Your Brand Story (in a Nutshell):
As anyone who knows us can attest: we at CRU love a good story. In fact, we think that great storytelling is the cornerstone for any successful—let alone extraordinary—brand. And in an ideal world, we’d have enough time and budget to begin every branding project by developing a fully fleshed out Brand Story, Manifesto, and Tonality.
But we do live in the real world, and know that not every client has the luxury of time or resources to completely overhaul their brand story—or sit down to write one in the first place. Regardless, we still think every branding project benefits greatly from at least some story work. It was out of this need that we developed what we call the Story Nutshell.
Elevator Pitch vs Brand Manifesto vs Brand Story Nutshell
Do a little Googling around and you won’t find much online about ‹Story Nutshells›—at least how we conceive of them. That’s because it’s a tool that we had to invent. Before we get into what a Story Nutshell is though, let’s take a look at two popular brand storytelling devices that you probably already know: the «Elevator Pitch» and the «Brand Manifesto».
The «Elevator Pitch» is traditionally the quick and dirty explanation of what your company or organization does, your main USPs and maybe a claim to bring it home. It’s a quick way to sell yourself, but focuses more on the business end of things rather than on the holistic understanding of your brand on the whole. It’s not traditionally the place where you’d talk about your grand mission or aspirations.
The «Brand Manifesto» is the inverse: a long form story that explains much more than what your organization does on a concrete level, but serves as the source code for your brand. A Brand Manifesto explains why your brand exists in the first place, and encapsulates your brand’s tonality, character, spirit, and aspirations. Your brand should be seen as a living, breathing thing that is more than the sum of its parts—and a Brand Manifesto helps bring it to life. It is a firm declaration that helps plant your foot firmly in the future you want to create—whether that means putting you in front of the right clients or colleagues.
But both of these tools have their downsides: Elevator Pitches can be too literal—it’s just a simple but catchy description of what your company does. And, as we said before, not every client has time to workshop an entire Brand Manifesto. At their worst, you can spend time creating both and they end up sitting in a drawer somewhere, unused by the company at large. This is often because of a disconnect between the two very different modes of communication.
We found that on many branding projects we needed to find a middle ground between an Elevator Pitch and a Brand Manifesto. Something that combines the succinctness of the Elevator Pitch with the aspirational storytelling of a Brand Manifesto. And thus, the Story Nutshell was born.
Your Brand Story (in a Nutshell)
Think of a Story Nutshell as a concentrated and condensed version of your brand story. It is a powerful image that distills as much information about your brand’s character, vision, and promise into the most compact form.
It’s brief (it should fit into a nutshell after all), but after reading it, one will have an almost complete understanding of your brand. We accomplish this by finding a powerful metaphor— a mental image —that perfectly encapsulates your brand, making it instantly relatable, understandable, memorable and easy to tell.
We created the Story Nutshells almost by accident, using them as stepping stones during our storytelling process. When developing full length Brand Manifestos, we found that it was good to present different creative routes (which we called, for lack of a better term: «Story Nutshells») to our clients before starting to write the Brand Manifesto. This extra step proved not only useful in the process of writing the Manifesto, but also in defining the rest of the project.
We found that they are so effective that, when clients decide on a Story Nutshell, the design team has enough information to start their work in parallel. We also found that while every brand deserves a great Manifesto, the Story Nutshell is the natural first step in the direction of writing one anyway so it can still be of great use for those who can’t commit to a full Manifesto (yet), so we began offering it as a service.
Why do I need a Story Nutshell?
Interested in a Story Nutshell for yourself? Still not sure what you’d use it for? Well, think of all the work and effort that has gone into the strategy that forms the backbone of your company. All of the market research, development, and confidence and faith that you have put into building what you’ve made. Without a brand story, all of that work you’ve put into making your vision a reality seems flat: facts on a page that might make logical sense but have no emotional sensibility. Think of a Story Nutshell as an emotional translation of your organization’s strategy that you can put to work immediately. It’s a way to fairly quickly honor all the work you do, and help your entire company (and your clients) identify with it.
Take the Story Nutshell that we created for the AppliedAI Institute in Heilbronn for example:
When they approached us, the AppliedAI Institute knew that they needed to help with their brand story but couldn’t quite figure out what they were missing. From the jump we knew they were the perfect candidate for a Story Nutshell. The non-profit educational institute had a lot of expertise at their disposal, and a curriculum that could educate people from their first forays into AI, to highly technical workshops for Machine Learning engineers. What they lacked was a clear way to communicate this incredibly varied program. In other words, they had all the finest ingredients to work with, but no recipe to tie it all together—a Story Nutshell is what it would take to get them cooking.
As we always do when creating Story Nutshells, we conducted a series of interviews with the main stakeholders of the project at the AppliedAI Institute, and even some colleagues at other AI institutes located in Heilbronn. These informal, but informative interviews help give us a 3-dimensional overview of the organization from as many different perspectives as possible. As an organization made of educational experts, machine learning engineers, and policymakers, there were a lot of different perspectives to account for at the AppliedAI Institute.
From those interviews, we synthesized the data collected and saw where there were alignments, differences in opinion, and opportunities. We ended up creating four different Story Nutshells that encapsulated various aspects of the brand story. Each one was very distinct from the others and described the institute in very different ways.
From an open campus in the countryside, to a particle accelerator amplifying ideas, to a workshop where ideas and minds in AI are developed, each Story Nutshell was a powerful mental image that helped make the institute easier to understand, situating it in the real world. One great aspect of Story Nutshells is that they force your organization to make a decisive creative decision together. It can inspire discussions that are surprising, helping you realize things about your brand that you may not have thought of before. Ultimately, in the case of the AppliedAI Institute, the story that won was unanimously decided upon: in their final Story Nutshell, we describe the AppliedAI Institute as «Europe’s trusted port for AI».
The choice made a lot of sense because they aspire to be a lively and bustling hub of activity where adventures both big and small can set sail from, and can’t wait to return to. Not to mention both computers and ships have «ports». They found this metaphor immediately useful, helping them understand how to picture each of the various departments in their organization. We only used the Story Nutshell to describe the Institute as a Port, but they began to run with the image, calling the Engineers Shipbuilders, and the Educators as Skippers. Their imaginations were running wild, and the understanding of how to communicate their brand began to take shape.
Story Nutshells help you understand your whole organization on a different level, in a way that you perhaps couldn’t see before. Rather than working on a full branding project, we can quickly work with you and a small group of stakeholders on a Story Nutshell that can help you in the short term, and could be revisited when you have more time for a Brand Manifesto. It’s a useful tool for both internally understanding your culture and relationship to your clients, but also on how you’d ideally be perceived by the outside world.
And with that Story Nutshell in your hand, your brand now has some more emotional firepower to leverage. It’s a powerful tool that can expand to a full branding project, developing the brand’s visual identity in a more cohesive and distinct direction, or to be used as a springboard for all communications: from PR, to pitch decks, to LinkedIn Posts, campaigns, HR, and more.
We think the Story Nutshell is a great tool for Brand Storytelling and are happy to share a peek into how we use it. For more on how we approach storytelling, also be sure to check out our series on Brand Naming, and stay tuned for more.
