Brand Storytelling: The Definitive Guide

Brand storytelling is often seen gracing the headlines of business articles, urging businesses to develop their own unique version of brand storytelling. A quick glance at a headline, however, is not usually enough to detail exactly what brand storytelling is, and how it can be an invaluable tool for your brand or company. 

Brand storytelling is a vital part of marketing, and is utilized by giants such as Apple, Nike, and Google, as well as smaller companies who focus on local advertising and local customers. To help you leverage brand storytelling for yourself, I have put together a definitive guide, including how to get started, how to make sure your storytelling practices are serving you, and the best examples available today. 

Before I dive into the full ins and outs, however, let’s start at the beginning. What, exactly, is brand storytelling? 

What is Brand Storytelling?

Brand storytelling is essentially the act of creating a compelling story as part of your marketing strategy, to make sure that you are making emotional connections with your audience. To be clear, this does not mean crafting tall tales in order to imbue your history with character traits or personality that the brand does not have. Instead, think of it as a way to encapsulate who you are, what you’re doing, and why it matters. 

Storytelling is an important part of content marketing, because successful brand storytelling efforts resonate with your audience and develop an emotional connection to your brand or products. Brand loyalty relies heavily on these types of emotional connections, so making sure that you are using stories on your marketing channels can help perpetuate that connection and improve your relationship with your target audience. 

Stories are valuable, because they engage an audience’s emotions. Even if your stories are not necessarily highly motivational in nature, they can still provide an emotional connection, as authentic stories provide a way for people to humanize your brand and see it as a source of connection. Even if the stories you are sharing are simple, such as the story of how your business got started, social media posts and blogs with stories offer an opportunity for connection. 

Apple offers a great example of how brand stories can shape perception and encourage brand loyalty. Few people who swear by Apple products are unfamiliar with the story of Steve Jobs and how he built his company. Nike is another great example: Nike focuses on sports performance, and uses emotional impact to tell the stories of athletes who do not give up, and who continue to pursue excellence, encouraging an emotional connection with their audience. 

Both examples offer great insights into how to deliver brand stories to increase emotional impact. 

Why Brand Storytelling Matters

Brand storytelling matters because it helps brands connect with an audience and demonstrate why that audience should go with a specific brand or continue using a certain product. Stories can be told via visual storytelling, but marketing efforts can deliver these stories in myriad ways, including videos and long-form content like blog posts. Ultimately, brand storytelling helps build emotional connections, sets your brand apart, and drives results. 

I have gone over each of these impacts in greater detail below. First up: 

Building Emotional Connections

Stories can help bring the human experience into a brand, and make the brand or company as a whole seem more relatable and human. To humanize a brand is to help develop a connection with its target market; emotional resonance leads to loyalty and even advocacy! If you are looking to develop a content strategy that encourages sharing, look no further. 

As mentioned above, Nike and Apple are great at emotional storytelling, demonstrating the intrepid nature of the human spirit. Other brands that use emotions to connect include Dawn dish soap, which highlights the use of Dawn to rescue animals harmed by oil spills.

Although the soap is being sold as a solution for cleaning dishes in the home, they are able to bring in the presence of animals in need and foster an emotional connection. This leads to brand loyalty and sharing, because it suggests that to use Dawn is to in some small way help the animals Dawn contributes to helping.  

Differentiating Your Brand

The marketplace of overall commerce has never been quite so crowded. Even a quick glance on line demonstrates how valuable a real story about a brand can help set a business or product apart; the smallest of niches can be overrun with options. Stories help set brands apart in this crowded marketplace by connection with your audience on an emotional level. This can be accomplished using company stories or customer stories, provided that a consistent message of humanity is being delivered. 

Generic storytelling is not enough to develop emotional connections, however; key elements of your brand stories should rely on unique narratives. From story structure to unusual or uncommon experiences, your brand stories should not be a dime a dozen. Instead, they should rely on both the power of storytelling and compelling messages or occurrences. 

To use Apple as an example again, we can see that Apple successfully and regularly differentiates itself through its brand storytelling. Although Apple designs are certainly unique, it is not design alone that sets Apple apart. Instead, the brand has long focused on simplicity and innovation, crafting an image of determination and drive that extends to Apple product users. 

Driving Business Results

It may not initially seem to be an invaluable part of your marketing campaigns, but effective brand stories do impact your bottom line by improving sales and customer retention. Stories are shareable and compelling, which makes them the perfect fodder for word-of-mouth marketing. Dove, for instance, created quite a name for itself through its beauty campaigns highlighting natural beauty, with compelling stories and videos that are easy to share between consumers. 

