Mastery Journal 5.1

Mastery Journal 5.1

Identifying the original goals

In the Mastery Journal, I identified three different goals, from the three phases, in the book “Mastery” (R. Greene, 2012). Greene states that there are three specific phases one goes through to achieve mastery. The three stages are as follows: The Apprenticeship Phase, The Creative Active Phase, and The Mastery Phase. This was the assignment in which I had to determine what were my goals for each of my classes to accomplish attaining my degree. For the Business Storytelling and Brand course, I determined at that time, that my phase 1 goal would be to learn how to use brand strategies. The phase 2 goal was to learn what my demographics are and how to reach them and finally phase 3 pertained to how to use storytelling strategies to help market my company.

Meeting and achieving the goals

The three goals I determined for myself are being met by the pertinent information that we learned through the coursework and video segments. I didn’t have an understanding of what a brand was before I began this course. I didn’t realize how important a brand is for a particular individual and or a company. Also, the amount of work that it takes to establish a proper brand is amazing and in some instances, can take years to establish. The image that one portrays for themselves or for their business is crucial to the over-all success of their products. It has to be one that individuals can remember and establish a relationship with. The brand has a trademark or logo which represents the company and what they stand for. A brand should describe the companies intentions or promise to its customers and should have a tagline that touches on what the company can do for the client/customer. This can be accomplished in many different ways however; the final result should be to establish a relationship with your customers within your demographics or parameters.

When it comes to demographics, I now have a much better idea of who my customers are and what I have to do to establish a relationship with them. For my particular company, the building of a website was wonderful because it gave me an understanding of the things that are important when building a website. The look, colors, consistency, and what information needs to be present to get my brand to the customer is exceptional. It also has to have a feel or story from page to page. This branches out to the social media circuits that I have establish as well. Linking into Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. is a must in today’s world of marketing your products. For my musical products Amazon, Pandora, Spotify, and iTunes will also play a part in getting my products to the customer. A good marketing plan needs to be in place in order to be able to maximize all of the media outlets. This is where a good storytelling campaign will help with the process.

Storytelling is another essential part of establishing a business brand. It’s basically what brings like minded people together. We hear a story that we relate to and mentally establish a brain pattern with it. When we were children, everyone heard a scary story or a pleasant story about something that happened. Telling those stories left little pixels of information in our mind that we can retrieve at any moment. A good story will always resonate with an individual as long as they can relate to it. It’s the same when one is developing their business or individual brand. With a highly relatable story that touches an individual, one’s brainwaves will remember the story and hence remember the product that’s associated with that specific business. The company or product will immediately come into the persons mind when they hear the story, tagline, logo, jingle, accomplishments, etc. It’s an emotional attachment that is made by the association between the client and the company. These are things we want to remember because they make us feel good in one sense or another.

I am extremely excited to put the tools I learned from this program into play. They will be very important for me in helping establish the kind of company I want to own. Helping me brand myself as well as the company, will definitely allow us to receive the type of exposure we will need. It will help develop a concrete state of the art image of an up and coming company that cares about what it produces. Hopefully by good storytelling, we will be able to resonate with our clients and customers.

References:

Greene, (2012). Mastery. Retrieved from VitalSource. Penguin Books.

Morgan. N. “What Storytelling Is And Is Not” Online posting. 14 April 2015. Forbes. < https://www.forbes.com/sites/nickmorgan/2015/04/14/what-storytelling-is-and-is-not/#1f1d5d9c1722>