Stories Make the Difference

Some years ago, The Invisible Grail (Simmons in The invisible grail: how brands can tell better stories. Latest edition Urbane Publications, London, 2003) [The book has published its latest edition in 2016. It is one of the Dark Angels trilogy alongside We, Me, Them and It and Dark Angels, also published by Urbane.] made the case that brands were ignoring their most obvious and available assets: words. With the decades-long emphasis on ‘visual identity’—the vital combination of logos, symbols, colours, typefaces, illustrations to make companies distinctive (Olins in The corporate personality. Mayflower Books, New York, 1979)—words hardly got a mention. But we were not just talking about any word. The argument, told in the form of a quest, was about the use of words to make an emotional impact, not the dry, corporate language that seemed to be the comfort zone for most brands.