Brand Building Through Storytelling
Throughout my career, storytelling has been a key to my approach in building brands. Below are some examples of how my teams have collaborated with our participants to build our brand….
Brand Ambassadors with HEVEA
I conceptualized and launched this ongoing tradition at HEVEA - global ambassadors willing to share media across our product ranges invested in supporting a B Corp & eco-friendly brand. Here are some beautiful examples of their visual storytelling representing the HEVEA brand…
Student Media & the DIS Brand
Since 2011, the DIS Communications & Marketing Department has been recruiting semester and summer students to tell the DIS story with Blogger, Videographer, Photographer, Vlogger, and Illustrator internships. Students submit portfolios with their application, are invited to interview, and chosen candidates are trained and up and running within weeks of a semester or summer session start. In total, approximately 100 student creative storytellers worked with my team each year. Below are some examples of their projects…
Meet the Bloggers
My team recruited, chose and trained over 60 bloggers a year - it was a competitive process and became a time-honored tradition at DIS - bloggers choosing to become bloggers as previous bloggers had made large impact on them prior to coming to DIS. Gain insight to this ongoing tradition here:
DIS Through Their Lens
Each semester, my team recruited talented Student Photographers and Videographers who were trained in the types and styles of imagery that are used in DIS materials.
Student Videographers worked together as a team to create each semester’s Student Yearbook, and based on their time and skills, were sometimes also offered their own projects. You can find some of their individual projects on my video page, and Student Video Yearbooks can be found here.
Instagram Takeovers
DIS Instagram Accounts were taken over several times a week by students. Check out the DIS Instagram Accounts for more…
Branding DIS & Scandinavia
Whether we were branding DIS broadly, or at one of our two locations, our goal in storytelling always focused on highlighting our tagline: “Scandinavia as your home, Europe as your classroom”.
Several examples of creative blog content generated by my team…
-
Scandinavia as your kitchen
Scandinavia is becoming more and more known for its food culture, and we created a cookbook featuring Danish and Swedish recipes from our greater community. Later, we used this content again for a blog series. I wrote the intro text for all recipes, including our faculty member’s drømmekage recipe found here.
-
Neighborhood Guides
We wanted DIS students to get to know the neighborhoods they lived in or explore ones nearby. We wanted them to be able to do so on a budget, and we also hoped we might convince a few epic travelers to slow down their extensive travel bucket lists and stay home to explore what was right in front of them! Here’s a great example from our Amager guide.
-
Best Bites
Denmark and Sweden are amazing foodie destinations—with so many local finds that are accessible on a student budget! But beyond that, many American students have specific dietary needs. They may be seeking a study abroad destination that is vegan-friendly, or that has plenty of options for to avoid gluten or dairy. Our Best Bites series was designed to highlight just this—a niche but very important topic for many students considering where to spend the next four months of their lives around the world.
Telling DIS Stories
At Home with Our Homestays
It’s such a personal experience welcoming a student into your home…and still is 42 students later…according to Lisbeth and Steen, DIS Homestay parents since 1985. They invited my team into their lives for a day and shared their experience with DIS over the generations. They were also interviewed by the local paper for their story. Watch their interview shared in this video.
And we’ve told countless other stories like theirs - from this feature video sharing the stories of 3 Danish Homestay families, to this short montage with a Swedish Homestay sharing fika with their host daughter.
Tell Us That Story
The reasons students decide to study abroad somewhere are numerous, as is the local knowledge tips from their peers that you can share with them once they have arrived, making their experience so much richer.
At DIS, we often we had a specific story we wanted someone to tell, whether it was showing us behind the scenes of what it is like in the fall semester in Stockholm like Milly and Isabelle shared with us here, local tips like this gluten and dairy-free guide to Copenhagen with Emma, or reflecting about personal indentity abroad like Natachi does here with her cultural experiences in Copenhagen.