Your brand story is not your history
Brand Stories are how you differentiate your brand.
We are doing a lot of work lately with clients focusing on their brand story, helping to bring their brand to life in ways that have broad human appeal. Increasingly this involves video.
When done well, brand stories develop trust between an organisation and customers. They also lift morale with staff because they reconfirm organisational and individual purpose.
Stories are a powerful way of communicating because they can be voyeuristic and experiential.
Research published in the New York Times backs this up.
“The brain, it seems, does not make much of a distinction between reading about an experience and encountering it in real life; in each case, the same neurological regions are stimulated.
Hence the popularity of fiction. o read a story or watch a video is to feel and breathe and, on some level, live that experience.
At Action Communications we are experienced storytellers with a passion for stories. Sherryl has written 3 novels and worked on various film/video projects, and crafted numerous brand stories for clients.
Tips for telling a Brand Story
There’s a knack to telling your brand Story. It is not telling your history and it’s not marketing as most people know it.
Forbes Columnist, Susan Gunelius, explains:
Brand stories are not marketing materials. They are not ads, and they are not sales pitches. Brand stories should be told with the brand persona and the writer’s personality at center stage. Boring stories won’t attract and retain readers, but stories brimming with personality can.
So here are our tips
-
- Like any story, it is the voice or the personality that drives the story. The voice humanises your story and your company because people trust people and people buy from people.
- It’s also important to keep your story simple and short but with an ending that points to more – so your brand story can continue and have new stories.
- Your brand story needs to convey your WHY – your brand purpose.
- And it needs to connect with your customers in an emotional way. Why? Because people remember how stories and actions “make” them feel, sometimes more than what is said or done.
The goal is that through your brand story people will feel a connection to you. They will feel that you have things and values and views and experiences in common. If you were a person they would want to hang out with you and be your friend. They will want to support you. (that may be on social media to begin with, telling your friends, being super attuned to your marketing and one day buying your product – because they will be proud to own your product)
In this way, customers are buying your story rather than your product. They want to be a part of your story and a part of your brand.
And then they will tell your story and their story to other people. So your brand story will live on.
Here’s a brand story we recently produced in video for our client, Eden Made. Here’s one from Airbus Defence & Space.
And below is a brand story from a glasses company.
