Before you dive deep into developing the authentic brand story, it is essential to determine the potential here.
Many studies and research show how the human brain is wired to be extremely great in responding to well-crafted stories.
Neuroscientists prove that storytelling is the best way to capture the people’s attention and that too with much more effectiveness.
It is also highly effective to bake information into people’s memories, create personal bonds and connect with them.
Image Source: Dr. P Rutledge
People are biologically, psychologically, and neurologically programmed to crave stories and seek out them.
So it is evident that you need to connect with them to utilize stories in the retail market and branding to sell people something.
And that your business requires an authentic brand story.
So, getting on, What is a Brand Story?
Before you understand what a brand story is, you must be clarified on what brand is in the first place.
First of all, How do you call a business a brand?
What is a brand?
Well, to begin with, a brand can be described in many ways and with definitions.
But to make it very specific here with the required perspective, you can say that a brand is the promise of value and identity.
What differentiates a brand from a business is its inclination to make a promise and reflect some authentic identity.
Their promise is about delivering benefits to their target audience through their products or services.
This promise that brands speak of can be :
- Resolve a particular problem
- Generating and fulfilling the desire
Apart from the promise and identity aspect, a brand is also an experience that gets associated with people’s minds.
There is some message that the audience consciously and subconsciously gets from a brand.
When you engage with a brand, you absorb what they stand for, its values, positioning, and imagery.
A brand also needs to position itself as an industry expert, offer the ‘best value’ in the industry, or even something completely innovative.
But having said that, you also need to remember what a brand is not! It is definitely not just a logo, a particular product, or your website.
In a word, it is an experience that one feels when engaging with the brand.
What is a Brand Story?
Now, when you know what the brand is, exactly! Understanding the brand story won’t be very difficult, either.
A brand story is a core essence, the expression, and the values communicated through building brand narratives, design, story, and content.
This communication helps evoke an emotional reaction in your target consumers further to connect them to your brand.
The brand story is a brand’s narrative communicated across multiple media avenues to connect its target consumers.
Why Is Brand Storytelling Important For Your Business?
Brand Storytelling Help You Build Awareness
The brand you develop is a promise to a target consumer about offering them a value and experience that impacts their lives.
It helps you reach out to the people with a unique voice and with a set of purpose, a message, and a set of values and beliefs.
Brand storytelling builds this awareness into the world so the right consumer with similar beliefs, needs, values, and requirements can reach out to you.
Not just awareness, but more targeted and unique positioning you get as well, to connect emotionally with the audience.
Brand Stories Connect To Audience Emotionally
Brand stories don’t only evoke emotional reactions or responses from your target consumer but also connect them to your brand as well.
This emotional connection is stronger than anything where products are promised to offer value and functional benefits.
You connect with people over their problems, relativity, and desire to change their life.
According to various research and studies, it is proven that most buyers make their purchases based on their emotions and rationalize them or use rational justification for their emotional behavior.
So, developing your brand story isn’t just a branding practice but also a long-term sales strategy.
It is about positioning the message of your product and how it connects or even approaches your target consumers.
Brand Story Makes Brand More Credible
In a way, a brand story is a brand itself! Without a brand story, you will be left with a logo, a website, and your product, which is not a ‘brand’ as mentioned earlier.
Clients, customers, and media attract the brands with a clear vision and an emotional product positioning towards the market.
Your brand must mean something larger than just selling your product. It should reflect in your branding and marketing practices.
The brand story has the ability to gain the trust and confidence of potential buyers, and so the investors, clients, and media as well.
Brand Story Promises Repeat Purchases
People like to buy from the brand they like; sometimes, they go further with this.
Sometimes you like a brand so much that you feel inspired to buy its products just for the sake of how well you connect with them.
Also, if you like one product of a brand and the brand story itself, you build a relationship with the brand and have a higher chance of buying again.
In fact, you will be excited about your next purchase!
It is like you believe in the brand and now want to retain its loyalty.
Not only will you buy it repeatedly, but you will also recommend it to your friends and families and how their products have changed your life.
Nike and Apple are great examples of such inspiring and adored brands worldwide with a separate fan bases.
What Are The Essential Elements Of A Brand?
Uniqueness
Even by definition, a brand story has to be unique. It needs to stand out. Otherwise, how would it be able to connect with a targetted audience?
Your products and brand’s unique and differentiated positioning sets you apart from the competition.
This is something at your own hand, irrespective of all other factors. Uniqueness even beats the competition and large brands when it comes down to it.
Ensure you have some unique perspective, a specific value you are bridging to a niche audience or target consumer.
Authenticity
A brand is authentic when it is true to its purpose, the value it wants to provide, and its positioning is set to.
Authenticity is even more important than uniqueness.
You can also be derivative with your ideas, strategies, and overall branding story, but it must always be authentic.
It instills trust and reliability within the customer and connects with the audience in the most natural and realistic way.
Authenticity comes from honesty, so ensure you approach your brand story honestly. Be transparent with your audience and share the values that you truly mean.
Customer Focus
You need to remember that a brand is for customers, as clear as crystal!
A brand story, its objective is always to serve the customer and their core requirements, preferences, desires, and problems.
What you are offering must align with their needs. And you also need to specify those audiences.
This assures that customers are and always will be the center of everything that your brand does or aspires to.
Credibility
Your brand story must be convincing and has reasons to believe in it. Whatever you are proposing must be backed by proof and authentic statements.
Credibility comes from how well you can convince the audience about your expertise, promises, and past experiences.
It also comes from honesty and transparency, as people will believe if you are clear about how you come up with the product. What’s the process etc?
Simplicity
People do not owe you anything! They are not entitled to put themselves with the kind of time, effort, or money to learn about your brand.
Either you click with them in the first approach, or more chances are you don’t.
