What's your story? : Stories' effect on corporate image

Abstract: To stand out in today’s fierce competition companies need to evolve their competitive skills. Many organizations have come to realize that it is not enough to only include individual products in the offering but one has to sell the whole company. It is then required to work with the corporate identity and express ones story when promoting oneself. For the corporate identity to be successful it is critical that it is based on knowledge about the target group’s identity and an understanding of what the target group values. This thesis focuses on the part of communication of the story that is done via visual expressions and employee behavior. To connect our different areas of research we have developed a model which is presented at the end of the theoretical chapter. The model points out the importance of that corporate identity is based on both customer identity and internal elements such as the employees. It also shows that corporate image is influenced by external influences such as customer involvement and customer-to-customer interaction. To develop the understanding of how companies in the experience industry can use storytelling and how the customer perceives it, we have made two case studies, one at Såstaholm Hotell & Konferens and the other one at Stenungsbadens Yacht Club. Interviews were made with the employees to learn about the intended corporate identity and customer questionnaires were collected to learn about the image. The results have lead us to the following conclusions; storytelling is a useful way to express corporate identity, required that there is emotional engagement and that it permeates all parts of the organization. Visual expressions are mainly a way to communicate a theme, while employees are needed to communicate a full story. Finally we have came to the conclusion that a more suitable term for this kind of communication is story enacting. Key words: Storytelling, corporate identity, image and experience industry.