Month 3 - July 2008

Reflection

The third month’s course, Business Storytelling & Brand Development, focused mainly on the development of the business’s core brand and about delivering the core message of the business to customers. The Leadership Portfolio portion of this class focused around analyzing a brand, revealing their successes and their failures to better understand why that brand is important to us today. I naturally gravitated to the brand of THX because of the history and importance of the brand in my life. Not only was it my employer, but it meant something very profound in the entertainment industry and I wanted to better understand it. Through the month and research, I found the brand had been heavily associated with excellence and high quality in its early days which has made it continue to be a market leader today. I grew to have a greater respect for the major brands in today’s market and discovered a new interest in the process.

My passion for brand understanding, development, and delivery grew out of this class and continues to be at the forefront of my mind with most of business decisions. I understand the importance of having anything visible to the public represent the brand and the business in the correct manner. The core story and message of a business must exist in all of its products and services to give consistency to customers and to help establish a brand for a long lasting life. The biggest factor that kills a brand is confusion or contradictory messaging to a customer. I have continued researching this topic into the brands I use every day and have enjoyed discovering that the similarities and the main differences each brand has can be represented clearly by the concepts learned in this class. I look forward to expanding my knowledge on brand development and business storytelling.

Community Involvement

Due to the nature of my job, being a games software programmer, I am able to travel and represent THX to many industry conferences. This was the first month during my degree that I went to a conference and it offered a great place to meet face to face with many of the contacts I was making during the first two months. The conference I attended was the XNA Gamefest in Seattle and it was Microsoft’s game conference with focus on the Zune, XNA-PC, XNA-Xbox 360, and Xbox 360 development in general. I spent the majority of this conference at the THX booth where we were showcasing the Neural-THX technology (which is now actually DTS-Neural Surround Technology) and I was able to meet, exchange contacts, and network with many industry professionals. Some were members of G.A.N.G., IGDA, and other industry groups of which I am a member. These conversations and discussions lead to an easy way of staying in contact with them both on a personal and professional level. The conference was exciting and exhausting as most shows are but well worth the time spent in networking and community involvement.

Original LP Submission

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Update on Friday, May 15, 2009 at 5:36PM by Mark Gugler

A Reflective Analogy

This month’s course, business storytelling and branding, is seen as the musical addition of a bass line.The bass line solidly tells the story of the composition by laying the foundation of the form. The analogy is that the bass establishes the brand of the music, so other aspects must be redesigned to maintain the integrity of the brand.In this case, the strings part needed to reflect the addition of more complex chord structures demanded by the bass line.

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