When you leave the confines of education, you’ll find yourself faced with a new task: what will be your narrative as you enter the “real world,” and how will you shape that story into one you’re proud to be a lead character in? The same prospect is true as you enter the business world. In a professional sense, a brand narrative is a company’s emotional connection to its audience. By outlining the story of your business and the vision behind it, a brand narrative touches the company’s ideal client or customer and sets them apart from similar organizations.
The metadata you have available is just one component of your broader brand narrative, but it’s nevertheless a critical one. From data assets outlining your clientele to the data lineage that puts it in front of you, your available metadata can help to shape your brand narrative, offering you a stronger, more effective connection with your customers. By streamlining that data in high-quality metadata management software from a data science leader like TIBCO, you’ll simplify the process of crafting an effective brand narrative fueled by an organized database of crucial information.
Managing Your Metadata
Proper metadata management takes your company’s data catalog and gives it meaning. With a reconciled metadata management tool, your information will be easier to locate and utilize, whether you’re crafting your brand narrative or updating your information depository. Compared to the example of a new adult, metadata would be the data describing a particularly unique example of data: you. What traits, skills, and other qualities would you use to describe yourself?
Imagine putting together a resume, for example, a sort of personal narrative in and of itself. When a hiring manager scans applicant resumes, they’ll be looking for certain key terms, experience, or skills—data that becomes all the more important should they utilize machine learning or other types of automation to initially filter applications. When you have that critical information readily available, the hiring process will be that much more smooth—similarly, data managers who can access their critical metadata and implement it with more efficient workflows.
Creating a Brand Narrative
A brand narrative that is carefully put together will introduce your customers to your company with greater clarity and stronger meaning. Narratives can be used throughout a business to define the company and guide consumers to the desired endpoint, such as in an NGL-enabled dashboard. An overarching brand narrative applies to your company overall, while a more specific narrative might apply to a certain campaign, project, or customer interaction.
Returning to the example of a soon-to-be graduate, their brand narrative would be their cover letter and interview. Here, an applicant can manipulate their experience, skills, and other qualities to appeal particularly to their intended audience—in this case, an interviewer or hiring manager rather than a client or customer. Ideally, these portions of a job application will speak to that audience and create a connection that eventually leads to an offer.
Using Metadata to Control Your Narrative
That same job seeker likely utilized the information from his or her resume in crafting their cover letter and pitching themself as a candidate in the interview. It might not be a conscious process, in this example—after all, you know off the top of your head what your skills and experience are—but it’s nevertheless there. The metadata asset of your educational, career, or volunteer history will allow them to create a narrative that entices the interviewer, hopefully securing the role.
Similarly, well-organized metadata can inform a brand narrative. However, unlike the recent graduate’s job search efforts, the metadata, particularly in a consistent, reconciled form, is likely not immediately at hand. An effective metadata management system, then, becomes key, making this critical information accessible and ready to be used in crafting the desired narrative and the sought-after outcome. As a result, a metadata manager is essential to creating an ideal brand narrative, whatever your business goals.