One great example of this comes from the Significant Objects project, which was designed to evaluate the value of brand storytelling in driving sales and demonstrating ROI. The project took thrift store items, crafted stories about those items, and sold them for a premium price. Although the 100 items in question cost, on average, $1.25 apiece, the project brought in around $8,000! This shows how emotional stories have the ability to connect with audiences and drive sales. 

Further Reading: The 10 Benefits of Content Marketing Your Company Should Know

Elements of a Compelling Brand Story

Effective storytelling may not always come naturally to marketers. While sales and ad copy may be well established with a brand or company, learning how to leverage storytelling as a content marketing strategy can take more effort and intention. 

Simply telling a story is not enough to make sure that your digital marketing campaigns are effective. Instead, you need to make sure that the stories you tell are filled with authenticity, relevance, consistency, emotion, and simplicity. The precise manner in which you tell your story will differ–and that’s okay! What is important is that each of these elements can be found in the stories you share. 

Let’s take a closer look at the traits your stories require. First up…

Authenticity

Deceit is not the goal in brand storytelling, so shy away from fabricating stories to make yourself stand out. Instead, take the time to seek out or develop genuine, truthful stories that can be independently verified or supported. Doing so ensures that your audience genuinely connects with the story, and that your marketing efforts do not end in disgrace or a PR nightmare. Even exaggeration can come back to haunt brands who are not 100% truthful, so make sure all aspects of your story are rooted in truth.  

As you develop stories and determine which ones to share, take a close look at your brand’s values and actions. If, for instance, you have a customer whose environmental impact was lessened after using your products and you claim sustainability as an important value, that is a great story to share! Search for any points of connection between stories and your values or behaviors. 

Relevance

To be effective, a story must resonate with your target audience. A story that is outdated, or that goes over something that is no longer relevant to your audience is not likely to resonate. Before sharing a story, or chasing a line of inquiry, take a close look at your audience and identify their pain points, desires, and values. This can help guide which stories you will further develop, and which can be left behind or set aside for later. 

Targeting does not have to mean chasing only a single line of thought, however; different audience segments are going to have different interests and values. Tailor the stories you develop to each of your audience segments, to help further cement brand loyalty and capture interest. 

Consistency

I talk about consistency a lot regarding marketing and social media, but consistent storytelling is also important. A cohesive narrative that remains constant across different touch points is the best way to make sure your storytelling content marketing strategy is effective and does not raise any questions or uncertainty. 

Consistency also involves brand and company behavior; after all, if you say that customer satisfaction is important to you, but you have a litany of complaints regarding unanswered complaints, your consistency has effectively failed. When you claim certain values, make sure your stories back those claims up. 

One of the best ways to support story consistency is to develop guidelines for your storytelling efforts. Develop guidelines for storylines, content overall, and even how to treat the central character, whether that is you or a customer. Before you begin developing stories, create some general guidelines to hold fast to. 

Emotion

Emotions are the core thread of any brand storytelling campaign, so make sure that your narratives evoke feelings through characters, conflict, and resolution. An open-ended story is not likely to be one that inspires or resonates with your audience, and this is where a guideline can come in handy: you can compare any stories you have compiled to your guideline, to make sure you have all of the elements necessary to reach customers through marketing messages. 

There are common emotions in all brand stories, including joy, inspiration, and empowerment. How these emotions are revealed differs. Some start with a pain point or a struggle, and result in empowerment, while others present as joyful from beginning to end. Make sure that the emotions you are evoking are positive ones, however, as negative emotions can negatively impact loyalty. 

Simplicity

Concise, easily understood stories are the way to go when developing brand stories. It can be tempting to develop long, meandering tales to inspire, but in today’s culture of blink-and-you-miss-it trends and videos, long stories are unlikely to maintain interest. Easy to use language and uncomplicated narratives are going to speak to all audiences, and do not run the risk of losing people’s interest before the story has concluded. 

Dove’s “Real Beauty” campaign is another example of simple yet powerful brand stories. The idea is simple: beauty comes in all shapes and sizes, and to find it, women need to look no further than their own skin and bodies. This is a simple concept and an easy one to understand, yet it is responsible for catapulting Dove to the #1 preferred soap brand and resulted in a $1.5 billion leap over ten years. 

