“Storytelling” is the new panacea. But when every brand has a story, and many of the stories are interchangeable, none of those stories matter. It takes more than that to be a brand storyteller.
Being articulate as a brand is actually an artful science. Say too little and you risk being talked-over and seen-past. But say too much, particularly if it’s uninteresting, and you will simply be noise. Just having a story doesn’t make you articulate. It’s how you understand and apply your story that decides whether you have what it takes to be a storyteller for your brand.
The race to volume
It’s tempting to believe that telling the market more about who you are and what you offer will naturally make you more interesting and engaging. The problem is that, in many categories, other brands have exactly the same strategy. And the result is a race to volume, as everyone quickens the pace in their bid to rank high, talk more and be seen. AI has only accelerated that inundation and the self-absorption and blandness that characterises much of the resulting content.
Stories as conversations
To be an articulate brand and a strong storyteller, you need to be capable of sustaining stimulating conversations:
- Sustaining – because a story should be told in various formats over a range of timeframes. Your longest story for example should link to your strategy and your pursuit of your purpose. It will probably take place over years. Your shortest format – anecdotes – should be capsules in time that act as momentary proof. It could just a few words in a social post.
- Stimulating – because the story itself must engage others, from internal stakeholders through to customers and even investors. It must be relevant, it must be revealing, it must invite action and reaction. It must be consistent enough to always feel like your brand. But surprising enough to prompt curiosity.
- Conversations – a brand that speaks only for itself risks being a megaphone. But as Steve Ballantyne once quoted in a post, the potential of story is that it should create the shortest distance between two people. As the world pulls back from the death scroll, the challenge for every brand is to find, plan and tell stories through conversations that people lean into.
What’s the story?
Identifying and building out stories is hard work. You have to see the patterns and the tensions in data, features and commercial agendas. It requires reading the tea leaves of the research for what people think, feel and do when they come in contact with what you’re marketing.
To do that well, you need to see past what is obvious to others to find what your brand can lay claim to.
Ad agencies claim this as their territory, but to be an articulate company, it’s crucial to broaden that mandate. Stories become the responsibility of everyone, meaning everyone should ideally be able to frame what they are doing in storytelling terms.
Choosing the stories to tell
Actually, the term “brand story” in itself is deceptive because it implies one piece of narrative that acts as a central referencing point and that is slavishly copied from. An accomplished brand storyteller, however, treats that story as the basis and the reference point for a full range of interactions and exchanges – allocating specific channels to particular aspects of the story and then building those out into storytelling opportunities in their own right.
Apple, for example, has turned the free iOS operating system that powers its phones into a storyline in its own right. Equally, the launch of Apple Intelligence is treated as more than just a major feature. It has its own storytelling within the wider Apple world.
Knowing what to highlight and what to leave is the hallmark of an astute brand storyteller.
The crucial decision markers
In order to sustain and stimulate, Thomson Dawson talks about three principal brand storytelling drivers that should act as crucial decision markers for every brand looking to be articulate:
- Truly understand: Why are you telling this story? Stories need purpose – meaning marketers need to be clear about the reasons for them to choose to tell that particular story. To succeed, Thomas Dawson says, your story, and everything you do around it, in all its formats, needs to be based in resonance and relevance. It’s not a story if no-one cares.
- Method matters. Choose your channels carefully. Specifically – find and nurture the most meaningful places to share. Articulate brands focus on the storytelling environments for all the levels of their storytelling to ensure each forum is as receptive as possible to that articulation, at that time.
- Recognise when to tell brand stories. “Enlightened marketers now realise they must provide the venue for inviting customers to share their experiences and tell their stories.”
It’s not just about you
And that’s the other key to conversation: knowing that you’re not the only one telling your story anymore. Once customers provided validation, now they provide narrative. Their experience of your brand becomes everyone else’s opinion of your brand, or at least part of it. You can’t own the whole story anymore.
So, if everyone has a stake in your story, doesn’t that make crafting a story redundant? Far from it. Because if you don’t have a full sense of your story, you’ll never know where you should be. And if you wait and allow customers to write your story for you, then the story will never be yours.
You must own the direction of your brand story, how it develops, how it recovers, how it adapts … But strong brand storytellers and articulate companies also recognise that stories are increasingly responsive and kinetic – they are being rewritten, revised in response to the iterative demands and understandings of customers. Your different story forms are opportunities to adjust what customers believe, contribute and want to hear about next. From you.
Four questions for brand storytellers everywhere
- What’s the basis of your story? What are you driven to share?
- What’s the timeframe for that story? (And why that time?)
- Where will each part of your overall story be seen and experienced?
- How do others get involved? Is there a place for them that feels uplifting? Apple’s “Shot on an iPhone” campaign for example not only highlights what the camera on the phone can do, it invites customers to contribute stories of their own.
Come to our brand storytelling workshop
If you’re interested in building a more articulate company, Long Arc is our storytelling workshop. It’s an opportunity to appraise what your brand story is and the best ways for you to articulate it. More on how we can help here.
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Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash