Who's Telling Your Brand Story?

While "traditional" media relations and PR are still vital to help a company reach its growth potential, the storytelling revolution continues and strong, progressive brands must compellingly tell their own stories - continuously.

For those of us with deep experience in corporate brand public relations, we can remember the days when the big newspaper hit or magazine score was cause for popping a cork on a champagne bottle. The avenues to tell your brand story were controlled by a small and powerful group of large publications.

For years now, that has changed, and the art of corporate storytelling is key to long term public relations success for brands big and small.

The growth of social media as a way for consumers and businesses alike to get their news and information, has changed the mindset of marketers and communicators the world over. There has long been the ability to go around the middle man (the media) and communicate directly with your audience. Yet many brands find themselves early in this journey and that's OK.

What does it mean to become a powerful brand that has storyteller skills?

First, storytelling sets forth three key questions your brand must answer:

1. What is your voice?
2. What does your brand stand for? What is its purpose?
3. and Why it matters to people

Often, many mistake storytelling for prose or other content telling a story about your company or product. Yet that is a fallacy. Storytelling for a brand is about emotions, experiences, needs - the written and unwritten meaning of images, etc.

It's not hard to think of brands who do this well. They leverage the hooks of emotional need and experience to weave their company or product into the story - where the value to the consumer is obvious and a value proposition created. Brands like Apple, Nike, and Dove have done this very well.

Brand stories are increasingly evolving and spontaneous. They often change based on community needs, cultural phenomena, or larger events. Brands have to be agile and able to move around these things strategically to weave their story into these events or cultural norms.

Just like the bedtime stories we heard as kids, brand stories have three acts. They need to inform, inspire, and motivate.

Does yours measure up?

Scott Gulbransen is an accomplished social media, public relations, and digital marketing pro and thought leader. He has managed and led public relations, social media and digital marketing at brands like Intuit, Applebee’s and H&R Block. In 2014, Gulbransen was named Global Head of Digital Content at Haymon Boxing, creators of the Premier Boxing Champions series. In two short years, he helped build the most digitally advanced team in the history of the sport. Gulbransen now is owner/partner in Classic Rock Coffee Co. in Las Vegas, and also serves as the State Director of Communications for AARP Nevada. Gulbransen resides in his adopted hometown of Las Vegas. #BattleBorn