Introduction to Brand Storytelling: Connect with your customers

1. Introduction to the class: Brand storytelling is becoming more and more popular in the marketing world. And with good reason, stories are scientifically proven to capture attention. Hello, and welcome to this course on brand storytelling. My name is Robin and I work as a creative entrepreneur in Belgium. I run a small creative agency with one of my best friends and a sub-brand called raw copper socks as well. In this class, I want to introduce you to brand storytelling because as an entrepreneur and as an advisor on marketing and branding for my clients, I am convinced that storytelling is at the base of all marketing and communication that you do as a brand. If you are a business owner, a marketeer, designer, freelance, or maybe even part of a sales team. This class is for you. I've created it to be very understandable and easy to follow, but backed with as much information and inspiration as possible that is as valuable as possible, no matter your level of experience in marketing or branding. So the way that I've structured this class is by splitting it into four parts. The first part, I want to try and convince you of the importance of storytelling by explaining what it does, how it works. And then in the second part, I'll tell you a little bit more about brand storytelling specifically. In the third part of the class, I provide you with a framework that will help you write your very own brand story. And then finally, in the fourth part, I will finish up by showing you some examples of strong brand storytelling. If that sounds interesting or useful to you, I would be very grateful if you decide to stick around and watch this class. I promise I've done my very best to keep things interesting. And I'm convinced that you will not only be excited about writing your brand story at the end of the class, but you will also have the basics you need to actually get started. So first up, I will tell you about why storytelling works in part one. See you there. 2. Part 1: The importance of storytelling: If you are watching this class, then I'm going to assume that you have already heard that storytelling is important for business marketing and for life in general. Probably you've heard that it's a powerful tool and it has potential for having a massive lasting impact. I'm going to show you some of the science behind why we love story so much. What gives them their unique Bower, and how you can capitalize on that. First of all, I want to underline the importance of storytelling. I think that somewhere inside our minds, all of us already know how important storytelling is. Because stories have been essential in humankind's ability to learn and survive throughout our history. It even starts when we are kids. Children love stories, and it's a great way for them to learn. Stories, have the power to transform ordinary events into magical ones by imagining new realities, no feelings, concepts. They're capable of making us smile, sob, or jump in alarm before consoling us with a pleasant conclusion. We learned how to enjoy a narrative from a very young age, both for pleasure and to help us make sense of the world and ourselves. But of course, there's a scientific explanation for love of stories. When we hear a story that resonates with us, our levels of a hormone called oxytocin increase. Oxytocin is what's called a feel-good hormone. There are a couple of things that it does to your brain. It boosts our feelings of things like trust, compassion, and empathy. It motivates us to work with others and positively influences our social behavior. Because of these, stories have the ability to help you build connections. And it's my belief that branding and marketing in essence, are both about building connections with people. There are studies that have found that when listening to a well-told story, the exact same areas of the brain light up on an MRI. In both the storyteller and the listener. Your brain as a listener mirrors the brain of the storyteller. In other words, when you hear a well-told story, your brain reacts as if you are experiencing it yourself. Another study, whether virtual stories have the same effect as a face-to-face interaction. They tested if narratives captured on video would also trigger the production of oxytocin in the brain. Then they took blood samples before and after a video-based story and discovered that character-driven stories do consistently result in oxytocin synthesis. So that tells us that good storytelling doesn't depend on the channel or the medium of the story, but the story itself. The most interesting part of the study actually was that the brain's production of oxytocin was a very strong predictor of people's willingness to do a good deed, such as giving money to charity that was linked to the story. In short, this is what grade brands understand and why agreed brands step into the power of storytelling to build a real connection with their customers are followers. 3. Part 2: What is Brand Storytelling?: Hi again. I'm happy that you made it to the second part of this class. I hope that by now you are convinced about the importance and relevance of storytelling when you're building a strong brand. In the second part of the class, I want to explain a little bit more about what brand storytelling actually is. Brand storytelling is the use of authentic, emotional stories in order to create a connection, which in turn will drive growth and customer loyalty. As I have explained, the potential production of oxytocin in the brain. Being told a story does not depend on the medium used. This means that brand storytelling can take a lot of forms. It could change through a video, a social media post, through SAO, a PR campaign, a logo, the use of colors, the tone of voice, etc. It's important to note though, that the key to really good brand storytelling is not just creating one story and choosing one way. You're going to share it. Choosing one specific medium to tell one specific brand story is actually step one in the process. The third part of this class, I will guide you through a framework to do just that. But if you really want to unlock all the power of brand storytelling, I believe that