8 Essentials for Effective Brand Storytelling

Effective brand stories engage people in ways that drive real business results. 

According to Bernie Thiel, a marketing consultant and partner at the firm Corporate Narratives Group, effective brand stories possess these characteristics:

Relevance – Show that you know your audience - what inspires them as well as their needs and struggles.

Credibility – Leveraging your leadership and expertise gives consumers qualified reason to listen and learn ... and act with trust. 

Compelling – Artful selling touches the consumer's head and heart.

Persuasiveness – An effective brand story is like an informative trail that leads the reader to an enticing, actionable conclusion.

Timeliness – This goes hand-in-hand with relevance.  Evergreen stories may inform, but they don’t trigger immediate action.

Understandable – Don’t let creativity bury your pitch.  Have a clear story line with coherent messages and defined action points.

Informative – Great brand stories educate and cultivate consumers. 

Authenticity – Fakes reveal themselves and in marketing deception is a brand killer. Brand stories offer opportunities to share what’s real and worthwhile about a product, brand or parent company.

I’ve only paraphrased Thiel’s points so check out his excellent post published in Brand Strategy Insider. 

5 Brand Story Essentials

Can you tell your brand story in under a minute? Of course you can (and indeed you should) with a pitch that's pithy, punchy and persuasive. Follow these steps to nail your message: 

1. Pain Relief: Zero in on the prickly sore spot your brand can relieve right now

2. Promise: In one sentence state your solution in "consumer speak" (no marketing jargon!)

3. Qualification:  In two bullet points or less, say why should we should believe you?

4. Relevance:  Put your pitch in context. What scenarios will your audience relate to? 

5. Dramatization:  Think carefully about your brand's voice. Are you friendly, funny or authoritative? Are you appealing to logic, fear or passion?  How might you tell your story visually, without words or sound? What sound bite or tagline will effectively brand your takeaway message? 

Madison Avenue used to churn out brilliant brand stories, like this classic commercial video for VW Beetle that sold frugality as mainstream chic. 

Transmedia storytelling engages audiences who want to be heard and validated

Digital Media Wire recently posed five questions to  Jeff Gomez, CEO of Starlight Runner Entertainment and a leading figure in the emerging field of cross-media storytelling called "Transmedia." 

DMW’s Q&A is a very good read; here’s a sampling of what Jeff said:

“For me, transmedia narrative is a kind of subset of cross-media content. It's the technique of conveying messages, themes and storylines across multiple media platforms in a way that is both artful and coordinated with care.

With transmedia you're not repeating the same story on a movie screen, a TV screen, a novel and a videogame. You are using each one to tell a complete piece of your story, and combined they can all become a deeper, richer and more immersive experience.  Different aspects of the story or story world are created to play to the specific strengths of the medium.

From a business standpoint, much has been said about how transmedia can help build franchises and maximize return on investment for entertainment properties. The toughest aspect of getting transmedia right is that you have to build two-way communication into the apparatus of your narrative.

Everyone talks about Star Wars to exemplify good transmedia, but I love talking about Glee, because what makes transmedia so unique and relevant is that it is fundamentally about telling stories to a generation of people who want to be heard, and who are used to being validated for their participation. That's what interactive media is about in essence: response.”

On April 25th in Los Angeles, Jeff Gomez, together with Digital Media Wire, will host the first in a series of transmedia workshops on how to use and leverage the most effective transmedia techniques.

Peter Gruber's new book about the "Hidden Power of Story"

Great video Q&A courtesy of Harvard Business Review: Peter Guber, chairman and CEO of the Mandalay Entertainment Group, explains how to establish an emotional connection with any audience. His new book Tell to Win: Connect, Persuade, and Triumph with the Hidden Power of Story (March 2011, Crown Business) is sold on Amazon.

Incidentally,clicking the anchor text above will take you to my new Storyful page where I took a crack at curating material for this post. I must say, excited as I am about the storytelling potential of curation services like Storyful and Storify I've yet to find one that is easy to use. It's surprising that Storyful does not offer a quick tutorial because the site is not very intuitive in my opinion. I'll continue to putter with it to see what I can do with a bit of practice.

Are you using curatorial tools and if so what's been your experience? Any recommendations?

Should “sin” brands steer clear of social media?

Should some brands be unsociable?  That is, are some products and services better off being wallflowers at the social media ball?

Rob Marsh, author of the branding blog Brand Story, ran an interesting post recently about the difficulty so-called “sin” brands (i.e. distilled spirits) have keeping social conversations socially responsible and reasonably on theme.

The front-end of social marketing involves pumping out contextual content to engage fans and get them talking.  But as Marsh rightly points out, the end game of any social campaign is the online chatter it generates. For some brands (and product categories) the prospect for robust viral  publicity is offset by the possibility that fringe fans will dominate online conversations in ways that actually malign the brand. 

Lost in translation? Why global brands need a local story.

Everyone aspires to luxury, right? Not according to Tyler Brûlé, the Canadian-born journalist, entrepreneur, and magazine publisher, who argues that consumers around the world think and behave differently, shaped by their local culture, history and values. Luxury brand Gucci for example, which is hot in Japan and the US, holds little appeal in Sweden where people prize social equality.(It’s little wonder that the massively democratic retailers H&M and IKEA are Swedish.)   

Several years ago Britain’s BBC4 ran a series presented by Brule called Counter Culture, which examined the consumer mindset in Japan, Libya, Sweden, Italy and the US.  He found that marketing, like politics, always has a  local dynamic. The Telegraph newspaper ran an article about Brule's show that’s still worth reading. Only the episode on Libya can be viewed on the web and it is fascinating. The other episodes are sold online. 

Recently the Financial Times ran a story about Russia's growing preference for home-grown fashion designers. According to Igor Chapurin, a noted Russian designer, after the end of the drab Soviet years Russian consumers gravitated to flashy western designers such as Versace and Valentino. Now they favor monochrome, low-key looks created by domestic talent who have a better grasp of Russian tastes and attitudes.

Mashable has an excellent post on international marketing with insights (and tips) on tailoring digital programs to vastly different audiences.