A brand is as strong as its storytelling, and the business that it supports. Storytelling is how leaders effectively humanise strategy. By understanding brand storytelling as a whole – what it is, how it aligns with the business objectives and where you currently are in that storyline – leaders and marketers can get out in front of short-term communication objectives and better understand and control the whole story they need to tell.
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Executive brief
Q: What is the relationship between brand storytelling and business strategy?
Storytelling is how leadership shares goals, turning strategy into a narrative that people can believe in and act on.
Q: Why should CEOs and CMOs prioritise brand storytelling?
It brings strategy to life through emotion and meaning. When leadership defines and champions the story, every message reinforces strategic direction and builds trust.
Q: How does brand storytelling support brand strategy?
It ensures strategy is lived and shared, not just documented.
Q: What makes an effective brand story?
Alignment with business strategy, authenticity to the brand and interest for the audience.
Q: What types of brand stories work best?
We give 12 examples in this article, based around four themes: From the beginning; Something attained or transformed; An ongoing quest; and High emotions.
Q: How can leadership start improving brand storytelling?
Align brand narrative with strategic intent, use storytelling to maintain coherence across teams and touchpoints, and use it to guide decision-making and innovation. In managing how your brand executes on your storytelling strategy, we suggest you set four goals: distinctive presence; internal coherence; co-ordinated narratives; and flexibility to respond.
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The significant emphasis on data and “proof” these days should not distract decision-makers from the competitive advantages of strong storytelling. Data is largely an internal didactic. It informs, proves and quantifies decisions. But it doesn’t involve and incline stakeholders, markets and customers. It doesn’t shift the dial emotionally. Campaigns too are often ‘response bait’. They focus on short-term “performance” at the expense of building longer-term understanding and cultural salience.
Leaders that understand the power of brand storytelling can structure and express their goals and intentions in ways that take people with them. Released over time, strong, long stories “play out” in markets. They unfold, supported by products, services and innovations that make experiences stickier, richer and more distinctive. So while data proves performance, it’s storytelling that builds meaning, involvement and momentum.
Howard Schultz once said, “If you can’t tell your story, you can’t lead.” We’d take that further. “If you can’t champion, share and develop a distinctive story, you won’t have a brand worth leading over time.”
What is brand storytelling?
We define brand storytelling as the use of narrative techniques to bring a brand to life in the minds of customers. A brand strategy informs where a brand needs to go to deliver on its potential for the business. But the shifts in perception that dramatically change value equations come with changing what people understand about the brand. And that’s the role of storytelling.
Story provides sentiment. And sentiment changes inclination. The team at Emotive Brand capture this beautifully, as follows: “to lead, to differentiate, and to truly drive transformation, companies need to ask: What emotional state are we creating for our audience? … Emotion isn’t just a vibe. It’s a strategy. When teams align around the right emotional energy, they create the conditions for performance, clarity, and momentum.”
In their post, they coin an idea that we find powerful and pertinent for every leader: emotional acceleration. The ability to transform business by quickening the reaction of humans. When you move people towards what’s possible, you shift more than mindsets. You shift interest and buy-in.
Rich storytelling draw on 10 core elements to elevate the brand from just a product or service to the embodiment of an idea – expressed through a story. The goal is to bring the brand alive in the minds of the culture, investors, buyers, the media and more, so that it takes on value beyond its raw materials and functions. The best leaders know how to build emotional equity in their brand – and to generate and capture value by doing so.
“If you can’t tell a story, you can’t lead” – Howard Schultz
Understanding strategic storytelling
Every story needs a goal. In our model, we structure brand stories at five levels – ranging from the longest form to the shortest, each with its own role within the storytelling agenda. The effect is cumulative.
But to truly work, the strategic end goal must be clear. Only by knowing whether you want to put daylight between your brand and that of competitors, or whether you want to shift the affinity people have for what you offer, for example, can leaders measure and judge the contribution of storytelling to their business performance.
A key question for every CMO grappling with how to make storytelling meaningful to their peers is this: What could a story achieve that nothing else will deliver? Framed in this way, leaders come to understand brand storytelling as a unique strategic contributor rather than as just a creative plaything.
Strategic narrative and brand story
Unless the organisation and the brand are the same, strong business storytelling should align two lines of narrative that tend to remain silo-ed: the strategic narrative, which sets out, in narrative form, the intentions of the business and where your strategy is going; and the actual stories of your brand and how you intend to present those through campaigns and various media.
