Crafting Narratives: Why Telling Stories is your brand’s best Strategy.
I just finished facilitating and mentoring my 12th cohort of the “Brand Strategy and Storytelling” course with Hyper Island.
40 graduates will walk next Monday into their workplaces with a renewed sense of purpose about how to use storytelling to build epic brands.
As it usually happens, I’m left with a profound sense of nostalgia about the experience of dissecting and teaching the power of Mentor Storytelling to build strong brand strategies.
Brands don’t exist without stories.
This isn’t just a slogan or a mantra; the power of storytelling is firmly rooted in scientific understanding, drawing insights from various fields including psychology, neuroscience, and cognitive science.
The human experience is inherently storied. We actually make sense of our experiences by telling stories about them. And our stories help us to understand who we are and how we fit into the world.
Yuval Noah Harari’s profound insight into Homo sapiens as a “storytelling animal” resonates deeply in the world of brands, where narratives shape our understanding of products, companies, and the universe they inhabit.
Harari suggests that as storytelling beings, we perceive the world not in numbers or graphs but through narratives. These stories, filled with heroes and villains, conflicts and resolutions, hold the potential to swiftly and significantly transform behavior.
In the context of brand strategy, this insight unveils the immense influence that carefully crafted narratives can wield.
The Societal Impact of Storytelling
According to Roland Barthes, “narratives permeate every facet of our existence, from myth and legend to cinema, news, and everyday conversations. Narrative is international, transhistorical, transcultural — it’s an inherent part of our shared human experience”.
Liz Neeley, former executive director of Story Collider, underscores the significance of stories as tools for knitting together events, postulating causality, and resolving ambiguity. Every day, we craft personal narratives that shape our identities, guide our choices, resolve ambiguity, and identify heroes and villains. These stories are not only shared with others but serve as a source of confidence, clarity, and resilience for ourselves.
As Barbara Hardy notes,
“We dream in narrative, daydream in narrative, remember, anticipate, hope, despair, believe, doubt, plan, revise, criticize, construct, gossip, learn, hate, and love by narrative.”
Narrative psychology recognizes the centrality of stories in human conduct, offering a framework for understanding the “storied nature of human conduct.”
This field, pioneered by thinkers like Jerome Bruner, Dan P. McAdams, Sarbin, and Kitsuse, acknowledges the human propensity for storytelling and explores its implications for understanding the self.
Narrative psychologists argue that stories are vital to understanding ourselves and the world.
They are more than representations of reality; they are ways of constructing reality, connecting with others, and creating meaning in our lives.
Key Insights of Narrative Psychology:
Stories engage our emotions. When we hear a story, our brains release hormones such as dopamine and oxytocin, which create feelings of pleasure, empathy, and connection. This is why stories can be so powerful in moving us emotionally.
Stories help us make sense of the world. Stories provide us with a framework for understanding our experiences and the world around us. They help us to see patterns, make connections, and draw conclusions. This is why stories can be so helpful in times of uncertainty and change.
Stories inspire us to take action. Stories can motivate us to achieve our goals, overcome challenges, and make a difference in the world. They can also help us to develop new perspectives and see the world in new ways. This is why stories are so often used in marketing, advertising, and social change campaigns
The power of storytelling lies not only in crafting compelling narratives but in recognizing the profound impact they have on our beliefs, choices, and human experience.
If you are interested in developing strong brand storytelling first you need to identify, create, and implement a Brand Narrative:
1. Understand Your Brand:
- Explore and understand your founder’s story, including the motivation behind creating the brand. All strong brands have this crucial step well identified; for example, Patagonia (clean climbing), Nike (democratization of sports), and Apple (think differently). What your brand stands for and the principles guiding its actions can be found in every founder’s story, provided you know how to look for it.
- Craft a narrative around the inception of your brand, searching for the founder’s story that articulates your brand’s origins and the motivations for its creation. Look for anecdotes or pivotal moments that led to its establishment.
2. What is the Moral of Your Brand’s Story?
- Narratives are built around high-level principles, ideas, and concepts that help us make sense of the world around us. Your brand must have learned a lesson that it wants other people to learn. This lesson is called the moral of the story, and every story has one. For The Little Prince, “what’s important is invisible.” For Indiana Jones, “some treasures are better left untouched.” For Finding Nemo, “you have to let go for your kids to grow,” and for REI, the outdoors company, “it’s in the wild, untamed, and natural places that we find our best selves.”
- Write the moral of your brand’s story by looking at the life lessons learned by the founders of the brand that inspired them to create the business, products, or services.
2. Create a Brand Purpose:
- Inspired by the moral of your story, craft a concise and impactful purpose statement that articulates your brand’s mission and the positive impact it seeks to make.
- The purpose of your brand captures what you intend to achieve in the long term. It’s a forward vision of the desired impact it wishes to have in the future. It’s okay if you can’t achieve that goal just yet. Your purpose is your compass, guiding every decision you make in managing and building your brand.
3. Know Your Hero:
- The real hero in narrative branding is your audience. So, for your brand to fulfill its purpose, you need to understand your audience really well. What are their needs, aspirations, and pain points? Their desires, frustrations, secret wishes, and biggest fears. Remember that people negotiate hope, despair, belief, and doubt, not just happiness and aspirations.
- The best way to understand your hero this well is by creating psychographic descriptions of them. By understanding their values, beliefs, and attitudes, you can create brand narratives that align the hero and the brand on the same storytelling frequency, making it easier to synchronize attention and intention.
4. Engage in Storytelling:
- Identify the channels that best suit your storytelling style and craft stories that allow your hero to learn the moral of your brand’s story. For Apple, the narratives are about self-expression, creative possibilities, and technology as an enabler. For Nike, the narratives are about sacrifice, discipline, achievement, and inclusion. Commitments that are available to every human because every human is an athlete.
- Traditional marketing target descriptions add little value to narrative brand building. The real treasure lies in your understanding of your hero’s values and beliefs.
5. Iterate and Refine:
- Continuous Improvement: Regularly review and refine your brand narrative based on feedback, changing market dynamics, and evolving brand goals.
The 40+ graduates from our last cohort join over 600 alumni who have learned the power of Mentor storytelling to create epic brands.
The Real Hero is a brand strategy consultancy that combines storytelling expertise and global strategic thinking to create captivating brand narratives and build epic storytelling brands.
We believe in the transformative power of stories to create authentic, purpose-driven, and culture-shaping brands.
