The Power of Brand Storytelling
26 January, 2016 Reading: 1:59 min
Brand storytelling encompasses a whole range of ideas. It’s about building a personality, becoming approachable to customers, and developing an emotional attachment to a product.
Marketing Week explained it very well by stating that brand storytelling is ‘providing consistent and compelling content to build a picture of the company.’
Building a picture of a brand is important for many reasons.
First of all, brands need audiences to have an emotional connection. Having this can help many different aspects of a company, and one area that has truly highlighted this is social media.
The way brands talk to us over social is far more colloquial and engaging these days as they want a reaction – we don’t just watch anymore, we engage. Furthermore, when it comes to social media, users want to share content that will highlight certain aspects of their personality and values. Therefore brands that share their values, and not just their products, will see a major increase in engagement.
Below is a video from something that caught our eye a couple of months ago. This Bell's advert is a fantastic example of storytelling. It encompasses everything you want: an engaging, inspiring, unique and shareable storyline. It's not necessarily just the content of the story that makes the advert great. It also accomplishes good brand storytelling with the whole look and feel of the advert - the slightly off-colour picture with a simple soundtrack, for example, exudes a sense of timelessness and humbleness.
Taking this Bell’s advert as an example, the short film suddenly gives the alcoholic drink a greater meaning, providing consumers a reason to believe that this is 'Extra Special Scotch'. The bottle of Bell's now represents the brand values that are portrayed in the advert: perseverance, loyalty and celebration.
Below is another great example of brand storytelling. Beats, with a series of adverts, have managed to build this image of being the headphones that are used by the worlds top athletes to focus and get battle ready. In each advert the headphones seem to be a tool to block out the world and head to your personal space - a message that resonates with everyone around the world, not just first class athletes.
This advert follows the story of Richie McCaw, the Captain of the World Champions, New Zealand.