Rule number one for successful branding: establish a widespread perception of your enterprise's value.
That's a constant--whether you make products or offer services; whether you manage a small or a large business, an association or a nonprofit. So your first impulse in developing promotional material to support your brand may be to craft a value proposition explaining in logical terms precisely why your offering is the most rational choice.
Fair enough. But don't get too carried away with heady "left-brain" argumentation, however intellectually dazzling. While it's true that your circle of prospects, customers, and would-be admirers may need some structured convincing, most are far more likely to listen up if they can first visualize and then relate to your activities, values, and customer successes. So it makes as much sense to bring them to terms with your brand through narratives anchored in concrete, real-world details.
That's a big reason why brand journalism and business storytelling deserves a place in your content management toolkit. So certainly frame your pitch with a logical value proposition, but also let your audience experience the concrete outcomes of this value in action through a case study, preferably illustrated, or even a less formal anecdote.
This format is a ready-made platform for demonstrating your track record and capabilities. If you frame an experience case in real-world terms that touch a chord of common interest in your potential customers, it's a good bet they'll respond to your brand on a level that plainspoken logic cannot immediately reach. And if your story prompts them to identify strongly with your wider circle of clients and customers, they're probably inclined to buy into what your brand promises.
Marketers have used this case study technique-and its near variant, the customer testimonial-- since the dawn of human commerce. This may not be your usual realm for tracking best practices, but a quick skim of full-page ads in the leading print business magazines-Bloomberg Business Week, Fortune, Forbes, Fast Company-should convince you that the glossy, high-end approach to the case study is still going strong among big services firms. Today IBM, Siemens, and Xerox, to name a few prominent players with the bucks to put these themes out there, all devote a good deal of their paid media space, both online and in print, to showcase their work on behalf of keystone clients or industries. And of course their respective websites, social media channels and collateral materials reinforce the same stories and themes.
You can adapt this approach for your enterprise using the technical means at your disposal, even if your budget is limited. It's as straightforward as highlighting client, customer or industry success stories in your email marketing, and on your website, Facebook page and even your YouTube channel, if you have one.
Need a blueprint for success stories? Here's a proven one.
If you're looking for a model that has worked well over the years, you can organize your own cases in three parts, by describing:
- The challenge that your customer or client faced. (It's critical to make your story about the customer.)
- The approach/product that your team applied to resolving this challenge.
- The concrete and positive results that your work has created for the customer ...or (after the big industry players cited above) for your industry, society or the planet as a whole.
Consider this boiled-down structure for a moment and you'll realize that it's a familiar story arc. Its progression--from initial difficulty, through a corrective process (or struggle), and on to clarity and a new beginning-is as akin, in form at least, to Jane Austen or Jaws or the Harry Potter saga as it is to the familiar narratives of how Apple revolutionized personal computing or how Starbucks or McDonalds changed food service forever.
Their universal appeal may lie in how these stories are told, as much as in their specific content, and this is likely why the approach is so prevalent in both culture and commerce. Call it narrative branding or business storytelling. Done well, it can draw the attention of your potential customers and constituents into the reassuring promise of shared experience, the essence of successful branding. At a deeper level, it seems to trigger some archetypal circuit of human responsiveness.
You can easily explore all this for yourself on your own enterprise's website and social media channels. You may find yourself inspired by how adaptable this strain of business storytelling is to your own marketing or promotional strategy. And now that you know what to look for, you may be surprised by how frequently examples of narrative branding crop up.
So why not put it to good use? It's worked since forever.
Image: Kheng Guan Toh/Shutterstock