Further Reading: Brand Storytelling: How to Tell Stories That Will Increase Conversions

Developing Your Brand’s Story Framework

I have told you the value of brand storytelling and the basic parameters within which to work. Now, it is time to discuss how to develop your own road into developing brand stories and utilizing storytelling in your own marketing campaigns. To ensure your brand storytelling efforts are completed as effectively as possible, make sure you are defining your brand’s purpose, developing its personality, mapping your journey, identifying your central hero, and establishing your narrative conflict. To arrive at each of these components adequately, I have delved more deeply into each component below, beginning with…

Defining Your Brand’s Purpose

If you have not already developed your brand mission, vision, and values, now is the time to do so. These can all be used to guide all of your business decisions, so they are important for far more than simply developing storytelling ventures. Each can be used to determine how your brand functions, why you came into being, and why your customers should care. 

Although plenty of companies exist purely for the purpose of making a profit, a brand or company whose goal is to develop useful and engaging stories cannot exist solely for profit. Identify the “why” of your existence beyond profit. Do you want to help your customers build confidence? Streamline their business practices? Spend less time at the computer and more time with their families? Identify why your company is in operation. 

Once you have the answers to the questions involving mission, vision, and values, you can begin trying to align your purpose with the values of your target audience. Your target audience is the lifeblood of your business, so finding common ground is essential to growth and success. 

Crafting Your Brand’s Personality

Do you know your brand’s personality? If someone were to ask you your core traits, would you have a solid answer? If so, great! You’re on your way. If not, look into defining your brand archetype and traits. This will likely begin with an evaluation of your niche, followed by an evaluation of your business practices and values.

From there, you can develop your brand voice and tone. If you are creating business solutions to streamline operations, for instance, your brand voice and tone may be irreverent, with an air of distinct authority. If you are a clothing brand designed to attract the interest of men in their twenties, friendly and forward is going to be your most successful tone. 

Finally, make sure your personality is both distinct and consistent. Look at it this way: are you more likely to pursue a friendship or other relationship with someone reliable, whose moods and behaviors are stable, or someone who is more volatile and unpredictable? Chances are, you’re going to gravitate toward the reliable, stable person. The same is true of business, so regularly check in with your marketing materials and brand stories to make sure they embody a consistent, distinct personality. 

Further Reading: Brand Voice: 9 Tips on How to Create Your Own (with 7 Examples)

Mapping Out Your Brand’s Journey

It can be difficult to know where to start, if you have not started out your brand journey with stories in mind. Nevertheless, fortunately, you can go back and develop stories based on your brand history and any key milestones you have already surpassed or overcome. From a brand-new brand, whose primary milestone is getting started to a seasoned brand with a decade of history behind them, it is possible to craft a timeline of brand evolution from which to base your storytelling campaigns. 

One of the best ways to begin creating stories is to highlight any pivotal moments that have shaped your brand. Remember that you do not have to have a massive backlog of experience in order to do this; a pivotal moment that shaped your brand could very well have been your experience searching for a magazine that catered to your interests in eighth grade, and coming up short. Get creative and comb through your history for any relevant stories. 

Identifying Your Brand’s Hero

Your brand’s hero can remain constant, or it can shift and change according to the story you are telling. In every story, however, you should have at least one protagonist. Your protagonist might be the founder of your brand, a beloved customer, or even a product! The sky is the limit, provided that you adhere to the guidelines I outlined above: authenticity, relevance, consistency, emotion, and simplicity. 

Once you have your protagonist, tease out your hero’s character arc and subsequent transformation. Is your founder your protagonist? What obstacles did they face when creating your brand? Is a customer your hero? What problem or issue did the brand or a product help them overcome? As you parse through these questions, you will build the backbone of your story. 

Finally, take what you have identified and the arc you have created, and tie it back to your audience and their unique aspirations. In the case of a founder, you might relate the founder’s overcoming obstacles to the types of obstacles that your audience may be working to overcome (and provide some help in that arena). If a customer is a hero, illustrate how that customer is just like your other customers. As you practice doing this, it will grow easier to flesh out a story and do so organically. 

Establishing Your Brand’s Narrative Conflict

To establish your brand’s narrative conflict, or overall conflict that continues to drive stories, pinpoint the central obstacle or tension with the story in question. Highlight the precise problems the brand helps the hero of the story overcome, and frame products or services as vital tools to help resolve a conflict. In action, that might look like telling the story of a customer who was struggling to keep her business running smoothly, and now is enjoying weekends off of work thanks to a product that streamlines workflows, or a product that was struggling to get off the ground until a service alongside the product increased its efficacy. 

Get creative! 

