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Conor Shields

Passionate about stories: Air Iceland Connect

Old, fashioned communications make for the best storytelling.

There comes a time when you stumble across a brand, regardless of their size, who you cant help but adore for their ingenuity. Air Iceland Connect is one such brand.

Air Iceland Connect is a regional airline which helps native Iceland residents get to and from different parts of the country. As they are only a small charter flight, Air Iceland Connect do not offer flashy in-flight entertainment systems. Instead, they encourage their customers to share their stories through the medium of good old-fashioned journal entries.

To find out how we can help your team tell your brand story, request a consultation here.

Each flight contains one of the below journals and customers are asked to write about their travels and experiences to be passed on to the next customer. Spotted by a journalist from the Financial Times who fell in love with the idea, the Air Iceland Connect’s Shared Stories onboard travel journal has been shared online all around the world.

The Shared Stories journal allows for the collection and sharing of stories, creating an emotional connection between the user and the brand as whole.

 

Allowing your audience to become a part of the story

By having a well designed, physical journal for your customers to peruse and even contribute to, Air Iceland Connect already surpasses similar businesses when it comes to crafting a brand story. Some of the stories recounted by Tom Robinson of the Financial Times have the ability to capture the reader and draw them in for the duration of the flight. These included simple travel tips, accounts of enjoyed trips and even some more personal stories involving broken hearts and rekindled relationships.

Because of the analogue nature of these journals, they have proven to be quite popular among frequent flyers. The notion of sharing stories has been with humanity for thousands of years now. However, these journals show how storytelling like this is still a popular medium. Sharing stories can still be as entertaining as it was all those years ago.

Creating an emotional connection between audience and brand

As we always say All Good Tales, storytelling is one of the most effective ways of creating an emotional connection between a person and a brand. The Shared Stories journal however, does so in a way which allows for continuity in the their brand storytelling method. Air Iceland Connect are an airline which takes a profound interest in the lives and experiences of their customers. This emotional connection only boosts their stature as a brand who cares. This is the ideal situation for any brand to be in as they become a lovable favourite for returning customers.

 

Here at All Good Tales, we believe that storytelling can help your business succeed. We’ve worked with the likes of Ancestry.com, Kingspan and DAA in helping them tell their story. We’d love to help you with a free consultation. You can call Gaye on (01) 254 1845 to organise yours today. Alternatively, you can get in touch here.

 

Why communications shouldn’t be last on your list

It takes a lot to run a business. Loyal employees, a solid business plan, reliable IT systems, you name it. However, the one aspect of building a memorable brand which is often ignored by CEOs is brand communications and PR.

This is a complete and utter rookie mistake.

It’s often due to the bad rep which the PR profession gets from those who work in certain sectors. PR executives are often viewed as spin doctors or media manipulators, creating campaigns to promote a falsely positive image of a certain organisation. It leads business owners to avoid the idea and rely on traditional advertising and marketing strategies. And although media spin does occur in certain sectors, the actions of a small minority should lead you to paint the rest of the industry with the one brush.

When coupled with brand storytelling, good public relations campaigns can really help boost your brand image get your business the recognition it deserves. How you may ask? Well, we here at All Good Tales believe that great stories get more of everything; more sales; more funding and particularly, more media attention. So why should you put brand communications at the top of your company’s to-do list?

Ads can only get you so far

ads

When it comes to getting more people to notice your brand, traditional advertising methods can only do so much for you. You have to be more proactive and especially more creative when it comes to getting your brand to stand out. Just take a look at some of your favourite brands. Do you think they just rely on ads to grab your attention? They of course, do not.

Brand communications is all about working the different angles available. Along with advertising and digital marketing, you should be creating your own content, reaching out to influencers, rubbing elbows with journalists, drafting press releases, etc. Getting your business into the national newspapers or popular blog sites can unveil your brand to the eyes of a whole new clientele, those who are generally ignorant of spray campaigns or visible advertising. You can shape the image of your business through carefully crafted words and images. And it’s never as hard as it seems.

Still a bit unsure of it all? Why not get in touch! We can help discuss brand comms options and PR practises to suit your business.

Authenticity is the future

There’s just something a little bit impersonal about static advertising. Whether it be in a newsletter, a newspaper, or on a website banner ad, these types of advertising don’t really show much about who you are and what you want your brand to achieve.

We here at All Good Tales believe that the next big thing for both PR and digital marketing is Authenticity. The ability for a brand to show a personal, authentic side to what they do much more for business than a plaster ad campaign. It creates a positive, lingering connection between you and your audience. Emotion trumps visual stimulation every time, hence why brand storytelling has become increasingly popular in recent years.

