Marketing Needs a Story to Tell
“People are able to wrap their minds and memories around a brand story better than brand features, functions, benefits, and facts. It can create significantly greater awareness and contribute to top-of-mind memory of a brand,” Bergman says. “This is an evolutionary trait from our ancestral times when knowledge, history, and tradition were handed down from generation to generation through the use of stories. Our minds process information in a story, seeking understanding, relatability, and a moral to the story. This increased level of processing helps a brand story to stick in the minds of people significantly more than a brand with no story.”
A comparison of marketing automation software illustrates the importance of connecting with customers based on company vision. “There are more than a dozen different [marketing automation] tools on the market, most of which offer 70 percent of the same functionality. Yet, their price points and customer communities are vastly different, as are their brand stories,” Stone says, citing MailChimp and Marketo as examples of companies that provide marketing automation technologies but tell vastly different stories. MailChimp provides simple email automation and has a playful element, which is conveyed through its logo and tone of voice. Marketo, by contrast, has a more serious tone, as conveyed by its name and product offerings. “One is not necessarily a better brand than the other—they simply have different go-to-market models, and their brand personas reflect that,” she continues.
Beyond creating connections with consumers, stories can also act on a subconscious level, Skinner adds. “If [the story is] remarkable somehow and repeated enough, [it] lodges somewhere in consumers’ brains and can act as an explicit reminder—an ear worm, an implicit association, or just some kind of primal urge,” he says. However, a business needs to ensure that the stories it tells are consistent with its overall brand identity.
Chatterjee agrees, adding that “the brand has to understand its core identity and essence.” Although a customer-driven approach can be valuable for determining the medium of communications, companies must preserve their core tenets. “There’s a bit of a philosophical divide between ‘who am I’ and ‘how do others perceive me’—I think a brand’s essence belongs in the former group,” he says.
Moreover, each story a company tells—both to its customers and its employees—should be a natural extension of its central narrative. “Hopefully the story springs right from the soul of the company, and thus it’s easy for everyone to understand it and rally around it,” Skinner explains. He offers the example of General Electric, a company whose narrative is structured around curiosity about how things work. “The CMO told me, ‘We just lean in to our natural geeky wonder about how things function,’” he says, adding that this curiosity is “an innate value in most of the company’s employees, and thus easy to adopt. Thereafter, of course, it takes work to tell the story well internally and externally.”
Although compelling stories can be challenging to develop, they are essential to brand success. “In the end, those that are successful storytellers increase trust with their audiences, improve loyalty, and pave the path toward more proactive advocacy within their targeted audiences,” Stone says.
BECOMING A STORYTELLER
Companies need to follow three steps to become effective storytellers, according to Chatterjee. First, they need to build a framework for their stories by means of introspection. Companies should revisit their creation stories and core values, using them as jumping-off points to determine the emotional connections they want to make with their customers. This step should be viewed as a way to create a “brand anthology,” according to Chatterjee, who notes that “different facets of a brand’s personality” might “speak to different audiences.”
Establishing the right tone is the second step to becoming an effective storyteller, according to Chatterjee. Citing the example of Apple, he notes that tone can evolve over time. The company’s Orwellian “1984” ad, which introduced the Apple Macintosh personal computer, was broadcast nationally on January 22, 1984, by CBS during Super Bowl XVIII and expressed an iconoclastic tone. Today, the company’s portrayal is more about sleek design and being hip.