Brand Storytelling Is about Empathy | The Methodology & Values of Brand Storytelling
What exactly does brand storytelling include? What’s the purpose?
This episode is a bit of a recap episode. If you’ve been following along, then certain things might be confusing. Like why do I emphasize salesmanship, appear anti-social media, and then dig into story structure?
I wanted to take the time to go back and connect the dots for you and explain how brand storytelling is a methodology. From my perspective, it’s not merely cinematic marketing or telling stories all the time. It’s a marketing approach that covers the continuum from brand strategy (defining your story) to content marketing (telling that story).
The whole point is to create an authentic emotional connection between your brand and your audience, and that happens when you leverage your customer’s story as an empathy tool. From that perspective, you can design a customer-centric brand built on loyalty and trust.
Isn’t that what we all want?
You’ll learn
A recap of “the disease” and why we need to know our customer’s story
The values that drive brand storytelling
Brand storytelling as a methodology / holistic marketing approach
People invest in transformation
Using your business as a vehicle for change
Key terms
Brand storytelling - Marketing from a storyteller’s lens. It’s a purpose-driven, customer-centric marketing method for the purpose of establishing an emotional connection with your audience. Covers the continuum from defining a company’s story (brand strategy) to telling that story (content marketing).
The disease - The inability for an organization to truly understand their customer, and see their organization from their customer’s point of view, due to their insulated perspective that naturally occurs from being siloed from the customer’s world.
Episode Transcript
Hey. What's going on, everybody? All right, so essentially, this episode is kind of going to be a sort of like recap episode. If you've been following along with all these past episodes and you're starting to get a little confused, starting to wonder how does all this sort of tie in together right That's what this episode is for. Like I've been explaining on several episodes prior.
The whole point of this podcast is to allow me to work my ideas out in public and basing all of this off of my theory, my context, essentially my content marketing strategy of practice in public. The idea being that if you don't show other people what you do, other people have no idea what you do. Right. So the best way to like for other people to understand what you do is to show them what you do.
Okay. And that's that's the whole purpose of this podcast is to help me like kind of like see my own philosophy and see my own ideas kind of like in paper, so to speak. We turn all these things into, into an actual blog post so I literally do get to see them in paper digitally. So that way I can understand, like, what is my philosophy about this?
How do I think about this? The purpose for that is because brand storytelling sounds great. You know, it sounds fun. You know, you've got these two things that are highly creative, right? Brand and story, right? And and so because of that, it's got like this. It's it's new. It's it's a shiny object. And and so because of that, I feel like it's it's just starting to to to kind of, like, become formalized.
Right. That we're really trying to figure out exactly, like, what is this thing? And I don't fully agree with a lot of current perspectives out there because I feel like what we've what has been done collectively is this essentially created an opportunity to start thinking about marketing from a storyteller's perspective, that approaching marketing from a storyteller's lens and obviously that lends itself great to me because I am a professional storyteller.
Right? So it was helpful for me to approach it from that perspective. Because it's how my mind works and it's how my mind thinks. But as I've been continually going going forward and, and diving deeper into the intricacies of all of this, I'm starting to realize just how brilliant all of this can be if you use it within its totality.
Right. And so in a prior episode, I talked about like, what's the purpose of your brand story? And so the whole point of that episode is to help you realize that your brand story isn't doesn't exist for the function of just being a really focused message that connects with your audience. I see that almost as an inevitable symptom of having a story driven brand.
Okay. Like I said, like, I'm literally going to be referencing all my episodes of pulling them together into this one because I think a story driven brand is actually a truly customer centric brand that the whole point of brand storytelling isn't just to create a crafty message that gets more engagement. The whole point of brand storytelling is to use the story to transport you out of the silo that you find yourself within because you're inside of an organization, and it literally allows you to walk in the shoes of your customers.
So that way you fully understand them. Brand storytelling is about empathy. It's about creating a bridge of empathy between your organization and your audience so that where you've established this bridge that connects you to, and now you've got an avenue from where you have an avenue of understanding, you literally get to get to understand them. You could speak their own language that establishes trust.
Right. That helps you to form a lasting relationship with them because you are now trying to relate to them and you're trying to relate to them by first attempting to understand them. Right. Like, that's how relationships are formed.
So that's why I see like an effective message as being secondary, because the primary purpose is to relate. It's literally to understand and understand that you have the disease that you're first with this disease in a sense. It's kind of like being an addict, right? Like, you're never going to be freed from your addiction. You have to constantly be in a cycle of treatment.
Right? Or it's like being a Christian, right? Like you're saved, but you are in a constant process of sanctification. Okay. Like, that's that's exactly what this is like. You have the disease you your tendency is constantly towards an insulated viewpoint, a siloed viewpoint, because you're cut off from direct contact with your customer. Because your customer is out there living their own unique life with their own experience, and they don't ever see your company the way that you see it to you.
