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Abstract. The branding process no longer revolves just around the main branding elements, such as naming, slogan, visual identity or positioning, but is rather a storytelling process promising customers the satisfaction of their needs, as well as an entirely new experience. Stories have a great persuasive force because our episodic memory stores them effortlessly and brings them back to us when we see or hear about the product again, unlike numbers and specific data (Wala 2015, p. 170). Therefore, products that tell stories are no longer foreign to consumers, since they know a great deal about them and products people associate with emotions and stories are called brands. The present paper offers an insight into this branding approach by combining theoretical considerations with numerous examples of brands which have already embraced this technique, with the aim of providing a better understanding of the process of storytelling in general and an assessment of its role, especially in relation to branding.
Keywords: Brand; branding; Story-branding; Storytelling; Persuasion.
Introduction
"Brand" and "branding" are some of the most prolific terms used in specialized literature by practitioners and theoreticians alike. However, we should keep in mind that "brand" is a very complex concept and "branding" is an ever-evolving process, adapting to change and to the needs of the market, just as the advertising process itself.
Our paper defines these concepts and classifies the main strategies essential for the understanding of brands, while discussing concrete examples. One of the presented strategies consists of the use of storytelling. This is a technique with an increasing popularity, to such an extent that it has led to the formation of a new concept in specialized literature (Boje & Khan 2010, p. 10), that of "Story-Branding".
The constant evolution of this field corroborates the fact that on such crowded markets, companies need to adapt and adopt innovative strategies in order to appeal to the customers and sell their products.
1. Concept Definition and Characteristics
1.1.Brand and Branding
According to Fanning (1999, p. 3), the classic definition of a brand was published in 1955 in the Harvard Business Review by B. V. Gardner and S. J. Levy, as follows: "A brand name is more than a label employed to differentiate among the manufacturers of a...