Brand Story: How the Right Narrative Fills Your Brand with Life

A clearly defined brand purpose is essential for brands. It differentiates your brand in a crowded market and attracts customers who share your brand's values. But only a well-staged, approachable brand story ensures that our brand becomes tangible and that people can identify with our mission, vision and values in the long term.

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Our brain needs stories

We encounter stories and narratives all the time in our everyday lives. Storytelling is not only an indispensable tool in content and brand marketing, it also essentially reflects the pattern of human thought. Our brain uses stories as an identity-creating tool to link sequences of events and information in a meaningful way. This not only emphasises the importance of your brand story in order to be successful. Conversely, it also means that a story is being built around your brand anyway. The question is, do you write it yourself and thus influence your target group? Or do you allow yourself to be influenced and, to a certain extent, hand yourself over?

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What makes a good brand story?

Before you develop a brand story at random, you should first consider how you can build your brand story successfully and effectively. A good brand story should always fulfil the following criteria:

1. Authenticity: The story must be genuine and credible. Customers quickly realise when a story is just a facade.
   
2. Emotions: A strong brand story touches and moves your target group. It not only links your brand with certain emotions, but also creates an emotional bond. Work with positive emotions here, for example joy, ‘we-feelings’ or inspiration - depending on your brand purpose.
   
3. Clarity and stringency: Formulate a simple and easy-to-understand message. This way, it can be quickly absorbed and passed on. It is also important to implement it stringently in all communication measures. ‍
4. Relevance: Your brand story must not only fit your brand, but also your target group. This also includes actively adapting or expanding your brand story when tapping into new target groups.

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What approaches and methods are there for developing a brand story?

The actual design of your brand story follows the classic marketing storytelling formula. It uses the building blocks that are inherent to every good story. Firstly, every story needs a hero with whom your target group can identify. In your own brand story, this can be you, the founders, with your brand. Then, heroes need a hurdle to overcome. For you, this hurdle is the problem that you solve with your product. You can also think globally or beyond the context of your company to shape your story. Then you need a strategy to overcome your obstacle, which in this case is your product.

Another approach is to make your customers themselves the heroes of your story. They then fight the villain (the problem) themselves. In this setup, you position yourself with your brand as the supporter or guide of your hero. With your product, you help your customers to solve their problem. Salesforce, for example, chose this approach. If you select the ‘Customers’ tab on the software provider's website, you will find testimonials from customers. They describe how Salesforce helped them solve their problems. With this approach, you focus on your customer groups right from the start and position yourself as a benevolent helper.

Regardless of which approach you choose, the three core elements should be used to create suspense: Hero, hurdle and solution should always be present.

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Where is the story expressed?

To put it bluntly: wherever you are expressed as a brand. You embed your brand story in all facets of your communication and marketing strategies. Here are some key areas:

1. Website: Your website is often the first point of contact with potential customers. Present your brand story prominently on the homepage or ‘About us’ page.
   
2. Social media: Use platforms such as Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn to tell your story through posts, videos and stories. Visual storytelling plays an important role here.
   
3. Advertising: Integrate elements of your brand story into your advertising campaigns. This can be done through videos, banners and print adverts.
   
4. Customer interactions: It is important that your employees know and live your brand story. Communicate it authentically in every customer interaction.
   

As you can see, it is worth taking a close look at your brand purpose and your brand story. You give your brand an identity and reach your customers on an emotional level. By giving your communication a common thread, you also simplify the planning of your communication measures.

Do you want to breathe life into your brand and develop a story that binds your customers to you? Get in touch with us! With our expertise, we will find your purpose and write your story together.