No one is interested in coal. A company with no identity and no personality is like a mass of coal: condemned to obscurity and with no publicity future. Today, the field of communications is completely saturated, full of noise and overlapping supply. The days of coal are over; only diamonds continue to be in demand.
The story of turning coal into diamonds is a process, and that process is our story. Porkka & Kuutsa has been pressurizing coal into diamonds for nearly fifteen years. All the stories are different, but the process is the same.
Our job is to explore, scrutinize and assess coupled with to challenge and to engage – to find the factors and the elements that form the starting point to the journey of becoming a diamond. Creating and polishing a brand is a process of cooperation. We cannot invent a personality, a visual image or a story for a business. What we do is take what we are given, what we discuss and what we see, and fashion all that into a visual concept that expresses and conveys the personality and function of the business at a single glance.
Pressure makes perfect. Do you see your business as a diamond? If it is clearly different from or even superior to others like it, then the answer is obviously ‘yes’. If, on the other hand, your business delivers products and services that no one is aware about, then the answer must be ‘no’.
Almost every business of any kind has a vision and a mission statement, in written form and displayed. How many of your employees actually know what the vision and mission statements of your company are? More importantly, how many of them can explain them to your customers? Even with cue cards?
Having a vision and a mission statement is all very well, but they are useless if they are not put to the use, understood and adopted since it is for them which those statements have been painstakingly crafted. The reason why in many companies these remain a closed book is that the people who wrote them, basically wrote them for themselves. You cannot tell a story in jargon.
Only good stories are remembered. You yourself can still remember and relate stories that your parents told you when you were four years old. That is what a good story is like. Your company can also be put into a good story, one that you can tell your client during a 60-second elevator ride and one that is good enough for him to remember and to tell others too.