At any given point in time, you are somewhere in the story of your brand. You may be starting out or on the cusp of huge change. Your brand may be continuing something you started years ago. There may be plenty to share right now. Or plenty to come in due course. Our brand storytelling workshop helps you co-ordinate not just what you share but why and when you share.
All brands tell a story – but some do so by default. Their campaigns or feeds become their story. If your brand has an iterative strategy, that may well be fine. Leave things as they are.
If however, you have a deliberate strategy or an emergent strategy, adding structure to your storytelling through this kind of workshop will enable you to:
- Apply strategic discipline to your storytelling by understanding how brand storytelling works
- Demonstrate value to the rest of the business
- Bring marketing into more conversations and
- Hold your contributors and agencies accountable to an enduring narrative.
Through our brand storytelling workshop, we set out to solve three questions:
- What are your intentions strategically?
- How do customers need to perceive you in order for that to happen?
- What story do you need to shift their perceptions – and how is that story best told?
Business narrative and brand storytelling
Your strategic narrative is an important story of course in terms of setting out your commercial journey. But it can (and probably should) be largely invisible to the market.
A brand storytelling workshop works from that narrative to help you find the story your brand needs to be telling in order for your business to succeed.
Our goal is to identify the story you need tell to engage customers so that your brand(s) can achieve your business objectives. It forms the basis for the work that your ad agency, digital marketing team, social media team and public relations people will generate.
The brand story you intend telling
The reason why we refer to this as a storytelling workshop (rather than a story creation workshop for example) is because most brands have to make three key decisions about their story.
The first is, which story to tell to support their strategy (because there are many options).
The second is, which audiences to engage in that storytelling.
The third is, how smaller pieces of story come together to feed the brand story you are telling.
The focus of your story
Different stories have different shapes, with each shape influencing how your brand will unfold for customers now and in the years ahead.
Most brands need a long story – an arcing narrative that takes in your history and projects forward to where your strategy tells you the brand is heading.
In this workshop, we work together to build the long form of your story. Once you have this narrative, decision makers and teams will have talking points that they can reference, internally and externally, and a context for a full range of other actions.
Smaller stories and sequences can then be fitted inside the overarching narrative – meaning everything you articulate is consistent with where you are heading and adds to customers’ understanding of the brand.
Deciding the shape of each brand story
In our brand storytelling workshop, we piece together the structure, span, twists and turns of the story that you will tell. And to do that, we might use the storytelling shapes of Kurt Vonnegut, the proven principles of Pixar or the simple structures of screenwriting legend Syd Field.
We evaluate stories two-dimensionally: those that move the overall story forward; and those that add depth or dimension.
Who should attend?
A brand storytelling workshop does not need a lot of people to participate. The key to success is stimulation, imagination and a willingness to start big and then fill in the detail. You might just want to have the brand team in the room. Or you may wish to as others to join you to provide a more rounded way of interpreting your strategy as a story.
There is no formula. Your story is yours – and our intention throughout is to make it ownable and specific to you while using storytelling elements that people recognise and relate to.
The goal is to create a brand story structure that maps out your narrative past and future, enables you to engage customers, complements your strategic intentions and sets the scenes for all the stories-within-the-story that you need to tell.
Through this workshop, internal teams essentially become the producers of their brand storytelling. They come to hold the story – which means they can confidently represent the story itself and its value to others internally, bring in other parties as contributors as they see fit and assign specialists to build out parts of the story to make them richer and more interesting.
They can also apply the story to other parts of the business. Or work with others to ensure that new releases, products and ideas are incorporated into the story streams.
That in turn makes the brand and your storytelling more relevant and more valuable to other parts of the business. And more coherent and inviting for your customers.
Brand storytelling workshop outcomes
This brand storytelling workshop is a powerful first step for organisations looking to become a more Articulate Company.
By aligning your storytelling with your strategy, you align your decision-making and direction-setting internally with how you engage stakeholders and customers.
And once your strategic narrative and your brand storytelling are in sync, they can stay that way: each adapting in response to cues from the other.
You can adapt your strategy to respond to favourable or unfavourable responses to your storytelling, for example, and vice versa.
As a result of this storytelling workshop, your brand storytelling will be:
- More cohesive and integrated
- More focused
- More aligned with your overall strategy
- More accessible (and therefore more valued) by teams within your organisation
- A blueprint for how you communicate through your brands long-term
More about Long Arc
Our brand storytelling workshop, Long Arc, is available as a one-day facilitated workshop in New Zealand or Australia. Or you can deep-dive over two days if you prefer.
To prepare, we undertake interviews and research to ensure we have a working understanding of your business strategy. And we ask participants to dig into your history so that we have access to pivotal moments and ideas in your development.
This workshop is best done in a room together so that we can storyboard progress on the day.
There’s something very effective about seeing a story come together this way. As it does so, you’ll gain an integrated understanding not only of the story you are telling, but why you are telling that story, and where to find the past, current and future elements of your story. With ownership established, you can then work with other parties with confidence to bring all your brand storytelling to life.
Next steps
If you’re interested in seeing where your story could take you, let’s talk about how our brand storytelling workshop could work for you. Please contact us to make a time to chat. From there, we’ll draft a proposal setting out how we would approach your Long Arc workshop.