it's important to go a level deeper. You want to consistently deliver the same simple and authentic message through every available channel. So if you do that, brand storytelling becomes a collection of stories all working together to create a connection with their customers. But it's also very important to be aware of is that these stories should be centered around your customer as much as possible. As a business owner, market tier or brand storyteller, it's important to achieve the right balance between an audience centric approach to the story on one side and then achieving your commercial objectives on the other side. Often brands are very much focused on themselves and their own ambitions like raising brand awareness or changing consumer perceptions, or increasing revenue. But since storytelling relies on the emotional part of our brains, It's very important to align your commercial goals with a story that actually resonates. You'll want the main character in your brand story to feel relatable to your customers. And therefore, the main character should be like or customer not like you. Your customer has to be the hero of the story. You or your brand can be the guides. Now of course, if you want to tell a brand story, you will first need to get very real with yourself and figure out why your brand even exists. Having a brand story and knowing what you stand for at the core of your company's strategy does more than just help guide your marketing activities and create consistent messages that connect with your audience. It also gets her team on the same page. It energizes them so that they know where they are going and why they are going there. If you need some help with figuring out the identity of your brand. I have a class on exactly that topic as well, in which I explain how you can use a simple model called the brand key model to formulate your brand identity. 4. Part 3: How to write your first brand story: Alright, so we've established the importance of strong brand stories. And you now know that good brand storytelling is not just about having won that story, but it's about consistently delivering that same story over and over again in different ways, forms, and sub stories. In this third part of the class, I'd like to help you get started in writing your first brand story. I know that this can be quite a daunting task. Really good stories are well-written, emotionally loaded, and generally require a lot of skill to be executed in a way that's truly engages audience. Writing. A story basically isn't easy, and so it's not something that I can teach you in one short class. But what I can do is try to provide you with a strong foundation for a good story in the form of a storytelling framework. The goal of a storytelling framework is to help you brainstorm and build a solid story structure with a captivating beginning, tension, building middle, and then a satisfying resolution. At this stage, you can let the ideas flow without editing. You can refine and edit your ideas later or have someone else execute on them. If you feel like you need help in the storytelling framework that I would like to introduce to you is called the hero's journey. The Hero's Journey is a storytelling template from author Joseph Campbell, and it's very popular amongst brands storytellers because it's one of the most relatable storytelling frameworks. Because it's explicitly built around our customer being the hero, which as I explained, is super important if you want your customer to be able to relate to your story. Whether you want to write a true story of your company's inception or you're going to write a fictional story that explains what problem you're trying to solve. The hero's journey is a great templates to follow. Typically, a story following the hero's journey is broken down into three acts. At one, sets the stage for your story and usually has four steps. The first step is the establishment of the ordinary world. So you define a main character or hero who is living in a irregular live or a irregular situation, which is very much like your customer's situation. And the second step is a call to adventure, in which the hero becomes aware of a problem or task that must be completed. E.g. your hero might be a professional that is looking for a way to make their team more efficient. Or your hero might be a consumer that realizes all of their clothes look the same as other people's clothes. So whatever the problem is that your brand is trying to solve, turn that into the call to adventure for your hero. The third step, act one usually is a refusal in which the hero initially shows some kind of refusal towards the call to adventure. This is a great way to make your hero relatable to your customer. So try to think about which refusals your customer might feel that prevent them from using your product or service. And then turn those refusals into an elements of your brand story. And then the fourth and final step concludes act one, which is when your hero meets a mentor. And this could be a personification of you or your brand or someone in your sales team. The hero meets a person or a thing or whatever, that'll guide them in the process of completing the challenge. Then your story moves to act two, which has five steps of its own. The first is crossing the threshold in which the hero officially starts their journey of solving the challenge. Then is followed by test allies and enemies. The hero faces different trials in the process of competing the challenge. They might make new friends or enemies or have experiences that underlying the transformation that is part of the journey. The next step in act two is an approach to innermost cave, in which the hero approaches a final battle or challenge. So this could be having to convince their team to adopt the new solution, or it might be struggling to find stores that sell unique clothes. You get the points. Then the next step is the ordeal, where the hero goes through a battle or a showdown, like in team disagreements or discussions with stakeholders. After which the reward follows, the hero emerges triumphant. Then concludes act two. Act three is the final act and has only three steps. The first is called the rope back. Typically, the