Your company is normal because it's your everyday life. Right. To them, your company is a character that just happens to pop up or a decoration that happens to appear from time to time within their world. So storytelling is an empathetic tool it helps us to literally embody our customers world so we can have a right perspective of our organization.
It really helps us to and this is why I talked about a prior episode like that, I think is when I was critiquing the the story brand framework. What Story Brand gets wrong to talk about our own pride in our own arrogance, right. Some people got annoyed by that being like, You should be proud of your work. It's not what I'm talking about.
And even phrased it in the episode as That's not what I'm talking about. Okay. Like, I'm talking about our tendency as human beings that we are prideful self-focused, selfish, right? We think about ourselves, right? Like, so it's natural that our audience, that our potential customers, our prospects are constantly thinking about themselves. If they're in this mindset of constantly thinking about themselves, how important is our organization to them?
That's the heavy pill we swallow, and we have to knock ourselves down a notch, understanding that that that is how we're showing up in relation to them. Right. Coca-Cola is not that important in my life. Apple not that important in my life. Right? Like I use their device to make and receive phone calls, text messages, open emails, right?
Like, okay, fine. I would probably freak out if I lost my cell phone. Right. But what I'm saying is it's not my top priority. So even these big big companies, like, they're not your top priority either, you know? So it's helping us have that humility going into the situation, helping us have that right frame of mind. So we're not just pushing out this look at me, look at me advertising and look at me.
You look at me marketing messages. We understand our rightful position that we are a part of our our target audiences life experience and to the degree that we understand their life, to the degree that we understand their experience is how well we can position ourselves communicate our message, get in front of them. Right. But then also design a solution that completely delights them and adds tremendous value to them.
The point isn't to like, let's figure this out so we can now trick somebody with a convincing message. The point is to demonstrate that we're truly trying to add value to this person's life. We're truly trying to raise their quality of life. By them interacting with us. There's almost like a need for an ethical code for this, right?
Because I feel like when we and it's almost like there is this ethical code, but it's not really spoken like when we see brand storytelling, the types of people that that frame message that framed positioning attracts, we tend to be like more relational, right? We tend to actually care about people's kind of what I mean, we like are more relational driven from the get-go.
We care about people. We care about doing something meaningful with our lives. So we're in it. For meaningful work, you know, like we're not just in it to make a buck. We're in it to make a difference. That's the whole that's the whole point. Part of a story driven brand. Right. Part of a brand that that is out there doing brand storytelling is an impact component.
It's a mission component. It's the recognition that the day to day business that we're doing is not the whole reason for doing what we're doing. What we're doing is we're looking for that value addition, that life transformation, and we're hoping to make an actual dent in our community, in society or in the world and leave it in a better place than we found it.
We should be problem solvers, not just for our customers. But as the business and the power of the business grows. We should be problem solvers for the human condition you know, like what? What does brand storytelling look like? Because I'll tell you, it's it's not just a documentary video. That's that's a component of brand storytelling, but really that's brand journalism.
That's like the application of a company's story that's telling a story about a company. But that's that's not what I would consider brand storytelling holistically. Right. Like, to me, brand storytelling, it covers the entire continuum from defining a company's story. All the way to actually telling that customer that company's story. It covers this continuum from brand strategy to marketing strategy to content marketing and then even all the way to, like, building out advertising campaigns and funnels.
I see it as an as a approach to marketing in general. I don't see brand storytelling as brand marketing. I see brand storytelling as both direct marketing and brand marketing. And here's how my own my own mentality has shifted since I've started to do this, because I've started understanding that that my perspective of what direct response marketing was was an immature perspective.
Right? That that like and that's also having to do with like thinking about actual how in my house, my business actually adding value to another business. Like case in point, if you're not making money, the company isn't making money. The company doesn't exist, the company doesn't survive. Right. And so if the marketing that you're creating does not have a direct tie to the output of monetary value, then what you're offering to the business is worthless.
It is it's worthless, right? Unless you already have a strong marketing component set in place that has a direct tie to revenue that you think that that business can count on to be growing its revenue. It's only at that point that that business can then turn its attention over to just doing like an impact story. Right. Or a story that that is just there for the sole purpose of building its own brand presence, because at least at that point, you have a foundation there to catch an audience member if they're intrigued by that story and they want to learn more.
Okay, you can't just out of the gate just start just making stories just to make stories. That's not brand storytelling. All right. The whole point of brand storytelling is, like I said, brand storytelling covers that continuum of defining your story, building a marketing strategy, and defining a brand that is built around that story from that that side of your story right?
And then building a marketing strategy to help you take that story and put it in front of your ideal customer and then the application of that. So it's the actual content pieces that you create that some of them are actual stories and some of them are not actual stories. Some of it is going to feel like world building.
