When to Tell Your Brand Story | The 5 Levels of Brand Storytelling

Sep 27

When to Tell My Brand Story? | That’s Not the Right Question

Do you know when to tell your brand story?

It not that simple. It can’t be given a trite answer like “start brand storytelling after X months or X amount of revenue.”

When you should invest in brand storytelling depends on these two questions:

1) What type of business do you have?
2) What type of story should you be telling based upon your brand's development?

And the question isn’t really “when” should you tell your brand story, but rather “should” you.

To Storytell or Not to Storytell | Transactional or Relationship?

So, to answer that first question, we need to dive into some marketing basics.

The whole point of brand storytelling is to establish trust between your organization and your audience and cultivate a strong relationship.

We buy from organizations that we know, like, and trust. People must know who you, before they can buy from you. And how do you do that? Direct response marketing.

After you achieve that, it’s time to build an affinity for your company and instill trust. How does that happen? Through brand storytelling. The stories you tell help create a bridge between your organization and your audience in order to cultivate that relationship and build trust. The more your audience trusts you, the deeper their loyalty will be to your brand. The more they feel valued, the more they’ll want to spend with your company.

Brand power ultimately equals pricing power. I know it can feel a bit uncomfortable to discuss pricing like this, but it’s true. You pay more for the brands you admire compared to what you consider to be just a commodity. You pay for what you care about.

Back to Question #1: What type of business do you have?

The answer determines whether you should focus on direct marketing or brand storytelling.

Will your business succeed based on the relationships that you build? Does it depend on repeat business? Are you concerned about customer lifetime value? Then you need brand storytelling. That’s what will strengthen the relationship between you and your customers.

Is your business more transactional? Then it makes absolutely no sense to invest in brand storytelling. It doesn't matter. If your customer base just does business with you once, if it's very transactional, then it doesn't matter how strong your brand is. In fact, investing in your brand strength might actually be a mistake. You might actually be cutting into your profit margin because you're investing in something that doesn't matter. You don't need to cultivate relationships with your customer base because they're just doing business with you once. You’d be better served with a direct response strategy.

The 5 Levels of Brand Development | Which Story to Tell

So, if your entire business depends on the strength of the customer relationship, you should be brand storytelling.

Which begs the question: When should you tell your brand story?

Answer: ALL THE TIME

And it's not a question of when...it's a question of what type of brand story should you be telling throughout the life cycle of your brand.

I believe there are Five Levels of Brand Development that a company goes through. And as you begin to understand those stages, you will gain an understanding of what type of brand storytelling you should be doing at every point in your business.

What are the Five Levels?

Awareness
Lifestyle
Product
Philanthropic
Iconic

Level 1 - Awareness | Your Brand is What You Do

This is essentially when you're trying to establish yourself in the marketplace. It's developing brand awareness and basically letting people know that you exist. So naturally, a strong part of this is direct response marketing. You need those initial sales and revenue flowing into your organization.

That doesn’t mean there is zero brand storytelling happening. Brand storytelling works on an exponential growth path. It uses the principle of compounding much like investing in your retirement. At first, you’re just putting in the money but perhaps not seeing much growth. But over years, that compounding effect takes place and you end with up with a few million dollars. So, initially, you won’t be seeing much return from your storytelling investment.

In order to offset that compounding initially, you must do direct response marketing to make sure you're getting eyes on your organization. People need to understand who you are. Most of your brand story is developed by forming relationships with your customers. If you don’t have any customers...there’s no interaction. You need some short-term wins to get your business off the ground and start building your customer base.

The problem with constantly doing short-term wins is they inevitably cheapen your brand over time. They work for a while...then they don’t. So you have to come up with new strategies, techniques or gimmicks to stay in business. You can really only rely on them for the initial growth of your business.

According to LinkedIn’s Brand and Demand Playbook, “(Direct response marketing campaigns) provide short and significant spikes in sales, but typically the effects tend to fade quickly and brands end up back where they started.” After 19-30 months, the effectiveness of brand storytelling campaigns being to outpace the decline of direct response campaigns. That’s how long you can expect to invest in those short-term strategies before brand storytelling will pay off.

In Level 1, you’re just trying to get people to know that you exist. You’re communicating that with your value proposition. At this point, the brand story you're telling is why you exist. Tell people why you created the company and how you're directly solving the problem of your customer at this stage. Your brand is what you do. You're trying to get people to have an instant understanding of who you are. That’s the point of brand awareness.

You're not trying to go for this lofty story yet. That would confuse people.

You can't be Apple when you start. Keep in mind, when Apple started they were called Apple Computers, Inc. Apple was the thing it sold when it started. It was its computer. Its first computer was called the Apple. It didn't just jump out of the gate with “think different.” That came later in its life cycle.

