Today’s society is permeated with an inundation of logos, brands, ads and other mediated impressions. This makes reaching out to the public much more diffcult for companies. One technique that has been developed as a tool for companies to achieve and maintain a strong position on the market is the building of a personified brand which, in turn, creates postive associations from the public. Instead of focusing on selling products or services, brands now focus on creating value in the brand itself. By focusing on brand profiling, that is, what the company does and what resources it has, how it communicates these, and how they are interpreted by the stakeholders, many companies strive to create a pesonal relationship with the public. One key tool in achieving said personal relationship is actively and consistently communicating the brand’s identity and profile through storytelling and visual expressions.

The purpose of this project is to build a brand for Swedish fashion designer Joanna Andersson that conveys a harmonic and balanced brand-profile, which, in turn, results in a relationship between her brand and her public. To achieve this we have defined and examined the term ‘storytelling’, or more specifically ‘corporate storytelling’, as well as rhetorical aspects, both verbal and visual, to approach clarity in what makes up a strong brand-profile. This has led to review of theories and terms within brand-profiling: identity, profile, image, as well as storytelling and verbal/visual rhetoric.

In order to approach the purpose and its corresponding research questions, we have conducted semi-structured interviews with three experts within fields relevant to our project. In addition, we have used techniques from qualitative content analysis to review four companies in order to get a more objective and external perspective of the process and brand building.

The major conclusion of this project is that storytelling is a highly effective tool for companies of all sizes to utilize when building brands and trying to achieve a market share. By using storytelling, companies can personify their brand and thereby create personal and positive associations and connections for and with their public. Moreover, the project has resulted in a clear idea of how a brand needs to speak to/with their public in order to strengthen their realtionship between their identity and image.