Branding… a story well told

In May Pelican teamed-up with leading design and brand development business The Brand Nursery to run a webinar on the importance of Brand Story Telling. In this guest blog, Chris Blythe, strategy director of The Brand Nusery explains the rules of brand story telling.

There are tens of millions of pieces of content being created and shared every day. (Instagram uploads topped 95 million daily in 2019). Brands are spending billions worldwide clamouring for a few seconds of attention from audiences that are being bombarded with similar messaging. The internet has made marketing a level playing field by making communications incredibly accessible.

However, in the midst of all this, it’s often very difficult for audiences to discern between brands. It’s not enough these days to have a quality product or service; you need to know how to talk about it in a way that differentiates you. That’s why brand storytelling is so important.

In order to thrive (or even survive) in this ever changing, digitally-driven world you need to work much harder to connect with your audiences. You need to pull at their heartstrings and engage them at a much deeper level than perhaps ever before. It is this that brand storytelling excels at.

Brand storytelling is essentially the strategic ‘glue’ that bonds the rational and emotional attributes of your brand together to create a powerful narrative.

Our Rules

#1 Be unforgettable.

Instead of throwing facts, statistics, and testimonials at your audience, focus on making your brand thoughtful, memorable, and real. Package your brand message into a story that transports people and provokes an emotional response.

Create a narrative to bring to life your brand’s history, challenges, successes, and value proposition – remember that no other brand can have exactly the same story as YOU. Think about the following:

• What do you want to be remembered for?
• What is the key message you want your audience to receive, and what do you never want them to forget?
• What emotion do you want to evoke in your audience every time they interact with your brand?

#2 Create a community of advocates.

Use your story to create a deep emotional connection: start conversations, ask for and encourage engagement and involve your audience in what you do as a business. Turn your brand into an experience that your audience can consume – seek to develop a community that will support your success, follow you, be loyal, and come back for more.

Make people want to tell your story to others and be proud to be associated with you. Once your audience likes, trusts, and respects you, they will be more likely to buy from you. You’ll have created relationships with people who will become advocates of yours for years to come.

#3 Be human. Be successful.

Consumers are ever more informed, ever more savvy – but they are also increasingly demanding. They want to ‘do the right thing’ and they want the brands they associate themselves with to do the right thing too. To behave like a caring human being.

When you start to create your story, don’t forget about the bigger story! How do you touch and transform people’s lives? How do you put your positive mark on society? In short, is your brand human? Does it have a soul?

In a place where everyone is focused on doing things faster, more efficiently and in increasingly automated fashion, be the brand who dares to be human. Show your customersthat you care even if it means slowing down or approaching things differently. By doing this you may be the brand that actually stands out and ultimately, develops a valuable legacy.

So how can we help you to tell your story?

The Idea

A workshop session involving key brand stakeholders (ideally 6-12 people). Running time of 3-6 hours, depending on what needs to be covered and the availability of attendees.

Using projective and creative brainstorming techniques to uncover and articulate the stories around your brand. We’ll show examples of outstanding story-telling to inspire the team and tailor our portfolio of idea generation exercises to fit the needs of your brand.

The Follow Up

Pelican and TBN will take all the outputs from the workshop, have a bit of a think, weave a few magic spells and will return to the client team with the story that your brand should tell, captured through words and images.

Essentially, we will deliver a creative framework that can be used as a platform from which you can build the marketing communications for your brand.

If you’d like to know more or want to arrange a workshop, call Michael Bennett on 01457 820807 email hello@pelicomms.co.uk or Chris Blythe on 0113 234 6220 or email chris@thebrandnursery.com

Pelican Communications is a specialist in the environment & CSR, food, packaging & logistics and trade association sectors and offers a range of services such as strategy, design, content creation, public relations and people development. Contact us for marketing and communications expertise. Call us on -1457 820807.