Ultimately Level 1 is about building awareness. Success = people know who you are.

Level 2 - Lifestyle | Mission/Vision, or Identity Storytelling

When you get to Level 2, your brand becomes a lifestyle.

You’ve already made your stake in the marketplace. People know who you are. They have linked what you do with your organization. Now it’s time to tell a bigger story.

It’s no longer just about your product offerings. In fact, those have likely expanded as you’ve learned how to serve your customer base in unique and delightful ways. Now, your brand story becomes a lifestyle. It’s about your mission. You're promoting an identity for people to adopt.

What does that look like?

You invest more into content marketing and thought leadership. People see the path you’re carving out for them and then want to know more. You're cultivating an identity. People need to know why you believe what you believe. That comes through your content.

People want to show they’ve adopted the lifestyle you created. They want to be associated with your brand because they believe in what you do.

You’re still telling stories about what you do, but now you have an overarching story above them - your mission story. It has more weight.

Level 3 - Product | Marketing Becomes a Revenue Stream

By pursuing content marketing, you’ll inevitably build lead gens - those tiny offerings to bring someone into your sales funnel. As people enter your funnel, some of them will become paying customers…and you’ll develop a deep relationship with some of those. As people invest in your business, they’ll start to demand new products created from your marketing materials.

It might sound like this:

Can you go deeper on this blog article and make it a book?
I’d love to have all your blog articles bound in a hardcover book?
Could you put this group of podcasts together with a discussion guide for small groups?

People will ask for what they want. And it will all come from your marketing.

So now your marketing actually earns revenue. You’re getting paid for your marketing. That’s Level 3. Your marketing has become a product.

At this point, you can start telling stories just to entertain people. It doesn’t have to be as closely tied to your product. Your business is established in the market. You have an identity and lifestyle. So your marketing can lean into rewarding your audience and adding value. You can think about how to deepen the experience of the people interacting with your brand. You could even make a whole video series that served solely to entertain to your audience. You have that freedom.

Level 4 - Philanthropic | Shape the Culture Through Stories

Level 4 is when your marketing goes beyond just bringing in revenue...it actually starts shaping the world. It changes the culture around you.

As you notice people loving your content, you’ll realize you can use your content for a higher purpose than mere entertainment. You can use the stories to actually shape the culture around you. You're going to start investing marketing dollars for the sole purpose of advancing the mission of your organization.

A really great example of a brand doing philanthropic marketing is Patagonia. They’re masters. They’ve created an entire production department within their brand that creates full-length documentaries advancing their mission of creating a sustainable world. Patagonia is a clothing company, but these films don’t discuss clothing or even show people using their products. They solely focus on changing the culture. One of my favorite Patagonia films is Artifishal which examines the dangers of fish farms.

Level 5 - Iconic | When Your Fans Make Content About Your Brand

After you've made such an impact on the world around you, you inevitably reach Level 5 of your brand development: You’re Iconic.

Everyone knows who you are. After rising through the other four levels, you’ve earned the distinction of being an icon.

Who are those brands today?

Nike. Coca-Cola. Apple. These massive brands have such a richness and strong presence. They’re iconic.

I can’t think of how your brand can rise beyond being an icon. But you can lose that status. Even icons can never stop marketing. Coca-Cola actually experimented with this. They stopped running ads in a specific region for a time and their sales slipped immediately.

One indication of reaching the iconic stage is your audience now begins to create content about you. You have not just shaped the world around you, but you've literally captivated the minds of your audience…. and they are now world building about you.

Let’s take Disney World for example. If you’ve never done this before, search for Disney World on YouTube. You're going to be dumbfounded by how many YouTube channels are about people who go to Disney World. There are probably hundreds of YouTubers and bloggers giving you all the scoop and tips to have fun at Disney World. And that’s just one of the Disney theme parks! Think how much more content is out there for Disney that they aren’t even creating. Their fans are continually promoting them through their individual content.

That’s the kind of world building that comes from the iconic level. You’ve done the work of inviting your customers into your story, and they now take ownership of your story and start running with it.

Summary

So back to our original question: When should you tell your brand story? I hope you can see the answer always depends on what kind of company you are.

If you’re a transactional-based business, don’t bother with brand storytelling. The strength of your brand probably won't help you too much if you're conducting singular interactions with your customer base.

If however, you are a relationship-based business, then you need to be brand storytelling all the time. Here’s how you know you fall in that category:

Does your business depend upon the relationships with your customers?
Do you need repeat business?
Are you concerned about increasing your customer lifetime value?

If you answered yes to any of those, then you should always be thinking about investing in your brand. An investment in your brand is an investment in the value of your organization. And as you grow in your brand power, you grow in your pricing power.

Identify what level of brand development you are in and go forth creating content for that stage.

Bryce McNabb