What is brand storytelling?

Use brand stories to connect with your customers

Story telling isn’t limited to novels or tucking kids into bed at night. In this age of short attention spans and masses of information being available, it’s incredibly difficult to capture someone’s attention and even more difficult to be memorable and encourage someone to spend more time focusing on your brand and business. Writing a story and building an emotional connection with your customers is one of the most effective ways to build a long lasting relationship and ensure that your customers come back over and over again, and consider your business their first choice in all their needs. The following five steps help to create stories that make you memorable and appealing to customers. Writing a story and building an emotional connection with your customers is one of the most effective ways to build a long lasting relationship and ensure that your customers…

Brand storytelling examples showing how a successful brand story takes consumers on a hero’s journey

No one’s heart is wooed by product capabilities and financials alone. What you need is a good story — it’s the key to making your brand a living, breathing thing. Investors, employees, and consumers will rally around a story, and the best business leaders understand that storytelling has the power to change minds and spark action.

Take High Brew Coffee, for example. Its story could easily have been about its product: canned cold-brew coffee. But that’s not very original, and it certainly doesn’t capture the imagination. Instead, High Brew’s story is all about adventure — founder David Smith was inspired to start the business after enjoying cold-brew coffee during warm nights navigating the Caribbean on a sailboat with his family.

When investing in content marketing, it’s necessary to go beyond describing what…

Chart of the day: Neuroscience reveals that for long-term impact ads should appeal to emotion or make us laugh

In this example of neuromarketing, brain responses to over 200 TV ads were analysed. By looking at how the respondents' brains engaged in long-term memory encoding whilst watching the ads, Neuro-Insight were able to establish what makes for effective TV ads. Since short-term memory only lasts a few seconds and then is lost forever, if you manage to get your ad into someone's long-term memory they'll be able to recall it for years. That means it's critical that your ads are able to make an impact and become part of someone's long term memory. As the chart shows, information-based ads or discount-related ads make very little long-term impact on our brains. Opting for the 'hard sell' is clearly not effective. Humour stands out as the most effective…

Key lessons for brands emerge from the most anticipated ad of the holiday season

On initial viewing the John Lewis’ £7m Xmas 2016 commercial  tells a quaint story of a girl whose trampoline becomes popular with the local wildlife community.

Set against a backing track of Randy Crawford’s ‘One Day I’ll Fly Away’. The commercial features a Boxer dog in a typical Middle-England home. The dog enviously stares out of a living room window as it watches two wild foxes, a badger, a squirrel and a hedgehog liberally jumping on a trampoline built by the household’s father for his daughter. 

Come Christmas morning Buster (the Boxer dog) pushes aside a surprised Bridget (the daughter) to merrily jump on trampoline all for itself.

Given a tumultuous political year, John Lewis’s customer director Craig Inglis said:  

“You could say 2016 has certainly been quite a year.  We…

UK Fashion brands see opportunity in expanding into the US Market

US businesses have long eyed up opportunities in the buoyant UK retail market with brands typically establishing a presence in the UK as a launchpad into Europe. Now a large number of British retail brands are heading back in the opposite direction. In many cases, these ventures have met with considerable success. The upscale retailer Boden, for instance, expects US sales to overtake those of its home market within a few years. It’s very clear, however, when it comes to relocating a brand across the Atlantic, American and British audiences shouldn’t be approached as a homogenous group even though the language is shared. Consumers on both sides of the Atlantic will respond best to localised and personalised content strategies. Buzzfeed, for example, one of the web’s biggest and most influential content hubs, has editorial teams in both regions. They find that their…