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  Telling a great brand story is the secret most iconic companies like Apple Inc, Meta, Coca-Cola, Nike, Louis Vuitton, and many others employ to stay ahead of their competitors and rake in more revenue. A brand story is when you effectively tell your audience what your company is all about (why it exists), what business model you operate, what your mission and vision are, and how your product or service is a plus to mankind. The big secret is that consumers love to buy stories. From ads to products, companies are selling an idea. Appealing ideas attract customers. 
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According to Niel Patel: “Stories are a powerful tool in human communication. Research shows that the human brain responds to the descriptive power of stories in deeply affecting ways, influencing both the sensory and motor cortex.”  To read a story is to feel an experience and to harmonize our minds with the subject of the story. In this article, I discuss how companies, whether great or small, can tell brand stories that increase sales.
  • Your Brand Story Needs Personality
This simply means that your brand story needs to come alive. To best capture what it means to have a brand with a personality, Susan Gunelius started that: “Brand stories are not marketing materials. They are not ads, and they are not sales pitches. Brand stories should be told with the brand persona and the writer’s personality at the center stage. Boring stories won’t attract and retain readers, but stories brimming with personality can.” This means, your story should be about real people with identity, personality, and status. Your brand story should be able to relate to a group. For instance, if your company produces detergents, your brand story should be about helping mothers to do their laundry with ease with the best cleaning agents out there. Another example is if your company is a food condiment producer, your brand story should center on nourishing the everyday family – the ordinary family out there – with nutritious and healthy food sauces. Just like Niel Patel perfectly puts it: “People trust other people. The core reason why your story should be personality-driven is so that it will provide someone real for customers to trust.”
  • Keep Your Brand Story Simple
Keep your story as simple as possible. No matter the origin of your company, its vision or mission, and even if they take up a thousand words to express, it is efficient to keep your brand story simple. Your brand story should follow this straightforward pattern:
  • Problem
  • Solution
  • Success
With these above-mentioned patterns, you can segment your brand story into Beginning, Middle, and End. Let me explain further. Every story needs to have a beginning, a middle, and an end to make sense. Every story follows a natural progression. 
  • Beginning: Problem: Explain the problem that you set out to solve.
  • Middle: Solution: Describe how your product/service is the solution to the problem.
  • End: Success: Get thrilled about the success this produced.
With this progression, you easily get the attention of people from start to end. However, do not make your audience think that the ending part of your story is like the end of the road, rather let them feel that it is the beginning of a new adventure. When your stories are simple, people believe in them, especially when they are told with clarity and assurance.
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  • Focus on Why Your Brand Exists
The biggest question every brand must ask themselves is: “Why does my business exist?” Your answer should be a story. Many brands make the mistake of thinking that their brands exist “to make money”, but are far too short-sighted. Making money as a business is legitimate and crucial, however, having a larger-than-life reason for existing will keep your company in business for a long time to come and will certainly give a story to tell. Let me tell you a short brand story about one of the leading footwear companies in the world – TOMS. A brand like TOMS shoes uses its story as a bedrock for its existence. The tagline, “One for one,” means that for every purchased pair TOMS gives a pair of shoes to someone who is without shoes as a result of poverty. The simple logic behind TOMS’s story is that it exists to improve lives. The story behind TOMS’s tagline is that its founder visited Argentina and found thousands of improvised children running around barefooted. Tell the world why you started your company and watch them turn out for you.
  • Use Your Story to Connect with Your Customers
The goal of brand storytelling is not to speak well of your company or product, rather it is about constructing a story that connects with your customers, it is about telling a story that addresses their pain points and inspires them all the way. Tell your story in such a way that it tells your customers “we relate to you, we understand you, we are like you.” For instance, Nike’s tagline, “Just Do It” is a classical example. The tagline means so many things to so many people. But at a simpler look, the message behind the tagline is “is a call to action, to motion, to activity, or a motivation to take no prisoners”. The “Just Do It” campaign allowed Nike to further increase its share of the North American domestic sport-shoe business from 18% to 43%, (from $877 million to $9.2 billion in worldwide sales) from 1988 to 1998. A Final Word To make your brand story sell, you must tell it on every corner of the street, on the highways, on every social media platform, on the TV screens of people’s homes, and even employ the service of brand evangelists, who will tell others to tell others. Featured image source: Column Five
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This article was first published on 16th March 2022

nnaemeka-emmanuel

Nnaemeka is an academic scholar with a degree in History and International Studies from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. He is also a creative writer, content creator, storyteller, and social analyst.

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