Marketers often like to talk about brand storytelling and, for many, a marketing strategy isn’t complete unless the brand is telling a compelling story. Brand storytelling represents the complete narrative you create for your audience—beyond your individual commercials, print media or website banner ads. As The Story of Telling notes on their website, “It’s about building something that people care about and want to buy into. It’s about framing your scarcity and dictating your value.”
The concept of brand storytelling certainly isn’t new. In a Forbes article from 2013, Susan Gunelius points out that a big advance in brand storytelling started as more companies incorporated traditional elements of fiction writing into their campaigns.
“Today’s strongest marketing team will have room for new roles like the data architect and the brand creative content director,” says Gunelius. “While the former position focuses on all that big data has to offer, the latter focuses on increasing consumer emotional involvement in the brand through social media and content marketing stories as well as on weaving the brand storyline into offline brand experiences and marketing initiatives.”
We would add that increases in technology have strongly complemented these improvements in the art of storytelling. There are two key impacts of technology on brand storytelling. The first is the ability to move beyond “brochureware” to incorporate sight, sound, movement and interaction to engage consumers. Long gone are the days when these elements were confined to television commercials. Action-packed multimedia can reach consumers through their computers, via their phones, through in-store displays, etc.
The second key impact of technology on brand storytelling—closely related to the first—is the opportunity for two-way engagement with the audience. This represents both opportunities and challenges for marketers. The opportunities include the ability to make a greater impact with your messaging; the challenges are that others have the same opportunity, so marketers must be continually—and increasingly—looking for ways to break out from the clutter. Additionally, the ability for consumers to engage directly raises concerns about potential negative comments.
We believe, though, that the opportunities far outweigh the potential negatives, and many successful marketers are proving this to be the case. How are you leveraging technology to boost your brand’s storytelling power?
Recommended Reading:
The Everything Guide to Customer Engagement
Tags: Brand Management, brand storytelling, branding, video, visual communication, visual storytelling