Brandcamp

Brand-storytelling for brave small businesses

Through Brandcamp, I work with brave small businesses to develop content that tells their brand stories.

What that really means is, I listen to small business owners tell me about what they do, and I help them craft the way they put themselves out into the world - on their website, on instagram and facebook or other social media, and all communications with their customers.

I support and guide my clients to be brave and make good changes that strengthen their brand. I seek to help the whole-hearted to recognise and live up to their values through the way they shape their brand and relate to their customers.

If you have a small business, you know it's important to keep your customers engaged and loyal. You want them to care enough about what you do to keep coming back, and to tell their friends how much they like you.

Brandcamp helps you to tell better stories. I work with you to help you:

make useful and engaging posts on social media
achieve a look and feel on your website that signals your values and engages customers
develop a brand voice that actually suits you
take good photos for goodness' sake
use smartphone apps like a marketing ninja
differentiate your business from the competition
tell stories that people want to share
feel like you can totally do this small business marketing thing

Brand-storytelling is marketing for people who hate the whole idea of marketing.

'Marketing' sounds like something Big Corporates do - something they pay squillions for to advertise their products and services to the masses. At its most classic it can be pretty shouty and insistent and in your face.

Brand-storytelling is a gentler, more personal thing. Its goal is to let people know how much care goes in to what you do, how doing what you do makes you and your customers feel. It's not all crazy discounts and shiny features - it's more about the deeper experience of what you are creating.

Marketing often gives us the screaming heebie-jeebies, but brand-storytelling makes us feel connection.

Good brand-storytelling feels like sitting around the campfire with friends - warm, relaxed and connected.

Understanding brand-storytelling

This REMOgram is the best way I know to explain brand storytelling.

What your small business sells or offers is the tip of the iceberg. The reasons people care about it are all about what's beneath the surface.

Simon Sinek talks about 'knowing your why' - people don't buy what you do, they buy because they love you for why you do it. Remo puts it this way: we don't sell stuff, we sell stories - the thing the customer takes home is a souvenir of the story.

Working with Brandcamp, you can discover those stories and learn how to talk about your why.

It's my mission to help my clients tell stories that make people feel excited and connected. Stories that create warm and engaged tribes.

My skill is in finding and telling my clients’ stories with nuance, flair, honesty and charm.

Step 1 >

Brandcamp begins with a fixed price two-hour workshop, which establishes where you are and where you want to be.

It's easy and kind of fun, and ideally, there's coffee.

Step 2 >

Using the information I have from the workshop, I create a report for you. From there we work out what you need - whether it's a brand name and tagline, website design and content, social media content, fresh ideas, strategies and action plans.

Step 3

We crack on making what you need and skilling you up to make quality, affordable content yourself, so you can create a tribe of people who get what you do and love you for doing it.

Some of the brands I've helped co-create through Brandcamp.

Frankly website

1803 website

Musichunter

Blue Mountains

Some people who inspire my Brandcamp work

Writer, thought leader, freelancer

Seth Godin

'The secret of leadership is simple: Do what you believe in. Paint a picture of the future. Go there. People will follow.'

That's what Seth Godin calls a tribe. I'm trying to be that kind of leader, and I'm helping my clients become that kind of leader too.

Researcher-storyteller and mega-TEDster

Brené Brown

Brené Brown's grounded theory research

demystifies shame. Her work shows that without vulnerability there is no creativity or innovation or possibility of connection.

Brené has harnessed US President Teddy Roosevelt's 'Man in the Arena' speech to convey the dangers in staying small to slip under the radar of the critics. The credit belongs to those who 'dare greatly' - not those 'cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.'

Thinker, writer and Al Gore's ex-speechwriter

Dan Pink

'Poets..contemplate the world in which we live, ...and give expression to it in a way that makes the reader understand how that world runs. Poets, those unheralded systems thinkers, are our true digital thinkers. It is from their midst that I believe we will draw tomorrow's new business leaders.'

I want to be one of Dan's poet-leaders. And I believe he's right about the six senses that are emerging as the most important in the connection economy. Right brainers will rule the future.

Merchant and General thinker

Remo Giuffré

I loved the old REMO General Store on Oxford Street. REMO's famous catalogues are where I first understood that the language of marketing didn't have to be bollocks, smoke and mirrors. Remo pioneered brand storytelling. And then he founded the General Thinking movement and TEDxSydney. He's the master.

672px-Benjamin_D._Maxham_-_Henry_David_T

Pencil maker, transcendentalist nature writer,

proto-environmentalist

Henry David Thoreau

Thoreau spent two years living in a small, simple house he built with his own hands at Walden Pond in Massachussetts.

'I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.' I want to live deliberately, and I've chosen to do so in a place where I am always close to nature.

Writer and practical philosopher

Alain de Botton

I love this chap. Alain de Botton has rescued Philosophy from the dry, academic I'm-cleverer-than-you-are scholarly courses he took at uni, by creating the much needed and very practical The School of Life.

TSOL is a joyful approach to teaching us all the most important thing - how to live. There's one in Sydney, and their videos are instructive and charming. His work has very much inspired my DIY Festival project.

bRANDCAMP

Tell me about your small business and how I can help

Email Manda to have a chat

I acknowledge the Gundungurra and the Darug people, the Traditional Owners of the land where I live and work. I recognise their continuing connection to land, water and community. I pay respect to Elders past, present and emerging.

Acknowledgement of country

I accept the invitation of the Uluru Statement from the Heart and support a First Nations Voice to Parliament enshrined in the Australian Constitution.