Telling Your Brand Story Across Touchpoints

Touchpoints are any points at which a customer or client interacts with a brand or company. Touchpoints can be literal, physical touchpoints, such as a customer setting foot in a brick-and-mortar location and speaking with a sales representative. They can also be digital interactions, as might be the case when a potential client clicks over to your brand’s social media profile. Telling your story across these touchpoints is important, as it helps solidify your stories in your customers’ heads, and provides a point of entry. Consider the following touchpoints through which you can share stories: 

Website and Blog

Story does not have to be relegated to quick blurbs on your social media pages; instead, they can be woven into your web copy, your About Us page, and blog posts. Websites and blogs provide plenty of opportunities to use visuals and multimedia to further enrich your storytelling, making it a great platform on which to share your brand stories. 

One such example is Peloton and its collaboration with Beyonce. The exercise company leveraged a partnership with Beyonce to tell a story of resilience, strength, motivation, and even social justice. The partnership allowed users to feel as though they were a part of something larger than themselves, and was a truly immersive foray into brand storytelling and partnership. 

Social Media

Brand storytelling will look different across different platforms. To successfully utilize storytelling, adapt each story to each platform’s individual features. Posts, videos, and live content all perform differently, and each is received differently on each social media platform. Tailor your stories accordingly, and shy away from a blithe repost from one platform to another. 

Consider encouraging user-generated stories and testimonials. This is one of the greatest assets of social media for brands and businesses: people are often eager to share their own experiences and testimonials, so give back to your customers who are willing to step out for your brand by including their mentions as part of your brand storytelling efforts. 

Further Reading: Six Powerful Ways to Create Engaging Video Content for Social Media

Advertising and Campaigns

Advertising and campaigns are among the most common places to find storytelling efforts, though these efforts do not always come across in the way brands are hoping. Although storytelling is designed to offer a sales pitch alongside a value pitch, advertisements and campaigns need to make sure brand stories are carefully distilled into ads and marketing collateral, rather than delivered in an overt sales pitch. 

Story-driven campaign themes and narratives differ from traditional sales pitches in an important way: they deliver a story that invites the audience to step into the emotional shoes of the brand or its customers. This creates an emotional bond between the brand and the consumer, which can then be funneled into an ongoing relationship via the sales relationship. 

One great example of a story-centric ad campaign comes from Intuit, the company perhaps best known for TurboTax and business solutions. The ad campaign in question utilized a love story to demonstrate the potential value of its suite of tools, effectively bringing emotional connection into a realm that is typically seen as dry or uninspiring. 

Packaging and Product Design

Packaging and product design offers another great opportunity for storytelling. Product packaging and overall design can incorporate storytelling in a number of organic and engaging ways, including using unboxing experiences to further expound on the brand narrative and storytelling ventures. 

Annie’s collection of food items is a great example of storytelling in packaging and product design; each Annie’s product contains a brief history of the company, including why it was created and why its food products matter to the family who started the company, and the families who enjoy those products. 

Customer Experience

Customer service interactions offer another opportunity to include brand storytelling. This is perhaps a less frequently used tactic, but can be an excellent way to help customers feel seen and heard. To successfully implement stories in this area of your business, however, you must properly equip employees to be brand storytellers, themselves. 

Customer experience can be used to leverage stories by creating immersive in-store and event experiences. Think of it this way: your customers want to feel as though they matter, and as though they are seen. You can demonstrate this by sharing a significant customer service interaction, by providing an immersive experience to help find the product that best suits their needs, or even by creating events through which to connect current or new customers with long-time users. 

One example is Nike’s foray into self-designed sneakers. This ability encourages customers to share their personality, and to reach out to Nike with their own ideas, while continuing to tout their tagline and encourage customers to become a part of the Nike community–with their own personal twist, allowing them to create their own stories within the larger Nike brand. 

Further Reading: 4 Effective Ways to Use Customer Testimonials in Your Content to Increase Conversion

Brand Storytelling Best Practices and Examples

I have touched on some examples of storytelling in brands you likely know or recognize, but let’s take a closer look at a handful of storytelling examples that go above and beyond the basics of storytelling, and truly deliver a powerful punch in their marketing and storytelling efforts. 

In each of the following examples, note the value being created by the story being told, and how that value translates into a product or service. This is pivotal when creating a story: your story is not merely a vehicle for exposition, but is a soft and compelling lead into encouraging your audience to make a purchase or return to purchase in the future. 

