Brand Storytelling: what it is, examples and how to put it into practice. A trend in the marketing world for some years has been Storytelling as a form of branding. This is a strategy implemented by various brands to achieve a real connection and bond with their customers. In the following blog we will explain in depth what this narrative is for brands, how we can use them in our businesses and what are the advantages that we can perceive when doing so.
What is brand storytelling?
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When we speak of brand storytelling, we refer to the creation of a narrative or communication threads with the objective of carrying a message about the identity of a brand. This message is loaded with emotions that will allow us to connect on a sentimental level with your target audience or audience.
It is important to understand that branding and storytelling are not elements that go together in most cases. When we talk about brading we refer to all the elements, visual and background, on a brand. From the history of the business to the way you communicate with your customers, they are branding factors . Other elements included in the definition of branding are the brand personality, the purpose, the values, the culture, the mission and the vision of the companies.
By bringing both crucial tactics together in current marketing we can merge the present with the future. When talking about the branding of a brand, we are explaining who your brand is today. On the other hand, when we carry out a storytelling strategy, we want to send customers a message about where we want to go in the future and how we want them to be part of the journey.
The most important thing when doing this type of strategy is that we really look for ways to connect with the public. One of the best ways to do this is when we make our clients feel identified with us. We must find ways to approach potential clients with authenticity, originality and in the most humane way possible. Do not seek to pass yourself off as the guru who knows everything, be honest and talk about your successes, but also your failures.
Why use brand storytelling?
There are a large number of reasons why we should use these types of strategies for our businesses. Today we have at our fingertips endless information and in various formats. Although we have less time in our daily lives, it is more common for us to see how this content reaches us more and more frequently and less attractive.
So this has a great impact on the figures and percentages of interaction with brands . It has been proven for some time that people’s attention has diminished and getting their attention can be quite an odyssey. Brand storytelling seeks that the little attention that many clients have and that is more dispersed with the constant bombardment of information, is concentrated on a single objective, your business.
Not only something attractive is what customers are looking for. More and more people are looking to have a strong connection with the brands that they consider to be the best. As new dominant generations in the market arrive, brands work harder to establish lasting, real and human relationships.
Today, the modern consumer does not want a company that only wants to sell him a product or service. These customers are much deeper and want to engage with the brand on the same level. That is why brand storytelling is an ideal tactic, it helps us to awaken emotions, triggers empathy, generates identification and is a unique way to present a situation.
What are the benefits of brand storytelling?
We have already mentioned some of the benefits that your business could perceive if you start implementing them in your brand.
Some of them are more focused on consumer behavior and the actions they take.
On the other hand, some of the benefits are more linked to the perception that these customers will have of your brand from now on, thanks to the help of branding in these tactics.
Below we will give you a small list of the advantages of brand storytelling for different businesses.
Engages consumers
Brand storytelling works like a hook for the public, once you have them you will not be able to let them go.
This strategy has to incorporate the clients into the narrative, it helps people to relate to the characters, the settings and the situations.
In short, the reader becomes a fundamental part of the story.
If people feel involved in your story and the narrative you are creating, this will allow customers to feel more confident with your brand and prefer to stay there.
Humanize the brand
Thanks to the branding factor during this strategy , we can make the audience think that your brand has a history, a personality and some purposes.
They can be identified with a business easier than buying their achievements, their didifucltales and each of the decisions they have made along the way to get to where you were.
The humanization of the brand is necessary for the success of any business because it allows you to awaken empathy, identification and you manage to get closer to people because you generate trust and authenticity.
Build an emotional connection
Like life itself, not everything is success.
When we meet a person who only demonstrate their achievements, it is very difficult for us to identify with them.
However, if this person begins to share each of his facets, we can see that he is someone ordinary like us. With a brand it works the same, we want to see how the hero wins the battles but when he cries the defeats as well, when he feels fear and when he appears brave in the crowd.
Generating an emotional connection should not be seen as a way to create melancholy with your audience. This is a way to connect more deeply with your audience and show them that your brand’s life and journey is full of happy moments and more bittersweet ones.
Increase brand attraction
Errors are what allow us to grow, both personally and professionally. Well, this happens the same with brands and different businesses.
There is a phenomenon called the Pratfall Effect that tells us about how the traction of people and brands increases after a mistake is made.
Although this may sound a bit confusing it makes perfect sense for this strategy.
Proving that we are wrong makes us human, we are not just a brand that is being managed by robots. The people behind every piece of content , every story, and every step you took to get to where they are are valuable. Each of the successes and mistakes will allow you to achieve your goals and this is what makes your brand even more authentic.
How to put brand storytelling into practice?
To start creating a brand storytelling strategy, we must first do a deep analysis on the history of the brand with which we are going to work, be it a sample or the one we manage. This information is what will help us to have a more solid base on the principles and the most important elements that will guide us during this trajectory of the project.
However, it is important to remember that when working on a brand storytelling strategy we can not only create a tactic and think that we are ready. It is essential that we know how to communicate this strategy in the various communication channels so that the messages arrive effectively. Worry about knowing and understanding in depth the platforms on which you are going to work and what are the formats that work best for you to achieve the strategy.
Marketer Debbie Williams proposes, in an article for the Content Marketing Institute, six questions to find the core of brand storytelling . They are:
1. What is the purpose of the brand?
This is one of the most difficult questions to answer for many entrepreneurs. Finding the why of your brand is an important phase in brand storytelling.
You have to be very careful when answering this question, we are not talking about the beginnings of the brand. Here we want to know what the motivations of your business are, what was the trigger for this business to come to light, what is the purpose that allows the brand to exist.
All the purposes of the brand should be the reason, the reason why every day your business opens and is ready to work.
That which inspires you and which, in most cases, is clearly linked to a feeling of service and in favor of improving people’s quality of life.
2. What is the history of the brand?
Where it appeared? How did it happen? Through what places did it pass? What are your main achievements? These are questions that should be clarified when starting your journey through brand storytelling .
It is very likely that the work of remembering what the first steps of your business were will be very emotional for you as an entrepreneur. Share these emotions and the pride you feel with your audience.
People love to get behind the scenes of an event, which no one knows. That is why remembering the history of your business can be one of the best sources of inspiration for your brand.
Offer people that fun fact they don’t know and give them an interesting fact that can be enjoyable to exploit through a narrative.
3. Who are your main characters?
Who is the true protagonist of this story? This can be one of the most difficult questions to answer.
When we have a business, thousands of people cross our path.
Some seek to boost our business and others, on the contrary, work hard to destroy it. Each of the people who have participated in the history of your amcar are valuable.
Founders, employees, investors, partners, even competitors. All have contributed to making the brand what it is today. Show that you could not have achieved anything you have without these people. Some prefer to make the founders of the brand the protagonist of the story. However, you can play with this narrative and put the person with the most interesting story in that role.
4. What is the mission and vision of the company?
Here what we are going to define is the value that the company currently has with its environment and where they want to go in the next 5 to 10 years.
This part of the definition should be more focused on ourselves and not on what our customers might expect from our brand.
5. What were your failures?
We’ve talked a lot about the jars, the insecurities we have as a brand, and what our least successful moments have been.
However, these moments cannot be passed under the table.
Without them we could not be the brand we are today .
Don’t be afraid to share your failures with your customers, as they will identify with you as a brand and help you connect more deeply.
6. Where are your gaps?
Debbie Williams talked about gaps like these periods in our business that went unnoticed, where nothing major really happened.
But we can assure you that at any moment you learn even when you are not working or when you do not obtain an important achievement.
Check out what those potholes are, where your story is blank, and ask yourself what you can learn from it.
