What Is Regenerative Storytelling & Regenerative Branding? How You Ensure Your Projects Stay Relevant & Alive!

The Value Of Brands and Their Stories & Strategies

I started my current career, after leaving med school, as a brand strategist at a global top 5 ad agency (the agency that did the Apple ads, as well as PlayStation and Nike).

Yes, that is some pivot, although it may be less tangential than you might think, given I was aiming to be a psychiatrist—and brand strategists have to be experts in consumer psychology.

I then went on to found and build a wildly successful brand and innovation agency in 1999, helping launch Xbox, develop FMCG brands and mobile phone brands, build video game franchises, and even catalyze successful TV shows.

You may not think much about brands and branding (or brand strategists, for that matter), but I want to share my view on their importance after almost 30 years of engaging in the power of stories and symbols to influence and inspire change.

You see, a brand is much more than a logo, name, or snazzy set of colors picked from a Pantone book.

A brand and its brand story is an expression, a summation, a narration, a representation, a communication, and an invitation all in one.

• An expression: an effective way of sharing the deepest held beliefs, passions, and visions of the founders and employees of a venture
• A summation: a coherent synopsis of a complex reality that encapsulates your purpose, promise, vision, and values in a relatively simple way
• A narration: a compelling story that weaves together where you have come from, what you offer now (and why), and what your vision of a better future
• A representation: a symbol of all the people, the places, and the passion that together inform, create, locate, build, sell, and manage what you offer the world
• A communication: a series of messages about what is urgent, true, compelling, useful, and different about you and your offering
• An invitation: an opening gambit, and a continuing dialogue, that includes and invites others to engage, experience, own, buy, and collaborate

This means a great brand is not an inert logo on a page but is an alive—and lively—connection between the aspirations, inspirations, and purpose of an enterprise and all its people… and the needs, wants, and aspirations of its customers, now and in the future.

A great brand and its story should be a bridge between people.

It is this beautiful connection that makes well-conceived brands so powerful and valuable. Apple’s brand is estimated, as an intangible asset, to be worth about 500 billion dollars. That valuation does not include Apple’s factories, IP, patents, stock, existing contracts, etc.

Brands As Anchors & Strange Attractors

Brands also play a huge role in our world of epic complexity and constant overwhelm: they help forge a coherent sense of being and a cohesive sense of doing in the minds and hearts of those who interact with an entity—a leader, a keynote speaker, a project, or an entire company—whether those people are execs, employees, consumers, or shareholders.

They provide us anchors, harbors, and guidance through storms, particularly as our trust in politicians and religions has tanked. The data say that trust in US institutions “has never been lower.”

If a brand stays coherent, cohesive, and committed at the same time as it evolves to stay fit to its niche, people will use it as a lodestone. A well-tended brand can act, to use a term from complexity science, as a “strange attractor,” guiding people and the entire system to a new and more adaptive state of stability, purpose, and value amid the chaos.

This doesn’t happen without a vast amount of effort from brand builders and storytellers. All leaders, and even all people managers, must be brand builders and storytellers, using their narrative skills to shape reality and frame their vision, mission, and proposition. This is what we teach in our online Storytelling, Pitching & Narrative Skills Course.

We could say that brands help us buck the deathly forces of entropy—decay, disorder, and degeneration—by injecting aliveness into a business, project, or avatar of a person. Decay and disorder accelerate in times of radical change and relentless crisis, so more effort is needed by leaders to resist it.

This is why I believe that branding is a vital art form for leaders in this crazy-chaotic world… and why I suggest you continually evolve yours, whether your personal brand on your LinkedIn profile or your company or project brand.

You have to invest your life force, your precious energy, into bucking entropy if you want to help others find you and get you… and ensure they have a coherent and desired understanding of who/what you are, what you are about, and what you can do with and for them.

In fact, if you haven’t updated your LinkedIn profile for a few months (or years), I highly recommend doing so. I suggest this to everyone exec who goes on our storytelling, influencing, and inspirational leadership programs. I update my every few months. More if I am going through a period of intense leadership development.

If you’re on Linkedin, do connect with me there if we’re not connected already. It’s where I post a lot of new ideas and insights.

Towards Regenerative Brands & Storytelling

As times change, the story/narrative and the look and feel of a brand must also change. Yet traditional brand is a once-and-done, for five or even 10 years, kind of job.

In this world of radical change and relentless crisis, a brand must be alive, regenerating continuously to stay adapted and adaptive—even if this is inconvenient—rather than being a dead logo or bio, untouched for years, on a business card or webpage.

It should, as this article in Fast Company makes clear, also be fully aware of its role in social and environmental problems, as well as have a clear and genuine contribution to make to the world in the form of a business or brand purpose.

