Is your brands story bigger than what it sells?

The Art & Science of Memorability

Most drinks brands compete on the same shelf with the same story, an obvious taste or a regional connection. In some sense there's nothing wrong with that, valid, important to the product, but when it's sat on the shelves with every other brand shouting regions, great tastes and every other obvious category cue, it's hard to stand out on product alone.

But some brands find a way to ladder beyond the liquid, they attach themselves to something bigger, a world, a culture, a myth and build everything around it until the brand means something far beyond what it sells.

Some build a myth one so big that people stop associating the brand with what it makes and start associating it with, the product doesn't disappear, it just stops being the reason people care.

I call it Myth Building, one of our Brand Memorability Hacks, a set of creative levers for brands that know playing it safe is forgettable and being brave is more memorable.

Red Bull are a perfect example of this in practice.

They don't sell a caffeinated drink, they sell the myth of limitless human potential.

They didn't attach themselves to extreme sports hoping some of it rubbed off, they built that world from scratch:

F1 teams

Cliff diving world series

Football clubs

Air Race championship

Soapbox Races and more

Spanning cities across the world and their own media house producing content that had nothing to do with what was in the can. Hell, they've even sent a man to the edge of space with 8 million people watching him jump.

Now very few brands can build a world like that, never mind send someone to the edge of space. But that's not really the point. The point is Red Bull found a belief bigger than their product and built everything around it until the drink became secondary to what the brand actually means.

Any brand can do that, find something worth standing for, something your audience already believes in and build around it until the brand means more than what it sells.

That's Myth Building in action.

So ask yourself: if you stripped your product away tomorrow, what would your brand still mean?

Our programmes help brands find the belief worth building on and turn it into something bigger than the product. Not just noticed. Remembered.