Here's the other thing. Within marketing, you're not always telling stories. Not everything is a story. And if you approach it that perspective and you think that everything is a story, it's like a surefire way to just like get super, super confused, extremely stalled out and fail. I'm talking from personal experience here, right? Like, everything isn't a story because there's times we want to tell stories, and then there's times when you want to actually do stuff, make make a move like, like it.
Get your audience to actually make a move, right? Like or communicate information that's not inside of a story. Right. So there's moments when content pieces should be stories and moments when content pieces should not be stories, but you're not always telling brand story. Brand stories is what I mean. Like, you're not always storytelling within brand storytelling, but there are brands that are built on stories like your story becomes the strategic foundation because it becomes your identity.
And it's like you're approaching marketing from a story because you're literally starting to think about your marketing the way that a product designer thinks about making their products. Your brand story is your user story. It's it's the story that you tell about your brand, so you can properly understand how your customer views your brand. So so really that I've called it the Marketplace story before, but I'm going to change its name.
It's not the Marketplace story. It's really the, the, the company's customer value story. Right. It's the value that that customer gains from your organization. So it's in a sense, the value story you're constantly communicating as the marketer, as the brand storyteller. You're constantly communicating to the customer, to your audience, but you're siloed from them because your normal day to day experience is within the organization.
You work you work in. And the larger that organization is, the more separated you are from your customers because the more entrenched the more siloed, the more cut off, the more isolated you are. And you you're then like shooting in the dark basically hoping to hit a target. You're not really understanding like, well, what's, what's really going to resonate with my customer?
What do they need to hear? What do they care about? Like you have no idea, right? I mean, you probably have a some sense of an idea, you know, like you probably have like a fairly decent sense of an idea, but you're still not completely sure because you're isolated and even more so now with the fact that all of us are not all of us but large, like many more people now are working just from their homes than they ever have been.
So that just that even sense of isolation is even more overbearing. Right. The whole point of a brand storyteller is it's your responsibility to be a student of your customer. It's your responsibility to to to basically create, study them, understand what the world is like and create meaningful, relevant content that actually adds value to their day because you're morally obligated to reward these people for their attention.
And if you don't take it as a moral obligation, then you're never going to create this content from the perspective of of, hey, I'm trying to add value to this person's day to day because this person is going about their day being overwhelmed by thousands of messages, thousands of content pieces. And therefore, I want to make sure that what I'm providing them is worthy of their attention.
And if we take it from that person, it's all perspective shift, really. And this is what I mean by it's all about building a relationship. Like, the whole point is to like serve them, you know, like, and understand that we're constantly in this position of service, that we're constantly trying to build a relationship with them, earn their trust earn their loyalty.
That's what we're doing. Isn't that how you want to be treated as a consumer? That's how you want to be treated. So this is all about becoming that company that you want to relate with, really. It's applying the golden rule to business. That's what we're trying to do. We're trying to like treat other people as we would like to be treated.
I know I come at this hard all the time, right? Like I come in at heart and I'm kind of like kind of complaining from time to time. I apologize. I get real fired up. I'm passionate person. I'm not yelling at y'all. That's basically. I hope you understand that I'm not, like, yelling at you. Usually, it's like I'm kind of expressing frustration with people who don't understand this, and that's an inappropriate approach.
To this because those people aren't listening to this podcast anyways. So I just kind of want to apologize for taking that tone. I'm sorry. No one has really like, brought it up to me. I'm just I just know it's happening, right? So my bad, I know that you're taking your time out of your day to listen to this podcast and honestly, I sincerely appreciate it.
I'm kind of like, you know, like I'm honored that you would that you would give me that that moment of your life. Right. And so just in the same way that you're giving me that moment of your life, like your potential customer, you're your audience is giving you that moment of their life. And therefore, you have to recognize that this is this is something significant.
You know, it really is. It's something significant that that like we're tasked with providing that level of value in hopes that they share a moment of their life with us. And then we're hoping that that moment is so significant hint that they eventually share a piece of their finances with us.
In hopes of of getting this this ultimate value that's going to raise their quality of life.
And then and here's the other thing of why we want to be talking about brand storytelling is because what we're trying to do is like authentically communicate the true value that we're providing to our customer, because sometimes we struggle with actually communicating the value that we provide. We just kind of wish that people got it. And unfortunately, people just don't get it.
We have to explain it. We have to prove it. We have to demonstrate our value because it's just it's, it's not immediately obvious. And that's because a lot of us are getting bad marketing advice like start with y, really bad marketing advice. I'm going to do an episode really quick. We're going to be talking about when you should start with why and hopefully that you've heard enough me talking about this that that you can do.