One cannot have a regenerative brand polish the turd of an extractive, inert, and destructive business model. You can explore some of the facets of a regenerative business and business model in other articles in this series, particularly here, here, and here.

I am going to focus on the aliveness aspect of a regenerative brand, as this is what makes it, in branding terms, so very different from the conventional way brands are designed and built.

Being alive means not just crafting a narrative and creating lovely brand designs and assets. To be alive also means allowing what is old, outdated, and dying in the culture and brand to be relinquished, to be released, and to be let go of.

These may be products, values, or ways of working that are much loved or were once critical to success. However, as we evolve, we must sacrifice older parts of us that have served their time in order to allow space for newness; for what is arising and arriving.

This process of release-and-receive usually needs some active grieving, some intentional “hospicing” with gratitude, yet with certitude, it is no longer needed and may actually be holding you back. The process also may need some open-minded and open-hearted inquiry to explore what is new, what is emerging, and what is surfacing.

Most of all, it may require spending time on the frontlines, with the people making/serving/selling/buying—as well as in the physical places—where your business and its people live, work, and interact.

It is crucial that a regenerative brand emerges from the interactions of all the interdependent people, natural systems, and living things that make up the network, the “rhizome,” of your business and operating model and is not a fabricated, inert, top-down concept that is “plonked” onto living beings. That is the old way of branding.

Regenerative Brands & Brand Stories Are Always Evolving

A regenerative brand and regenerative storytelling aree inspired and informed by how living systems work in cycles of decay and growth, of generation and degeneration. As such, they are alive and always evolving. Otherwise, they die.

For example, the SOL purpose/promise/proposition as a business has evolved rapidly over the last few years. Companies have changed. Leaders have changed. Technologies have changed. So we have had to change.

Our old brand was also designed to represent our work in personal development, as well as my work in keynote speaking. We have actively released all that work into other areas of our ecosystem to be represented and communicated in other brands. Some things we have chosen to sacrifice and not do, at least right now.

Not only have our business model, products, and offerings evolved to stay a match with our customers’ needs and ambitions… but we, as entrepreneurs and leaders, have also transformed. We practice what we preach. We eat our own dog food/caviar (*you get to choose).

Over the last few years, especially during COVID-19, we as co-founders have sharpened our leadership power and deepened our leadership purpose in order to focus on whatever time we have left on this mortal plane making the “biggest dent in the universe,” as Steve Jobs put it.

As we have embodied our brightest business purpose—in a nutshell, transforming the world through transforming organizations through transforming their people—we realized that our old branding was speaking to where we had come from and not where we were going to.

A brand should, first and foremost, inspire those who live it and lead it every day to go onwards and upward toward its boldest vision possible.

So we made the call to upgrade and update, to evolve and help emerge, investing the time and energy needed to bring our expanded vision to life: to play our full part in forging an optimistic, beautiful, and regenerative future through unlocking exceptional and conscious leadership, teamwork, and innovation in corporations and institutions.

We would have rather not have spent time, energy, and money rebranding. But in order to inspire the right kind of connections, the right kind of bridge, with the people we serve, we lose projects but also power and influence.

Getting A Regenerative Rebrand & Story Right

A brand update should not be rushed or taken lightly. This is even more important if you want to allow into your brand the aliveness, the social and environmental awareness, and the genuine purpose that a really regenerative brand must have.

If you want to get the most ROI on the investment of time and energy it takes to rebrand like this, whether updating your CV or your website, do it fully with all your heart and mind power.

It will take the best of all of you to crack what the most fitting expression, summation, narration, representation, communication, and invitation is right now for you/your project/your business.

You will need to exert a lot of divergent effort to explore possible spaces before you invest even more time and energy to clarify, codify, and distill your purpose, vision, and values into a few cohesive symbols and a coherent story.

But after the effort and transformation, if you get it right, your brand will inspire you when you feel tired and despondent. It will galvanize your team’s collective energy and effort. It will engage your customers and collaborators in a live, alive, and lively connection with who you are and what you do.

This is why I fell in love with branding so long ago… and also why I wanted to take some of the brilliance of great brand strategy into new product development (as innovation) and into human resources (as team building and as leadership development).

SOL offers customized leadership programs in Inspirational & Influential Leadership Programs (Including Storytelling & Persuasion) and runs short courses on Storytelling, Pitching, and Narrative Skills—with and for corporates and institutions.

Customized & Experiential Leadership Development Programs We go way beyond teaching leadership skills to support leaders to change the way they think, act, interact, communicate, and relate to their teams—and how they go about leading change, adaptive responses to challenges, innovation, and (digital) transformation. We work in trusted collaboration with our clients to deliver exceptional context-fitting leadership journeys and experiences that truly transform leaders for good. DISCOVER MORE