Brand Storytelling Isn’t a Story. It’s a Method.

Your company’s brand story isn’t exactly a single story (I invite you to check out my previous entry “What Is Brand Storytelling” to get a deeper understanding). It’s really a storytelling framework. Very often, the act of brand storytelling feels more like world building than telling an explicit story.

And that’s because it’s not a story. It’s a methodology.

Brand storytelling is telling the story of your brand. Simply put: it’s goal-oriented brand marketing.

It’s marketing that’s relational, authentic, purposeful, and customer-centric.

Brand storytelling is human. It’s how we put heart into business.

You have to first see brands as people. A company’s brand is its personality. It’s an organization’s identity.

Branding is very primal. We have a curious habit of grouping ourselves. It’s part of our social nature. But to the religious degree that we identify ourselves with groups fascinates me. We can’t help ourselves but to take on labels, icons, phrases, songs, myths. Corporate branding is just an outgrowth of this need.

My heritage is Scotch-Irish (in case McNabb wasn’t a clear give-away). My lineage is part of a clan that has it’s own crest, coat of arms, tartan (plaid weave), and motto. My family name means son of the abbot. You’d think that’d indicate a level of moral integrity… but no. Our crest is the decapitated head of a rival clan’s chief, whom we murdered and stole their castle. So yeah, thieves and murderers…

I digress.

It is our nature to brand and identify. To build our identity through artifacts and stories.

In fact, our identity is a story. We call it a personal narrative. Our world view is also a story.

Stories are the foundation of our existence.

On an individual level, a story is both our identity and how we communicate that identity to others.

At the company level, a story is both the brand (the identity), and how that organization communicates that brand to others (marketing).

Brand storytelling approaches brand strategy and content strategy through a storyteller’s lens. Not only is it a natural, common sense approach. It’s also extremely useful in clearing up the biggest issue we face as business leaders and marketers:

The Disease.

The disease is the inability to see your organization from the customer’s perspective. It’s our insulated, self-focused, inside-out view of our company’s value. And it’s the disease that makes it EXTREMELY difficult to connect with our audience. Why? Because we can’t see our company from the outside-in. We can’t see our offer from our customer’s perspective, and therefore we have no concept of what they find to be meaningful.

Unfortunately, it’s the disease that causes us to design marketing content and ad campaigns for the company’s approval chain. When the whole point was to design it for our customer’s approval and win their favor.

Since we use stories to communicate our identity, a story is a vehicle for empathy. When we hear someone else’s story, we are (through narrative transportation) transported into their story world. Stories are how we walk a mile in another person’s shoes. And it’s by taking our customer’s story seriously, and investing ourselves in it, that we can treat the disease, clear up our fog, and begin to see our company from their point of view.

And I do mean “treat.” It is impossible to cure the disease. We are human. You are always experiencing life from your individual lens, like I am. You can’t disassociate yourself and become your customer. That’s nonsense. But we can use stories to understand them. And we can use stories to connect with them.

When we’ve more fully understood our customer, what they need, appreciate, and dislike, we then create a brand identity and a content strategy as if we were designing a product. Because they are communication products. The goal is to use storytelling principles (written, visual, etc) to communicate our value, offer, and mission in a meaningful way that sticks with our target audience.