You don't start with why. You start with who and you start with what. Who am I serving and what value am I adding to their life? And the reason we have to think that way is because people don't buy our thing. They don't buy our service they don't buy our product, they don't even donate to our cause. They are investing in transformation.
They're investing in what their life is going to look like after they have this thing. They're investing in the quality of life that we're promising them. They're investing in the impact we're going to make in the world, in our community, the transformation we're going to cause in other people's lives. If you're nonprofit okay, that's what people buy. Therefore, it's very important to understand that value story, that customer value journey, because we're not it's not about our information.
It's not about our product, it's not about our service. It is about that transformation that they go on. It's about where they're starting right now, where they're hoping their life could be, but where we actually know their life is going to end up, which oftentimes might even be significantly better than where they even hope their life could be.
Right. The whole point is to cause that radical transformation. And if it's not radical, cause that transformation, right? But then communicate that promise of the that promised transformation. We're communicating a promise that promises our value proposition. And the story that values story is essentially the argument and a proof of here's the promise that we're we're going to provide to you and and and then we're just building that argument of leading them.
This is how we're going to do it.
So the thing about brand storytelling, okay, is it's not a story okay? It's the act of telling your story, all right? And it's not a a story that you put on your website. Right? It's a methodology. It's an approach. It's a system of thought. It's a way of being it's a a system of values that you hold dear because of what you're trying to create is in an authentic, human, relatable purpose ful brand right.
Purpose driven brand that's that's working towards not just there to take money from people, but you're you're honestly working towards making a significant impact in those people's lives. So that way your brand can grow powerful enough to make a significant and significant impact in society. The whole point is to is to go beyond two being and be achieving a purpose beyond just the business and use the business as a vehicle for change.
And it's that change that we're causing within the people that we're interacting with on a day to day basis. Our customers is the change that we're causing with our staff, our coworkers, right? That we're the business exists to transform their life to because they're benefiting from it, because now they're doing even more meaningful work because they know that what they're doing is meaningful.
Right. Don't you want to give other people that level of purpose and then it's also giving because money is a change agent, right? Getting your brand to a position where you can literally start to shape culture around you. That's what we're trying to do. That's what a brand story, that's what brand storytelling approaches for. That's why I've outlined those five levels of brand storytelling.
I want to help you get there. I want to help every brand become iconic because I want to I want an army of companies like this. I want an army of customers centric companies out there trying to make a difference in the world, trying to trying to use their companies to shape the world. Because from my perspective, these companies are the are the institutions that can make the biggest changes the fastest.
Right. Don't get me started about government but like one company, Apple seems to have made just the most tremendous impact on our entire way of life. Right? Like, that's why it's like, I believe in companies. I believe in business. Like and I believe I'll do some say I believe in capitalism, but capitalism from the point of doing good, not crony capitalism, which is what is often mistaken as capitalism, but like the whole purpose of building, going out and building a business, building something of value like seeing a problem out there, going out and building a business to solve that problem and and providing value to another human being to raise their quality of life, to improve their situation. Like heck yeah, I believe in that. Who doesn't believe in that?
That's it. That's brand storytelling 2022 edition is brand storytelling is the process of of basically spans that continuum of defining a company's story and using that story as a strategic foundation for that company. But the purpose is also to use it as an empathetic tool. Understand that your current situation is you've got a problem your problem is you can't communicate with your audience.
You need a better you need a better message for your audience to connect with that customer. But that's just a symptom of the problem. The lack of that message that connects is a symptom of the problem. It's not the solution, the symptom, the problem. The true problem is the fact that you're suffering from the disease and you're isolated and and therefore you feel cut off from your customer and the lack of understanding of who they are and, and like how to properly communicate with them just demonstrates how isolated you are from them.
You solve that problem with understanding and empathy and studying them, like literally studying them to understand. Right? Not studying them to trick your studying to understand. And when you understand, you can properly position your company within their story, within their life, because now you understand where you're where you're placed at within their hierarchy, how they see you how you need to show up and speak to them.
Right. That's the whole point. And so you define your story, use that as your marketing strategy, and then you tell that story. Brand strategy, marketing strategy and then content. All right. Hope this was helpful. Hope this started to make sense of all of these messages that you've been seeing. And it's why I don't talk about storytelling all of the time, because that's just a minor component of the entire discipline of brand storytelling, where it's really it's more strategic.
And what we're talking about is marketing. We're just talking about approaching marketing from a storyteller's perspective. And not approaching marketing from a either let's be creative or let's let's get a book right we need money, obviously. But your business needs that money so it can make the impact that you're actually setting out to make that you hope to make in the beginning.
All right. I hope this was helpful. As always, if you have any questions, you can find me at Storytelling Giant on Instagram and Twitter. Feel free to send me a message directly on the website. McNabbstorytelling.com and I'll see you in the next one. Take care