Airbnb: Belonging Anywhere

Airbnb uses story to create a sense of belonging, its tagline being “Belonging Anywhere.” The brand’s storytelling campaigns focus on hospitality and human connection that is said to be inherent in renting a home rather than the impersonal nature of a hotel or motel. Citing the use of an actual home as an indication of connection over transaction, Airbnb effectively leverages the idea that to use Airbnb is to immerse yourself in a location, rather than simply skimming the surface. 

Although the bulk of Airbnb’s storytelling efforts center on the components listed above, story is extended through the use of Experiences, Neighborhoods, and Social Impact, which are used to further expound upon your use of Airbnb. Experiences allow you to engage with local experiences, as do social impact events (though these focus on non-profit-run experiences), while neighborhoods allow you to select your place based upon the specific neighborhood or area you are interested in visiting. 

Warby Parker: Rebellious Simplicity

Warby Parker relied on storytelling to encourage sales, by suggesting that they were a leader in the industry, effectively upsetting the status quo found in the traditional eyewear industry. Warby Parker’s disruption to the industry was told through story, with an emphasis on simplicity, transparency, and social good. Pricing was said to be arrived at with greater transparency and ethical practices, and storytelling was utilized to create an emotional connection with customers looking for affordable and stylish glasses. 

Warby Parker’s storytelling and brand infuses quirky personality into product design and packaging, and was quickly embraced by similarly quirky users. The brand continues to demonstrate its ability to rely on storytelling and innovation, seeing a considerable amount of success from word of mouth marketing, and even their dedication to charitable giving. 

Patagonia: Sustainable Activism

Patagonia is a brand known for its commitments to sustainability, activism, and a consistent, enviable company culture. Its focus on environmental activism and responsibility is one of its greatest ongoing storytelling efforts, as it successfully (and truthfully) posits itself as an outdoor gear brand dedicated to actually supporting the sustenance and management of the wild lands its clothes are designed to operate within. 

The company’s ongoing storytelling efforts and activism include its “1% for the Planet,” which diverts 1% of all profits to programs designed to positively impact the earth. Its continual dedication to activism and sustainability illustrates its belief in putting purpose and the planet over simple profits in business decisions. 

Patagonia takes its storytelling one step further by inviting customers to get in on its activism via Worn Wear and Action Works, one a program that allows customers to trade in old clothing or purchase used clothing and the other a program to help connect customers with local environmental causes and organizations. Both invite customers to join in the story by engaging in activism and environmental responsibility alongside Patagonia. 

Johnnie Walker: Keep Walking

Johnnie Walker’s “Keep Walking” campaign is one made up entirely of storytelling, as it focuses on many stories of people who keep walking, or continue to move forward to seek progress. The brand, a whiskey company, has long used its “Keep Walking” mantra, though it is only within recent years that it has extended that slogan to its many customers to encourage those customers to share their own stories of perseverance and moving forward. Johnnie Walker partners with people and organizations that focus on progress and upsetting the status quo to demonstrate the value of moving forward. 

Both historical figures and fictional characters have been used to represent the brand, including the brand’s short film titled “A Gentleman’s Wager,” which sought to position the brand as one of sophistication and class. No matter which market Johnnie Walker is catering to, it lets its partnerships shine, adapts its storytelling efforts to suit different markets without losing its core themes. 

Dove: Real Beauty

A star in my discussion of storytelling, Dove’s Real Beauty campaign is one that focused almost entirely on storytelling, even to the exclusion of overtly promoting its products. The result was a campaign that sought to redefine beauty standards and empower women, while only peripherally selling its products. 

While some might think that campaigning for body positivity and self-esteem in advertisements and programs is unimportant to promoting the use of a personal cleaning product like soap, Real Beauty has continued to show itself as an invaluable promotion tool for Dove. 

Dove extended its storytelling impact through its Self-Esteem Project, a project wherein resources are given to parents to help teenagers contend with the many self-esteem-damaging messages being sent out to drive sales, and Real Beauty Productions, a production company focused on providing resources and action items to help support everything from racial equality to children’s self-esteem. 

Conclusion

Brands often place a great emphasis on creating an interesting or viral marketing campaign, without focusing on long-term story building and brand loyalty. Marketing materials designed to fulfill trends and stay top of mind have their place, but storytelling is often evergreen content that can remain interesting and compelling long after its first run. Storytelling is a frequently underused marketing technique that companies with consistent, loyal customers recognize and utilize, and you can learn a lot from these giants. 

Do you use brand storytelling in your marketing materials? Let me know in the comments!