I wish that somebody had told me when I was a little kid, who believed I could become the world’s most-famous singer, that a role within the marketing and creative industry would become my goal instead. Every night, I imagined performing on stage to a tremendous crowd of fans with silver spot-lights beaming down on me and speakers blasting out my debut album, when in reality I would just jump about on my bed in front of a row of plush toy animals, forcing my younger sister to shine a torch on my head with my CD-player blasting ‘Spice Girls Greatest Hits’. Well, didn’t you do the same? Didn’t you ever pretend you were a doctor and used a plastic stethoscope to check whether your pig-tailed dolly has a steady heartbeat? Didn’t you ever sprint around your garden with a bottle under your arm, pretending you were a pro-rugby player? Or, didn’t you ever impersonate a teacher? Sitting your parents on your plastic play chairs and forcing them to count from 1-10, over and over again. It’s hard not to crack a smile at memories like these, and even to this day I always find myself humming under my breath and swaying slightly to the sound of ‘Wanna Be’.
As I grew older, I traded in my pink fluffy scrunchies for baseball caps and baker boy hats.
I have always been creative, studying art and English at school, dragging my family around museums and being fascinated by buildings wrapped up in artistic art-deco detail like the Empire State Building which I visited on my recent travels to New York. It was only a couple months before this that my Uncle revealed that Rooster Punk, leaders in B2B branding, were inviting me to intern with them for a week. I was sat in my University library with my books sprawled out across the table, notes highlighted in neon yellow – which always makes my eyes fuzzy – and a wave of pure excitement electrified my mind and coursed through my body by just imagining what my desk chair could look like. I was about to embark on a journey to learn what a real, human, branding agency looks like.
Striding up to the Emmerson Building, my pulse was racing. Nervous wasn’t even the word, and, considering first impressions mean everything, I wore a gleaming smile on my face like a school girl on her first day of ‘big school’. I was thrilled to join a company who are more interested in helping organisations craft a more human purpose, rather than exploiting it for personal gain. When scrubbing up on Rooster Punk before I arrived, I was captivated and curious by their way of using emotion within the client’s brand journey and how they use ’13 Stories’ as a framework to do this. I knew that I wanted to learn more. Looking back on my week-long placement with Rooster Punk, I have learned many things from how to carry an office-full amount of coffee at one time to becoming a hopeful Copywriter in the making. I have also seen how Rooster Punk develops brands narratives through the mechanics of storytelling, driving an emotive relationship between people and businesses. Feelings, not features. This is deeply rooted in their core beliefs that brands should be more human and have a purpose. Out of their ’13 Stories’, I have picked a few that resonate most with me:
Origin – To capture the meaning behind a brand and the message it wants to send out, it all starts with understanding the real reason the company was started. The Origin is the story of the founder or business when founded, the problems they were trying to overcome when first thinking about the brand or the facet of their life that led them there. The Origin emphasises where the brand started, and it becomes the roots of the company. Rooster Punk makes the Origin both the epi-centre of their personal story and the heart of other brands stories as well, using it to powerfully tell the reader what the brand is, right from its beginning.
Empathy – The unique imagination of the customer. Rooster Punk’s story of Empathy is rooted in the customer’s vision, and the customer becomes an integral part within the brand’s journey. It’s Rooster Punks mission to use their trusty techniques to foster the beliefs with the consumer, authentically tapping in on the personality behind the story and pairing this with them to create a brand. Rooster Punk’s Empathy story is my favourite because it shows how they perspire the customers’ wishes, wrapping the individual around the Origins of the brand so that a technology-led vision becomes a human-centered story.
Culture – When I consider the term Culture, the words diversity and power come to mind. Rooster Punk uses the story of Culture to show the diverse effect that one simple branding message can have on the masses, and, at the same time, the power it can have on one single customer. Culture embodies the meaning behind the brand and who you are reaching out to. Just think of a needle falling into a haystack. In the same way, if the brand hasn’t decided what its own Culture is, it risks being lost. The Culture of the brand becomes domineering, carrying the company down the path of success by driving passion and want from its customers and employees equally, cultivating the brand into something unique whereby the dreams can be made into a reality. By finding out what the brands Culture is early on, the final product will be authentic, successfully flourishing from its Origin into meaningful and motivational stepping stones to the company’s success.
Planet – What’s that quote by Margaret Mead? ‘We won’t have a society if we destroy the environment’. Within their 10th Commandment, Planet, Rooster Punk encourages that the brand should be moral and Eco-sensitive, embodying how the future of the Planet can impact the future of a brand. Brands that flourish and thrive are those that mirror the positive treatment of the environment, and, looking at this through a wider lens, without the Planet there would actually be no brand to build upon in the first place!
Authority – Rooster Punks lasting story of Authority gives us an insight into the mastermind behind the operation; their hope that the brand will become something unique and their beliefs about what will help them get there. Rooster Punk values the ‘thought leadership’ behind the brand, that the Yin of its creator will harmonise with the Yang of the customer, no matter how different they are and showing that the human is valued. With Authority, the brand will exhale the values within its core, inventing one-of-a-kind content from just one flicker of imagination. Authority gives a human meaning to the brand, in harmony with its purpose of technology, and here, Rooster Punk’s deeply rooted beliefs that branding should be ethical and deliver a human message uses this story of Authority to spin the idea that brands, no matter how rooted they are in the digital, should still be human.
I mean, we are human after all.