A Worthy Investment in Profound Human Stories
To be successful storytellers, brands have to come by their storytelling honestly; approaching it strategically and authentically.
“Brand stories are not marketing materials,” said writer Susan Gunelias in an article for Forbes magazine. “They are not ads, and they are not sales pitches. Brand stories should be told with the brand persona and the writer’s personality at center stage. Boring stories won’t attract and retain readers, but stories brimming with personality can.”
The catch is, brand storytelling is hard.
It’s a challenge to take a complex, multidimensional entity like a brand and distill it down into a cohesive story—even harder when you’re trying to accomplish this unbiasedly from the inside out. As a result, while most businesses understand brand storytelling is something they need to engage in, few do it well.
At the end of the day, companies who take the "tell, don't sell" mantra seriously will always be successful in forging an emotional connection with consumers.
Brand storytelling, the skilled craft of using a brand as a vehicle to tell a profound human story, isn’t a side project for a business’s marketing department to dabble in. It is an investment of a company’s time, focus, trust, and budget, best bestowed upon professional storytellers who understand the difference between an ad and a story.
Why?
Because stories are the communal currency of humanity, and they’re how humans think.
