Brand Strategy and Storytelling

Brand strategy is an all-encompassing, long-term framework that defines how a company positions itself versus competitors and with its target audiences. It accounts for things like purpose, audience, differentiation, and identity. The brand strategy provides a road map for how the company will earn attention, trust, and loyalty. It can also involve defining the relationships among company, product, and other sub-brands. Storytelling brings that strategy to life in ways that resonate with your audience. It involves using narrative to build emotional connections and reinforce positioning.

This is where storytelling starts. Think of the brand narrative as an overarching story that encapsulates your company’s purpose and informs all aspects of how you’ll communicate and emotionally connect with audiences — internally and externally — across all touchpoints.

This is a big question that deserves a long answer. To keep it from being overwhelming, start by thinking about your brand platform as having three key elements:

1) brand foundation — what you stand for and what it means to audiences;

2) brand expression — how you will show up consistently (identity, color, imagery, etc.); and

3) brand experience — where you will show up.  

Great storytelling builds emotional connections, trust, and recognition with audiences, which in turn help attract and convert audiences more effectively across channels. As AI automates buyers’ supplier research, effective brand storytelling is becoming increasingly important, helping to create that gut instinct buyers feel toward your brand that they will ultimately apply subconsciously when making complex B2B decisions.

Stories are more memorable than facts. They help customers connect emotionally with your brand, increasing engagement and loyalty. And format matters. Research shows that audiences retain up to 95% of a message when delivered via video (as compared to only 10% for stories delivered via text).