So, it becomes extremely important for your brand story to be as simplistic as possible.
Especially the core offer, the proposal must be simple and easy to understand. You can bring much layering to your brand message, but it has to go through.
The best approach is to let your audience lean towards you gradually but always hit them with a simplistic pull that means something to them.
Promise Fulfillment
If a brand story is a lot about the promise you put in your core brand offer towards the targetted consumers, the fulfillments play a significant part too.
Whatever promise you offer through your brand story comes back to you, depending on whether you fulfilled it.
So to truly gain more the trust and retain it in your customers, you need to ensure that your brand successfully fulfilled its promises.
And customers will also be able to see through how you can stand on your promises step-by-step.
Consistency
Consistency in your brand storytelling is an essential component of maintaining the credibility and authority of a brand.
It also provides authentic brand storytelling across social media and digital platforms.
How To Create A Brand Story?
Tell Your Story
You need to go back to the very start of your business journey.
Dig deep into how your business venture started and what the intricate details of your brand story began.
That will reflect all those answers regarding your brand’s existence and who it caters to.
Tell about how your small business started helping its target market. What kind of problems does it deal with?
To make your brand story resonate with the people, you must highlight the people themselves.
Talk about how your brand resolved problems or improved people’s lives through your offers and products.
When you tell this brand story, you don’t need to make it about how amazing your business is.
Focus on what was the thing that motivated you to start the business in the first place.
Remember, your business story cannot be about making tons of money as that’s not what connects people.
Understanding Your Audience
Understanding your audience is one of the most important steps to create an effective and working brand story.
Your brand story must revolve around your target audience, your potential customer, and the ideal customer.
So whatever you do to tell your brand story, ensure it serves your audience.
It needs to be the reason behind what you do and why you do it.
Here are few tips for creating a buyer persona for developing a better brand story :
- Start an email conversation with your existing subscribers
- Reply to the questions of your existing subscriber’s questions
- Look at the audiences of all your competitors in your niche & industry
- Send out customer surveys, questionnaires, and polls to gather more information.
Once you get the required information to sketch a picture of an ideal customer, you can create a more targeted and personalized marketing strategy around it.
A brand story that identifies and understands the audience is much more accurate than others.
Developing Trust Through Your Brand Stories
Brand stories can also develop trust amongst potential customers, clients, and media.
Since stories have always been a powerful and effective tool for human communication.
Research showed how stories impacted the human brain and how responsive it was towards influencing the motor cortex and sensory cortex.
When one reads a story or listens to a speaker, the mind connects to the story’s subject or the person; that is called neural coupling.
It connects the two people simultaneously through brain activity that affects the same areas in the storytelling process.
Apparently, researchers find this mirroring of this brain in storytelling assures more comprehension, greater understanding, and receptivity.
So that means, Stories develop trust.
And that’s how you can utilize the brand story to instill trust in your audiences through developing a successful neural coupling.
Highlighting The Conflict Of Your Story
Without a conflict, a story doesn’t work. Period!
A brand story is a story; it needs the conflict to be engaging and connect to the audience.
It is important that something valuable should be at stake in a story to lose for the character so that people can invest their emotions in it.
Stories have always been about overcoming adversities. That’s how people relate to a story when there is a drama or emotional journey.
So to make your brand story hold the attention of your targeted potential customer and connect to them, you need to highlight the conflict.
The Relectuancy of Brands Showcasing Conflict
Apparently, there are a lot of businesses in the world that are insecure about sharing the conflict and advertise their business.
They are keener to believe that the story of their rosy and free-from struggle with a hockey-stick growth is what only can convince potential customers that they are the best in the industry.
Most of the brands do not prefer to showcase their imperfections or company history in regards to that while pitching.
This is most certainly a huge misconception in reality. Like everything, companies also have flaws.
Also, perfection is not something that people relate to. Rather they see it as a superficial and sale-sy attitude of a business.
Modern-age businesses are more personalized about their connection with audiences.
So the brand story becomes pivotal in connecting to the audience, and conflict becomes an essential factor of a brand story.
Defining the Status Quo And Resolution
Apart from the conflict, you can also focus on crafting the brand story. To craft a compelling story, there are two essential components :
- Status Quo
- Resolution
Status Quo
The status quo is the initial nature of a particular situation or just how things have been.
The conflict disrupts the situation at hand and brings something at more stake encouraging the protagonist to look for a solution actively.
The same is what is expected from your brand in terms of the status quo. It is about how you resolve the existing problem giving them an emotional payoff after all the struggle.
So in totality, the story structure of your brand should be consecutively in this process :
- Status Quo
- Conflict
- Resolution
For Example Drift
Drift is a conversational marketing platform where businesses can easily connect with prospective customers by creating genuine interactions and empathetic conversations.
Here’s how you can differentiate the business story structure into three different aspects.
Status Quo
Content marketing has always been about touching people through personalized content, just like humans.
They created content that focuses on educating and helping their customers. And it is there to exchange the value they provide to their lives.
Conflict
No matter how much brands talk about putting the customer first but it never gets practiced it.
All the information required, such as emails or the contact information asked in the exchange of a lead magnet.
The aim is still here to keep connecting to the potential customer until they buy the product.
And no one actually enjoys filling these forms or going through this grind until they want to do it.
So this certainly questions whether you are customer-centric or not.
Resolution
So what brands can do is remove the necessity of all the forms for the prospective customers.
So if brands want to put the customer first, they need to be more humanized and empathetic toward them.
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“Business, marketing, and Branding – these three words describe me the best. I am the founder of Burban Branding and Media, and a self-taught marketer with 10 years of experience. My passion lies in helping startups enhance their business through marketing, Branding, leadership, and finance. I am on a mission to assist businesses in achieving their goals.”