The Impact of Storytelling on Customers’ Opinions of Your Brand

Consumers are wary of advertising ploys and traditional marketing tactics. While these tactics are still useful, the most successful brands are using them in collaboration with carefully crafted brand narratives. The story of a brand.

People have an innate desire to feel like they belong to something. Like they are a part of something bigger.

Developing a brand story that connects with consumers on a deeper level can help your brand create an emotional connection and achieve that sense of belonging, thus creating brand loyalists.

Seeing a product with pretty packaging and being bombarded with ads telling consumers why they need a product in their life doesn’t get your brand any closer to achieving this objective. The best brands understand this, and they’re doing something about it.

The Coca-Cola Content 2020 campaign

Coca-Cola is a prime example of a brand that understands the value of storytelling. Rather than producing expensive commercials that highlight specific features of the company’s product, they showcase product users that look a lot like their target audience actively enjoying the product in situations that model real-life.

The beverage giant understands that storytelling is at the center of all cultures, no matter where a person lives on Earth, and they leverage that to connect and expand globally. At least partially as a result of their storytelling, Coca-Cola has dominated the global market, holding a 44.9% share of the non-alcoholic beverages market in 2020 according to Statista.

Understanding and appealing to the wants and desires of its consumers through effective storytelling has placed Coca-Cola in a position that will make it difficult for any other brand to dethrone the company. Powerful storytelling, as can be seen throughout Coca-Cola's marketing, can create a strong position for a brand in consumers’ minds that gives the competition headaches.

Making boring fun again

While Coca-Cola’s products lend themselves to stories of living and enjoying life, what about brands that are decidedly more mundane?

Take General Electric (GE) for example. Years back, efforts to engage the company’s target audience were nothing short of a marketer’s worst nightmare. It was all about producing sheets of paper detailing boring product specifications and talking about things like appliances and engineering. How do you make that material exciting?

Fast forward a few years, and the GE brand has leveraged the power of storytelling to allow the company to reconnect with the public on a more engaging level and refresh its image. The content GE’s marketing teams now produce takes things like factory noise and supply chain management and makes them exciting. In a 2014 production, the company created a video that mixed together every day sounds from the production floor and turned them into an audio track titled “Drop Science.”

A video about shipping containers. Sounds exciting, right? Definitely not (not on the surface at least). GE, however, takes a topic that’s about as sleep-inducing as they come and makes it engaging. By dropping in music and applying some clever video editing and effects, GE’s marketing team produced a video that made supply chain and shipping logistics seem trendy and hip.

Telling a brand’s story in a way that, no matter how boring the topic, makes things exciting and engaging can help in a number of ways. First, it puts the GE brand back in the public’s mind as an innovator. Second, it really helps with recruiting. GE has used storytelling as a way of recruiting the top engineers, information technology specialists, supply chain experts, marketers and countless others.

GE even pokes fun at their own branding issues. Issues which a new focus on storytelling is actively helping to fix. Through storytelling, GE is able to change public opinion and bring in top talent by creating a narrative that makes working for the company seem exciting and cutting edge. A far cry from the public’s opinion in previous years.

So how does it work?

Storytelling isn’t as simple as gathering around a conference table (or a campfire) and spouting off a few quick tales. Like any marketing tactic, successful storytelling requires significant amounts of planning and strategy.

Developing a backstory

The first step is for a company to really understand its brand. Most companies develop mission and vision statements, but not many of them truly live them. It’s critical for a company to not only create these, but to ensure that they embody the actual goals, values and objectives of the company. This is the first building block of any great story.

All of the greatest characters in literary history have a backstory. They have aspirations and things that motivate them to do what they do. Dorian Gray was motivated by vanity and selfishness. Frodo Baggins was a reluctant hero who wished only for a peaceful, uneventful life but was thrust into an adventure against his will. Odysseus, it seems, was motivated dually by his love for his family and the desire to be a hero.

Just like these characters, a company needs to determine what its brand stands for and the direction it plans to head in the future. This will help drive the story.

Understanding the audience

It’s also critical that a company determines what its brand means to its target audience. A company’s intuitive guess at the public’s opinion isn’t always right. In fact, it can often be significantly far from the truth.

To create a meaningful brand narrative, a company needs to fully understand the needs and desires of its target audience. Connecting those needs and desires to the brand in a meaningful way can create a powerful platform from which to tell the brand’s story and have it resonate in a deeper way. It creates a lasting, emotional bond that makes the consumer a true brand advocate. With the power of media channels such as social media, it becomes easier for that consumer to share their connection to the brand in a public forum. The viral effect of consumer advocacy for a brand and its story becomes far more powerful than any advertising campaign.

Surveys, focus groups and other types of primary and secondary research can really help a company dig deep and develop an understanding of what makes its target audience members tick. What are their hopes and dreams? How does a product or service appeal to their values and objectives? Where is the company’s mission in line with that of its consumers?

Companies find the answers to all of these questions and more by simply asking. The knowledge that’s obtained about a target audience can help develop a narrative that truly resonates and leads to brand loyalty, increased revenue and continued organizational success.

The right content mix

Following the first two steps properly is critical in determining the best content mix to most effectively tell a brand’s tale. Videos are the hot thing right now, but are they right for every company? Is a blog necessary, or would it be a wasted effort? What does the target market really want to see and how best can they be reached?

The answer to the above questions varies for each company, but one answer that works across the board is ‘variety’. After all, it’s the spice of life, right? While a particular target audience may have lots in common, they’ll also have lots of different habits and preferences as well. Some members of the target audience will enjoy watching videos, while others want to read a two thousand-word article. Still others seek an infographic that dumbs down and graphically presents the info in an easily consumable format.

For this reason, it’s critical that companies create a variety of content on a variety of platforms. The device the content is being consumed on should be considered as well. Mobile needs to be a focus. Do people want to view your content on a computer, or would they prefer an app on their smartphone? There are approximately 3.8 billion smartphone users worldwide, with that number expected to more than double in the next five year. Companies that don’t take that and other digital media consumption habits into account when developing their content mix are foolish.

Understanding the types of content people enjoy and their consumption preferences is critical when developing the right content mix. Knowing the audience can help bring these things to light. Tools like Google analytics, which help you understand the breakdown of your target audiences across device types can be enormously helpful. And SEO tools like SEMrush can help you dive deeper into the performance of your content to make improves that help you connect more effectively with your audience.

From understanding our brand and selecting the right content mix to developing a consistent brand message and staying dedicated for the long haul, storytelling is a complicated yet highly valuable practice for brands. Brands that don’t act to create an effective brand narrative are playing with borrowed time.

Success hinges on companies’ ability to generate genuine relationships with their target market and create a brand story that generates awareness and inspires loyalty.?

About the Author

Anthony is the Founder of?Anthony Gaenzle Marketing?and author of?Blogging for Business: Skyrocket Your Traffic, Grow Your Readership, and Boost Revenue?as well as?The Business of Branding You: Invest in Your Personal Brand, Grow Your Career, and Gain Influence. Beyond running the publication, Anthony works with small businesses, startups, and creative minds to help you grow. Throughout his 15+ years in the marketing and multimedia fields, he has worked with companies across a wide variety of industries and disciplines, achieving significant growth in brand awareness, lead generation, revenue and other critical areas. He also helps?individuals build influence and thought leadership through powerful personal branding.?Follow Anthony on?Twitter?or connect on?LinkedIn.