them to. Much like the insincere politician who merely manufactures his or her identity to gain votes, motives become transparent, especially as information sharing opportunities gain traction.

The truth about any brand is its foundational story. It’s the one about universal beliefs and values that customers will readily identify with. It’s the one that is propelled by a brand’s internal cause that is passionately and irrevocably adhered to. Unfortunately, many brands are not in touch with who they are. Instead of using the voice of the consumer as a feed- back mechanism, they put the consumer in charge of their story. In turn, this drowns out the brand’s true voice—the voice that has always been there but merely needs a surge of confidence and passion.

Oftentimes the only fundamental change any brand needs to make is an improved sense of the values and beliefs that haven’t changed.

StoryBranding is not another “how to” book about using stories as a way to create advertising messages. Instead, it is a book for anyone who has asked the question, “what do we stand for?” And to get at the answer it draws on story structure as its toolkit. It does this in order to show how any brand is like the protagonist setting out to deal with certain struggles on its journey towards certain goals. And it provides some valuable and proven navigation tools.