THE F’ART OF STORYTELLING

Storytelling for brands. was an age old phenomenon. Most big brands told a compelling story, a story with high points and lows. A story with love, hate, climax etc. etc. and eventually a happy ending. Like any good story even in a brand's story there were many characters. The hero the villain and very importantly the supporting cast.Be it a Nike, Starbucks or Amazon they all had a good story to tell. Where like those apocalypse movies where the general public around who the world is revolving is in deep shit and then some big scientist from US finds the unthinkable solution and saves the planet, with brands it's no different just that in this case its for real.

Brands like NIKE or STARBUCKS spends years understanding customer need gaps, constantly innovate and build products which come as a ‘Solution’ to a problem which in turn makes the customer the centre of the universe and the brand becomes the knight in the shining armour. The process is not the other way around. Where the hero comes first and starts telling a great story, without any real background work.

But in real life lot of marketers and clients want the story first. And then fit the customer into it at their own convenience. Interestingly sometime back a client spoke to us about a new product/brand he planned to launch and asked us to write a brand/product story. On asking him a couple of questions it was very evident that he was not interested in what the story was as long as it was good enough for him to engage the customer. There was no intent to sync the internal team to the brand story at any level. The need was clearly to get some PR eyeballs above all. Thats where a fictional brand story falls flat it can fool the customer, maybe ones or twice but not beyond that. Customer soon realises that he's actually not a part of the story, he's not a character in the whole story. He's only a lead someone is trying to close.

A good brand story is the one where all the characters - the Brand, the Founders, the Team, the Vendors, the Distribution Channels, the Retailer and extremely importantly the Customer all of them are in sync. The sequence of appearance can be much different as per the narrative but the entire cast is extremely critical and aware of the individual roles being played by the others.

Each function is critical and marketing and design should always be at the centre of the storytelling process. Said that it's critical to understand their job is to walk through the history of the brand, talk to the core team and understand the vision, go back and forth with other departments/functions to understand what they think of the brand, they also need to gather insights from the customer and make sure that the brand is solving a real problem in their life. And after gathering all the insights from all the stakeholders the marketeer writes the story of the brand. Parts of it could be fiction but in totality it's not a pure fiction specially the promises made to the customer.

If someone asks you to write a brands story in isolation be sure he's doing a con job and he's trying to make you a fellow con artist.