Make sure your brand story has these 3 elements in 2022

The heart-stopping power of storytelling

When businesses use digital storytelling, they’re doing it for a solid business reason: it works.?

But what makes storytelling work is something deeply connected to the human experience itself. It’s the unique ability for brand storytelling to weave together complex narratives with emotional reactions that makes it so effective.

Letting the customer embrace your brand values

When you use storytelling for your brand, you’re allowing the customer to get more intimately connected with your brand values. If these values align with their own, then the results are spectacular; the customer will embrace your brand like an old friend? - because they recognize your values as their own.

‘Getting emotional’ is always a risk though, especially in business. For this reason, corporate storytelling requires a degree of both restraint and finesse.

Moreover, it always needs at least one of these three essential elements: Compassion, Hope, and Love.?

Each digital story should include some of these three elements to make sure you’re telling a story that has the right impact - and ultimately - to deliver value to business.

Compassion

Defined in the simplest of terms, compassion happens when one human being sees another who is struggling and offers help or comfort. It can also be self-directed, in the case of someone recognizing they need to take better care of themselves for example, but the strongest effect on an audience is triggered by the ‘binary’ arrangement of one person helping another.

In practical terms, this can be a story that shows how your brand feels empathy and acts compassionately to help. A story that shows compassion will have a double-effect. When the audience experiences this kind of story, they actually project themselves into both roles, ‘the helper’ and ‘the person being helped’. As a result, they feel good about themselves (and your brand) from both sides of the exchange.

Human brains love compassion, because this is a fundamental behavior for allowing humans to form a community. Our brains recognize the behavior and praise it with a rush of neurotransmitters, creating a warm, fuzzy feeling that then becomes associated with your brand.

Hope

This is one of the oldest elements of any story, and it helps drive most plot-lines. It’s also entirely positive, although it’s possible to accidentally mix this with more negative emotions. Every good story includes some kind of hope, even if it’s just ‘hoping the bad guy gets what’s coming to them’, however it’s better to keep it clear and unmixed with negative ideas. You can certainly frame a ‘success over adversity’ story with one of hope – and you should. There’s a negative side to this (the adversity part), but that’s OK, so long as the main story is about hope.

Hope is what keeps us going from one day to the next, and without it there’s no forward motion to your brand story. Giving a message of hope can show the customer that your brand is a part of a better future – specifically a better future for them.

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Love

Human beings are capable of many kinds of love, and romantic love is barely the tip of the iceberg. Your brand’s ‘love story’ isn’t all red roses and chocolate boxes; it’s about positive attachment and enjoyment in the purest sense.

A ‘love for running’ or a ‘love for innovation’ are both storylines that will get certain groups of people to prick their ears and pay attention, because we love to share our love – it’s a way we connect to ‘people like us’.??

The trick is to identify what common love exists between your brand and your customer.?

This can also become a useful exercise in customer-centricity, because it will really highlight if your company is focusing on what the customer really loves.

There’s actually a lot of scope for how to include this element in your story, and you can clearly connect it to the two other elements above.

Love can definitely be an attachment between two people, and once again you can trigger those warm fuzzy feelings by showing two friends laughing, for example – but connect this to your brand as the causal agent.

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And avoid these, to keep it clean

Keep the emotional storyline clear and simple, and don’t mix it with negative emotions.

Negative emotions like Fear, Anger, and Revulsion need to be avoided and kept as small as possible. They certainly shouldn’t take over the framing for your whole story.

There are some gray areas too; ‘Justice’ is an appealing basis for a story, but it has equal amounts of positive and negative – the effect is net zero, unless the main story is about hope.

The human brain simply has a limited capacity for negative emotions before we shut them off and stop listening. Rewards are more effective than punishment; so you want to make sure that your story focuses on emotions that are rewarding to feel.

In the end a positive message will always win through, capture our hearts and form lasting memories. As long as your brand is able to communicate how you are helping people to experience Love, Compassion or Hope, your story will be highly effective.