The secret to understanding brand storytelling is realising that stories provide the best ways to engage people. They are journeys that spike curiosity and partiality. When we hear a story, listeners instinctively “pick a side”. They want to know how things got to be the way they are, and where they’re heading. They’re looking for challenges and resolution. You need a story that works for them and also that is competitive in its own right.
This is how objectives become a narrative worth sharing.
Data alone doesn’t give you that arc. Content may well tell a story, but it tends to be more momentary. Brand storytelling animates the story of your brand’s history, character, struggles, triumphs and future. In doing that, it makes your brand relatable. And while many brand stories have common ‘chapters’, the stories themselves can vary greatly.
Four things a story must always be
It must be a story that aligns with your strategy.
As we’ve said, it has to be true to your brand.
It needs to amplify people’s reactions.
And it must be a story that adds to how others see you and value you because it confirms what they already believe.
Case in point: storytelling rebuilt the business for Lego
LEGO’s decision to become a storytelling company that sold toys, rather than the other way around, transformed their business model and completely changed how they generated and measured success.
Rebuilding their business model around a globally relevant, globally available “system of play” enabled them to inject new momentum, direction and energy into how they did business. LEGO bricks became the means for people of all ages and a diversity of interests to express themselves as never before. Instead of just being customers buying sets of bricks, buyers could become creators. They could build their own stories – or share in other stories with others.
The change in strategy became a change in story. And that new story not only redefined what the brand stood for, it literally changed the business case for growth and the relationship with customers. In choosing to re-understand what their brand could mean, LEGO rewrote not just the story they told, but what counted for success.
A whole new world of licensing opened up to them that attracted new audiences, lifted LEGO’s appeal, changed their fortunes and locked decision-making to purpose. As the company moved further and further into gaming and film, executives could ask: Does this advance the LEGO story of creativity, curiosity, and imagination? That narrative discipline became a crucial decision-making framework.
The big out-take for leaders here is how a clear narrative refocused the business strategy, re-engaged the culture and customers, added new meaning to the product and redefined success.
Finding the components for your brand story
One of the things we do in Long Arc, our brand storytelling workshop, is to look for the stories that people already know about you. These are part of your brand equity. If you are an established brand, the storytelling elements or pieces of story that you are using are contributing to how people see and relate to your brand.
Depending on your strategy, some must stay and others will be less important. Some may be distracting or unrelated to where the future of your brand lies. Audit and select.
Equally, you may have “moments” (past, current and projected) that you want to include or re-introduce into your narrative. These could be key things that have happened with the brand. They could be successes, changes of direction, new products, new markets, controversies, triumphs or collaborations. Again audit and select based on significance and interest. If you decide to keep some of these moments, then you will need to shape your brand storytelling around them.
Thirdly, look for the stories that haven’t been told, or told well, that shed new light on your brand.
By treating all these elements as contributors, you can establish how pieces of story and moments work with each other, and the cumulative impression they should be making to improve how people understand you as your brand storytelling unfolds. Here are 8 types of brand stories that you need to keep an eye on.
What does it take to tell a compelling story?
Make sure your story has the substance and the time to scale. Seth Godin explains that, “Great stories succeed because they are able to capture the imagination of large or important audiences.”
They do that, he says, by feeling true to the brand and by appealing to our senses. A strong story makes a promise but also leaves enough gaps for people to draw their own conclusions. Interestingly, stories start small and depend on contagion to gain momentum. And they can do that because they build on what people believe or are inclined to believe.
“The most effective stories match the world view of a tiny audience—and then that tiny audience spreads the story.” That’s how they get to capture large-scale imagination.
Just some of the stories you could tell
The story you choose to tell pivots on what is most compelling for audiences and most credible and competitive for your brand.
From the beginning
Your brand story might focus on chronology – on the emotive and literal journey you have taken to get to where you are.
It might focus on your founder, or your founding product.
Or your story could be based on commitments – how you came to believe what you believe now and where that will lead you.
These stories are powerful when you want your brand story to progress from one point to another.
Something attained or transformed
It could be a story of inspiration, or hard work, or discipline or innovation.
Or you may wish to tell a story based on reaching a goal that others thought impossible.
So it could be about a belief or a hunch or a mistake that led to a realisation.
Yours could be the story of a pioneer, or a laggard turned good.
Tell stories like these to reinforce the desirability and supremacy of your brand.
An ongoing quest
It could be about the formation of a community.
Perhaps it’s a story of protest, justice, persistence or triumph.
It could be a story where potential has yet to be realised.
Stories like these present your brand as a challenger and in pursuit of a noble goal.
High emotions
It could involve a battle with a brand enemy.
Or how you came to join forces with an unexpected ally.