Need some tips to help tell your brand story? Click here for an extremely useful blog post.

Be your best digital self

digital

As much as we lament the days of traditional print media ruling the roost, we can’t ignore the immediate shift to digital which has overtaken the industry. Everyone wants information to be freely available online and easily consumable.

PR companies can nowadays help step in and guide you along the way to establishing your online presence. They can also draft quick press releases and responses in the middle of a crisis and have them sent to journalists in a moments notice.

Brand storytelling is mainly done online through the creation of branded content, all contained within a single brand newsroom. By doing something as simple as this, you are already going to be leaps and bounds above your competitors. So put your money where your mouth is and start putting your brand’s image first!

Here at All Good Tales, we believe that storytelling can help your business succeed. We’ve worked with the likes of Ancestry.com, Kingspan and DAA in helping them tell their story. We’d love to help you with a free consultation. You can call Gaye on (01) 254 1845 to organise yours today. Alternatively, you can get in touch here.

 

 

 

Meet The Storyteller: Fiona Saluk – Fairtrade Ireland

Within creative industries, storytelling becomes an integral part of what we do on a daily basis. It forms the basis of our proposals; the hook for our presentations; even the cliffhanger for our marketing campaigns.

 

We here at All Good Tales are particularly keen about using storytelling as a weapon for business. But behind each good story is an even better storyteller.

So in this bi-weekly series, we chat with a different storyteller about their work and how telling stories helps them. Next up is Fiona Saluk, Business and Project Coordinator with Fairtrade Ireland.

 

Q.1: How did you get into your current role with Fairtrade Ireland?

My career with Fairtrade began in 2013 when I learned about the movement and wanted to find a way to get involved. It was my final year of college and I was eager to get work experience in all areas and hadn’t worked in the non-profit space before. I sent an email inquiring about work opportunities and they brought me on board as an intern to assist with the Fairtrade Fortnight campaign. The internship was a great experience and great use of my time in between classes. Shortly afterwards, I finished my degree and moved to New York to work that post college corporate lifestyle, but occasionally kept in touch with the Fairtrade crew. Just over a year ago they had an opening and got in touch with me. I quit my job immediately. I was delighted to abandon Trump-land and work for an organisation with a meaningful mission! My internship role had an emphasis on marketing but my current role is a combination of marketing and sales.

 

Q.2: What do you enjoy most about your role in the company?

One of the great things about Fairtrade Ireland is because there are only four of us in the office. It’s a very collaborative team. I get to work on most projects and campaigns as well as be involved in sales development and long term business plans. There’s no sense of ‘that’s not my department’ or ‘ask marketing about that’ because we all support each others work with our unique perspectives and varying skill sets. There’s a steep learning curve when you join Fairtrade, trying to understand how the system works between the Standards, the Premium (which is different for each commodity), supply chains, smallholder farms vs co-ops vs plantations, etc etc. But by getting my hands in a little bit of everything it was easy to catch up.

 

Q.3: How does storytelling fit into your daily life? Whats aspects of storytelling would you say you employ in your work?

Personally I’m a big reader as I love diving into imaginary worlds and I have a deep appreciation for beautiful prose and good diction. I’m a big proponent of reading fiction as I think it’s an easier way to digest serious issues and ideas without our social conditioning getting in the way. Tell me you want me to read a book about the Russian Revolution and the rise of the Stalinist era and my eyes kind of glaze over, but tell me you have a great novel by George Orwell and I’ll start reading Animal Farm in bed that evening.

I think in general people tend to use storytelling in daily life to help understand difficult concepts or to turn ideas into something more tangible. I always find it easier to learn through examples so I can immerse myself in a story. You’ll often hear me explaining the Fairtrade system to someone with something like ‘okay so you’re a hip coffee shop owner in Dublin, and you want to buy coffee from Honduras.’  I’m actually quite useless at understanding/explaining things without immersive storytelling. At Fairtrade, we tell the story of the producers in the global south through various forms of storytelling. Whether it’s through a striking image and a caption on social media, a targeted campaign, or verbally when networking with Irish businesspeople and consumers.

 

 

Q.4: Fairtrade Ireland works with farmers, growers and producers all over the world, helping them to get a fair deal for the produce they sell. How do you capture their stories and in turn, convey those to the public? What are the steps? And what do you think works well when telling these stories?

