Storied Brand-O-Rama, Part 1: Experts Offer Ways to Integrate Stories with Brands

In 5 Ways to Integrate Stories Into Your Social Media Marketing, Heidi Cohen offers 5 Story-Related Attributes for Content Marketing, 5 Story-Related Metrics to Determine Content Effectiveness, and 5 Ways to Integrate Stories Into Your Social Media Marketing, the last of which I found most resonant. Here are those five ways (see her full article for her elaboration of each way):

1. Determine trending topics to write about.
2. Source stories from customers and the public.
3. Incorporate a human-interest element into your content.
4. Provide stories that allow for interactions and additions.
5. Enables easy sharing quickly and broadly.

Writing that “one of the toughest challenges is telling stories about brands that are not only authentic but compelling and human. Sean Moffitt throws out an interesting challenge:

“Search high and low and if you scan 100 websites, you’d be challenged to find one good story about the company or brand it supports. … A good story should be there smack dab on the front page attracting you like a mosquito to the nightlight.” Moffitt characterizes the common threads found in great brand stories:

- They’re human — they avoid the PR and marketing jargon and articulate conversationally what they’re about
- They stand for something — half of the battle is not standing for everything and using words and phrases that don’t make people yawn or worse puke from their over-reaching and beigeness, that’s why big brands suffer in building them — they’re always worried what the other half thinks — get a spine and declare your mission
- They’re simple and clear — they pass the subway ad, I can draw a straight line between what you say you are and what I think you are
- They’re visual— if a picture is 1,000 words than maybe you can tell your story in 15 words with a picture
- They’re never fully told - great brand stories leave room to explore and discover and provide a bit of mystique or mystery
-They’re consistent with your experience — nothing hurts more than we’re the greenest company ion he world printed on non-recycled paper
- Unless otherwise justified, they don’t overpromise — in fact, some of the best ones are self-deprecating and don’t take themselves too seriously
- They are repeatable — they are memetic in nature and simple enough to be remembered and conveyed to others
- They are empathetic — they are as much about what you can do with the brand than what the brand stands for
- They root themselves in a cause or mission larger than themselves — they are so much more than the functional attributes of the product and vest people in a world view and mission that is impossible not to accept
(Tomorrow’s entry will feature, among other examples, the storied brands that Moffitt recognizes as successful.)

On Fast Company, Henrik Werdelin tells Why Defining Your Company Narrative and Creating a “Social Object” Is Important. Werdelin explains that the “social object” concept comes from GapingVoid, where it’s defined this way:
“The Social Object, in a nutshell … . Human beings are social animals. We like to socialize. But if [we] think about it, there needs to be a reason for it to happen in the first place. That reason, that “node” in the social network, is what we call the Social Object.”

Based on that idea, Werdelin suggests, “Human interaction is widely based on exchanging stories, so if you create a very good narrative of your company or product, it can become just such a social object. A good exercise is to spend some proper time making a good story about your business and try it on a few people. Then wait a few days and ask them to explain to you what your business is doing — and see if you like what you hear.”

Kathy Klotz-Guest asserts that ” every company should have a video storytelling strategy” and “video today allows for better, richer and more nuanced storytelling than with traditional media.” She adds that “Today, consumers don’t want to just view company content — they want to make their own. They want to be part of the story.”

On Game Changers (not totally sure who the specific author is), storytelling itself is perceived as having a branding problem: “And the art of storytelling won’t gain mainstream cred with MBA-educated managers and their brands until professional storytelling gets re-branded and re-positioned.” To fight negative perceptions about storytelling, the author says, storytellers need to:

• Shift the focus from “story” to “narrative.”
• Share the narrative.
• Move from scripted to improvised narratives.
• (Elaboration on each point in the full article.)

In Why Do Brand Stories Work? The Societal, Cultural and Physical Reasons Why, Stephen Denny draws from screenwriting guru Robert McKee, psychologist Norman Holland, and the late mythologist Joseph Campbell to answer this post’s titular question.

• From McKee comes this salient bit of wisdom: “When you tell a story, the whole gist is to admit the negative side, then dramatize the positive side of how the courageous little company overcame all the negatives.”
• From Holland, Denny cites “chemical changes in our brains when we’re under the influence of a compelling narrative” and “neurological evidence that our brains organize experience in narrative sequences.”
• Via Campbell, Denny explains how we become emotionally invested in stories: “”When the story is in your mind, then you see its relevance to something happening in your own life. It gives you perspective on what’s happening to you… “

Denny concludes that “Stories — the good, the bad and the inconceivably stupid — are the imperfections in our brands and our actions that make us believable, lovable and human.”

Melissa Campanelli echoes Denny’s last point when she writes, “the branding or advertising in an online storytelling campaign takes consumers through a narrative, and there’s a compelling emotion associated with it. It touches you in some way and illustrates a human aspect.” Talking to customers about their experiences with your brand will yield stories, Campanelli suggests.

According to astoriedcareer.com