It could be a story of love or refusal to compromise, of no money or too much money, leading to disaster and perhaps redemption.
These kinds of stories focus on people and relationships.
Further reading: Why linking strategy, culture and stories matters
Understanding brand storytelling strategically
Strong storytellers maintain “line of sight” strategically across their narratives. Their story pushes forward the brand strategy (which is in turn linked to the business strategy) and employees understand how their external storytelling aligns with purpose and their cultural DNA. None of this is happenstance. On the contrary, all of these elements are consciously aligned and leveraged, with teams under clear direction to maintain authenticity while keeping interest high.
In managing how your brand executes on your storytelling strategy, we suggest you set four goals:
- Distinctive presence: your storytelling should actively increase affinity and understanding of your brand. Measure this through brand tracking and long-term performance of your brands.
- Internal coherence: your people should have ownership of the story you are telling and its connection to what defines them as a culture. Measure this through engagement and how teams reference the story and purpose in decision making.
- Co-ordinated narratives: your stories coalesce around a core idea. Your storytelling presence feels bigger than it is. Measure this through awareness (including accuracy of awareness) as well as perceived market presence against actual spend.
- Flexibility to respond: astute storytelling means you retain control of where your brands can go through their stories. If possible, set out a set of circumstances where you would consider redirecting your story. Make sure all those involved with a brand are aware of this playbook. If you do need to pivot, monitor your Net Promoter Score as one way of checking if your story has held you steady.
How storytelling can go wrong
Stories need time, space and resources to run. A common mistake is that teams within an organisation want to change a story they are telling because they are bored and want to try something new before the story they have should have ended. There is plenty of evidence to show that, far from refreshing the brand in the minds of buyers, this leads to confusion and lower brand recognition. Equally, running too many stories causes fragmentation and dilutes impact, recognition and interest.
Stories are most powerful when they are shared – and that particularly applies to who has mandate over the story. Storytelling shouldn’t be functionally controlled. It should be a strategic asset that is executed on by experts, but it needs to be well understood and overseen by all leaders to achieve its potential. And that alignment needs to carry through to encouraging a storytelling culture. If teams don’t know the story or can’t retell the story, it simply won’t have the conscious presence it needs to be influential.
Storytelling needs to be accountable – because leaders need to be able to judge whether it’s working to the business’s advantage. Having a story is counter-productive if it’s the wrong story, or it’s not managed well or it doesn’t deliver to expectations.
Strong storytellers maintain “line of sight” strategically across their narratives.
Understanding how your brand storytelling aligns with your products and services
If your brand is closely tied to a range or ranges of products and services, and you have a release programme for how new iterations of these will reach market, you can also align these market releases with your projected story.
Gaming companies and the big film companies are masters at this. So are LEGO. Their products sit within what we call a ‘storyworld’ – an imagined universe that allows them to shuttle back and forth between the current, the history of how the story got to this point, and where the story s going next.
Product releases are slotted into the long story arc, enabling every new product or product improvement to be a reveal in its own right but also to sit within a context that is defined and cumulative.
Plotting the launch of your products and services against the trajectory of your overall story prevents what you sell being separated from what you tell. Instead, each acts as a proof point for the other.
Co-ordinating this can feel complex (especially for portfolios of brands) but it needn’t be. The key is to establish the long story arc first. Then look for opportunities across your organisation to inform and add value to where your brand storytelling is going.
Brand storytelling is a strategic leadership tool
The reason we talk about brand storytelling rather than just storytelling per se is that brand storytelling transcends the art of the tale. It is defined by and through what the brand values rather than just being a good story. Brand storytelling advances what the business wants to achieve through the brand. It is a story and a way of storytelling that only that brand, with that DNA, could tell.
In fact, the power of brand storytelling lies in how it helps key stakeholders re-value what your brand means to them.
But strong storytelling starts and ends with confident and involved decision-makers. The next chapter of your brand’s success depends on the story you tell as a leadership team, and how consistently you deliver on it as a culture.
We offer a range of ways for leader storytellers to explore where your brand story stands, and how to make it work harder for your strategy. Our Strategy in Motion session is an accelerated way for leaders to explore and identify the alignments between strategy, culture and story. Examine the connections between what your brand strategy requires, what motivates your people and the stories you are telling internally and externally to find where you have gaps to fill and better bridges to build.
Or, if you already have a range of stories in place, bring together authors and leaders from across the business and invest in our advanced brand storytelling workshop Long Arc to tighten how your storytelling works together, at every level, to advance your strategy. Please contact us to find out more.
Further reading: Why brand storytelling matters.
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Photo by KOBU Agency on Unsplash