Storytelling: Using Narrative to Build your Brand

When it comes to building a successful brand, there’s a lot more to consider than just logos and color selection. Building a brand means telling stories that accurately communicate your identity to customers – and while that story includes elements of color and design choices, it also needs to include narratives that resonate with consumers.

Design elements are important, but stories are foundational to the way humans understand the world around them. We are constantly telling ourselves stories about the world, as NT Wright said, “Stories are a basic constituent of human life; they are, in fact, one key element within the total construction of a worldview.” Telling effective stories is a powerful tool that shapes the way people think about your brand – and so building brand narratives should be an integral part of developing a brand identity.

Unfortunately, many marketing and branding efforts skip over the deeper element of brand-narrative in favor of the easier, surface-level discussions of color-scheme and logo design. But if story-telling is such a vital part of brand building, how does a business go about developing effective stories?

Think like a Writer
There’s plenty of story-experts out there, they just don’t usually work in marketing firms. If you want to develop authentic brand narratives, it is important to think like a story-teller – screenwriters, novelists, and the like. Typically, story-tellers follow a set pattern of conflict and resolution that looks something like this:

  • Character – For a story-teller, this would be the main characters of a story; for a brand, this would be the ideal customer or target audience.
  • Problem – Stories without problems are boring stories. Every good character needs a problem to solve, just like every consumer has a pain-point that needs to be relieved.
  • Conflict – Problems bring life to stories, and conflict drives them forward. Conflict in stories are the driving force of plotlines, and they are the sales pitch of a brand narrative.
  • Resolution – Everyone loves happy endings. The conflict is over, the problem has been solved, and the main character is changed for the better. Brand narrative resolutions are happy customers that have been changed for the better through your product.

Brand Development
Building an authentic brand that resonates with consumers isn’t an easy task. But by uniting emotion-evoking stories with powerful colors and logos, you can develop a brand that stands out in a crowded marketplace and building brand loyalty.
At Fusion Group USA, we develop brands through a 4-step process:

  1. Create an Identity – Laying out the basics of who you are as a business, including your goals, values, and aspiration.
  2. Determine Target Audience – Once we know who you are, we can narrow down your target audience to make sure we’re reaching the right people with your message.
  3. Define Methods – With a myriad of options available, we consider your brand identity and target audience together to determine the best channels for delivering your message.
  4. Tell your Story – Once steps 1-3 are complete, we turn to spreading your unique brand narrative with the goal of reaching and impacting your target audience and growing your business.

The Fusion Difference
If you’re interested in seeing just how Fusion Group USA can use authentic narratives to shape your branding strategy, contact us today to set up a free branding consultation with our creative team.

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