We don’t have a step by step process but we do work with our international colleagues in other National Fairtrade Organisations to create a shared database of producer stories. For example,  Fairtrade America might do a trip to origin with a photographer or journalist and would share all the photos and information making sure to capture incredible detail about the producers photographed. On these trips we ask the farmers to tell us their story about how working on a Fairtrade farm impacts their lives and learn all about their families, their daily lives, and however much information they choose to share. We are sure to also include information about the challenges of Fairtrade or how it could be better because we understand it’s an evolving system – we learn more about what the farmers really need with each conversation. These get uploaded to the shared database and any of us can use the photos/stories for our own purposes.
We try to use stories that we think we resonate best with the audience we’re looking to inspire. I do maintain however the absolute best way is to hear about Fairtrade directly from a farmer which is why our Fairtrade Fortnight campaign is so important – for 2 weeks every year we bring over farmers from the Global South that are involved in the Fairtrade system and they tell their stories all around Ireland to various groups/schools/towns. It’s always such an inspiration and if anyone heard what they have to say there’s no question as to whether or not they’d support Fairtrade.

Q.5 How does working in an NGO differ from working as part of a PR agency or government communications office do you think?

I can’t speak for the government communications office (though tbh they must have some fun with their job – shout out to whoever came up with the ‘Don’t be Dick’ campaign re the disposable coffee cups) but I had dabbled in work for a PR agency and it’s very different to NGO world. As a non-profit the biggest influence on our work would be resource availability and that we operate from a very humble standpoint. We are a tiny organization and creatively manage a limited budget – it would look pretty bad if we spent loads of cash on flashy campaigns since at the crux of it we are a charity and want as much money as possible to go to the farmers whose story we’re trying to tell.

https://twitter.com/Fairtrade_ie/status/1037624187702202374
Most agencies have giant budgets but we rely on our creativity to come up with campaigns internally and focus on platforms with minimal barriers to entry like social media. Of course as it’s cheap to be in the social space it means it’s a much more diluted space so it’s challenging to get the story heard among the chatter when compared with a beautiful ad on TV or a giant mural. If any agency is reading this and would like to do some work with us out of the goodness of your heart or for a very discounted price do get in touch!! We rely on our community to help us amplify our message and help the farmers be heard.

Q.6: What is your proudest achievement as a brand storyteller? Are there any campaigns which you are extremely proud of?

 My only real claim to fame to date regarding Fairtrade stories is the poster I came up with for last year’s Fairtrade Fortnight which was a coffee cup illustration with ‘caution: contents can change the world’ written on it that received a lot of positive feedback from Fairtrade coffee shops, our visiting coffee farmer and the general public. The campaign ended in March but I’ve still seen some of the posters around town 6 months later in coffee chains who liked the messaging.
We are partners with Electric Picnic (a Fairtrade festival) and after work-shopping a few different lines my colleague and I settled on ‘only 9%.’ and a Fairtrade banana graphic to go on the T-shirts for all our festival volunteers to spread the word that only 9% of bananas sold in Ireland are Fairtrade certified. While walking around the Picnic our volunteers were constantly asked ‘what does only 9% mean?’ so I’d call it a success!

Q.7: Working in public relations requires a good degree of creativity. Where do you think you draw yours from? Do you engage in any creative processes?

Hmm well if you consider ‘blue-sky thinking’ to be a creative process we definitely engage in that, meaning that in discussions about projects and campaigns the sky is the limit and we can throw any ideas out there and talk it out even if it seems unrealistic or totally out of reach. Our Director will often start a meeting with ‘okay this is a blue-sky meeting’ and if someone tries to rationalize an idea out of discussion he’ll stop them and say that the next meeting will be about actions and next steps but the first one is just to get the creative juices flowing. We also have a white board in our office that I will write/draw something on quickly if an idea pops into my head about a good slogan or a good message or even just a list of words that I think could be useful. Currently its covered in my very poor sketches of mugs with a plethora of words related to tea drinking as none of the major Irish tea brands are Fairtrade which is shocking for a nation that basically runs on tea. Do you have good ideas for a tea campaign?

Q.8 What drives your passion for telling stories?  

I’ve always been drawn to a good story. Whenever anyone asks me what kind of books or movies I prefer I always say ‘I like good books/movies’ that’s to say I don’t really adhere to one specific genre but rather the quality of a good tale is what really entices me. When choosing content to engage with I search for something meaningful and something that will impact me and force me to change my perspective or at least try on a different perspective for size. I have a few outlets for storytelling in my personal life, my biggest probably being my food blog! I am also one of those people who loves to spread the word about a good thing from a new shampoo brand to a great restaurant to facts about something I’ve just learned or simply about buying Fairtrade.
Here at All Good Tales we are doing great work for brands in Ireland and abroad. We are building brand newsrooms, executing exciting PR strategies, and training key staff how to source, structure and tell great stories. For more information please click here or call Gaye on (01) 254 1845.