Until two decades ago, the business world was product and brand-centric. Today, you’ll only thrive if you develop authenticity, emotions, and customer-centric marketing around your brand. Modern customers are no longer convinced by conventional branding and promotions. Instead, the best current marketing campaigns are built around engaging stories.
Humans are hardwired to be attracted to stories. So, even in business promotion, your target customers are more inclined to connect and relate with an emotional, authentic story than your product. Approximately 70% of customers perceive trusting a brand as more significant than in the past.
Nevertheless, every business has a story to tell. Whether it’s how you started the company, how you turned your passion into profits, or why you decided to enter the industry, you’ll always have exciting narratives. However, creating a powerful brand narrative can be daunting, but don’t worry! Let’s show you how you can create a robust narrative around your brand.
Why You Need a Company Narrative
The current business world is not all about advertising. Your customers, employees, and other stakeholders need something concrete to associate with your business. So, to make a lasting impact in the market, you need to develop a company narrative that describes your business.
Connect With Customers
Customers are no longer interested in the product; they look beyond the price tag and reasonable offers. They want to buy from a business they believe connects with their stories. They want to connect with a business that background story and ethos appeal to their sense of self and the need for a particular product.
By developing your narrative in marketing, you build connections with consumers who relate to your brand, creating unforgettable memories. The narrative allows people to pay more attention to your marketing message. People spend more time on brands when products are attached to a narrative. Creating a powerful narrative strengthens your connection with customers.
Deliver Company Value
The current world of businesses gives you only two choices to survive in the stiff market; you either lower your prices or deliver value. Unfortunately, attracting and retaining customers with price deals can be slippery. There’ll always be someone else selling the products at a lower price.
However, consumers may care less about comparing prices when you provide value. Your value is the experience you give your customers when they interact with your brand. A strong company narrative tells customers what emotional appeals they get when they buy from you.
Take Your Brand Close to Consumers
Most organizations keep their production and branding activities behind closed doors. As a result, customers only get to see your finished products. But do you know your customers are curious about how you make your products?
Consumers want to understand everything before buying your products. A company narrative allows you to give your customers a critical insight into activities behind the scene. The narrative improves customer satisfaction and builds their trust in your product. Around 81% of customers prefer purchasing from a trustworthy brand.
Consequently, customers can tell your story to others. Many successful organizations have realized that when they allow customers to tell their stories, other potential customers trust their brand more than when the company tells its story. This takes the brand and product closer to customers.
How It’s a Business Tool
People’s purchasing decision is highly determined by the personality you have cultivated for your brand and how the customer relates to the values you embody. We’re not disputing the element of the product itself or the service you offer. However, the significance of the brand-consumer relationship has never been more powerful.
Your brand narrative is a robust strategic business tool that tells your story and significantly affects how customers feel about your brand. Creating a company narrative allows you to deploy your business creativity and deliver content more engagingly to your customers. As a result, customers learn essential aspects of your business values, ethos, and objectives through the narrative.
Narratives have a place in every community. Today, narratives and storytelling are at the core of social interactions, social media, and content creation. Your brand narrative is your tool for reaching all these people who rely on storytelling.
How to Create a Brand Narrative
Just because you’ve created content about your business doesn’t mean your narrative is engaging. Unfortunately, many companies trying to develop stories are trapped in quantity instead of focusing on quality.
As a result, in 2019, only about 52% of marketers effectively utilized their narrative in marketing. Yet, creating a compelling story is key to success. For instance, a character-driven narrative by a charity group caused people to donate 56% more to the program. Here is how you can create a powerful brand narrative.
Analyze Your Why
When creating your company narrative, start with the why behind your business activities. You must consider the following:
- Why are you operational?
- How do you contribute to the world?
- What values do you have?
- What is your mission?
These questions help you tell about the narrative behind your brand’s existence and objectives.
Consider Your Target Audience
The basic principle for marketing is understanding your target audience. You can only craft your story once you know the people you serve.
Analyze your customers based on desires, preferences, aspirations, lifestyles and fears. Customer profiles and social networks can help you vet them effectively. Then align your story in a way it captures all positive things they relate with.
Understand Your Product
Crafting your brand story isn’t enough. You must understand where the product fits in the narrative. A brand story that doesn’t include the product can be misguiding and confusing.
A lack of awareness of the product is a significant error many companies make when creating their narratives. Constant product change is a cause of this confusion. For instance, if you have changed some ingredients or done away with a production step but failed to account for the changes in your story, you can be up for problems. If you’re in such a situation, consider Chipotle’s Back to the Start commercials as a starting point.
Tell How Your Brand is of Help
Nothing convinces a consumer more than understanding how a product has helped others. Remember, your primary objective is to fill a gap or solve a problem consumers experience. So, include a narrative of how the product or brand will help customers, including how it has benefited others who use it.
Analyze Your Ideas
It’s common to be carried away by your creative ideas. Still, if the story doesn’t portray authenticity and emotional appeal to the audience, it won’t help your brand.
For this, vet your ideas and ensure they cover the following:
- Why do you want to tell your story?
- What’s your unique angle?
- What value will the story add to consumers?
- What will they learn from your story?
How to Create a Narrative through People
Neural coupling is a narrative that revolves around people and allows people to experience and synchronize their minds with the subject of the story. In the neural coupling process, you share a story your audience shares and allow them to relate to your brand. But how do you create your narrative through people?
Create a Personality Around Your Narrative
Susan Gunelius suggest that your brand story should have a brand persona and your personality at the core. Narratives brimming with persona can attract and retain the audience.
Keep Your Brand Story Simple
No one wants to read your brand’s formation. Therefore, keeping your critical details straightforward fosters easier understanding. Still, when you include so many details, the audience may lose momentum in the middle, missing the critical part.
Use the Story to Connect to Customers
Your customers want to see how they impact your brand. Your goal is to create a connection between your brand and customers. When you tell your story in a way that tells your customers their significance in the company, they can relate more to your brand.