challenge, isn't it? Over? And the hero must deal with some kind of blow back from their previous battle. Maybe your hero found some original clothes in a new store, but now they are afraid to wear them outside because other people might not approve. And then this row back leads to a resurrection in which the hero emerges with a new power, internal lesson, or some kind of external change. The very last step in your story is called The return with elixir, where the hero returns home or moves forward into a new adventure or a new and better than normal. So in brief, that is a framework called the hero's journey. We start with one situation and the main character, and ends with the same character in a different situation. And we build our story around the journey between those two points. Obviously, this is only one example of a storytelling framework. There are many others out there. But I just wanted to include at least one in this class to help you get started with your first brand story. And I feel like the hero's journey is a very good one to make sure you build your story around your customer and not around your product or service. As tradition goes in Skillshare classes, I want to challenge you to make a foundation for your very own brand story using the hero's journey framework, you can upload your story framework in the class project down below, making sure that you include every step in every act. You are, of course, welcome to write an actual finished store, if you like. But I would suggest that you start by just writing down all the steps in the framework and then how they would be translated into your brand story. Remember, to start with your ideal customer as the hero of the story and then explore how your brand or product can play a role as well. Maybe your product initiates the hero's journey, or maybe it helps bring your hero hold in the end, situating your brand or product within the arc of the Hero's Journey is the challenge, because that is what will help potential customers visualize your brand as a key part of their own story as well. In the next part of this class, I will show you some existing brand stories that are great examples to follow and might give you some inspiration for your own brand story. So double-click away just yet, and then I'll see you in the next video. 5. Part 4: Examples of strong brand storytelling: Hi again. Good job. I'm not clicking away. Personally. When I try to be creative and brainstorm, I always find that some examples helped me get my wheel starting in my head. So I did my best to find a couple of good examples of brand storytelling that might get you in the mood to start on your old story as well. The first example that I have for you is from a brand called UAT, who offer a range of bags, containers, and accessories for adventures in nature. They have a YouTube channel on which they share a very qualitative videos that literally tell the stories of their actual customers. And the one that I chose to share with you is about Eduardo Garcia, who is an adventure that loves to cook and loves food. When you watch the video, which I've linked in the class description below, I hope that you'll be able to notice that all the different steps in the hero's journey framework are in some way or another, included in this super captivating story. First, we are introduced to Eduardo and his love for nature and for food. Then we see that he challenges himself to go out into nature regularly and cook meals using the ingredients that it finds on his adventures. In the video, we seem embark on a trip to Yellowstone River together with one of his friends. Along the way we meet a friendly farmer. Eduardo tells us about the challenges of having to be creative with the ingredients that he finds. We see him deal with bad weather. Basically, we are taking along the journey of him cooking a meal in nature and ending up with not only a yummy looking dish, but also the insight that the real reward is the adventure that he is having with a friend. And the reason, I think this is a great example of brand storytelling is because of the brand itself isn't even mentioned in the video. We do see Eduardo using some native products in the video, but it's fairly suddenly integrated into the story, which keeps the focus on our hero at Weibo and his journey. The second example that I'd like to show you is this ad from Chipotle, also linked in the class description below. And this ad follows another great story framework that starts similarly to the hero's journey, but has a different approach to captivating the audience. We start with a character that is in a zone of comfort, but they want something. So they enter into a unfamiliar situation. They adapt, and then eventually they get what they're looking for. But end up being a very heavy price for it. In the end, they return to their old situation having changed. As you can see, Chipotle use this framework to tell the story of how farming went through the process of being industrialized, which led to much more production and efficiency, but then ended up taking away the appreciation of animals and nature. It's a short video, but it does a great job capturing your attention and making you feel like old-school farming is a beautiful thing. Which is then linked to Chipotle, claiming to step away from industrialized meet. So those are two examples that I hope will inspire you and maybe convince you of the power of storytelling for your brand. Thank you very much for watching my class all the way to the end. I really hope you learned something. I really hope I convinced you to use storytelling as a tool to build a stronger brand. Because I really believe that it is a much better way of growing your business then creating some shallow T ads are trying to convince people with discounts and promotions. If you did like this class, I would obviously very much appreciated if you took the time to write a review, because that not only helps me to get this glass more out there, but also I could really use some feedback forum and I make my next class. I tried my best to make this class interesting, but I'm sure I can still improve. So I would love to know what you think. So thanks again and good luck with your brand storytelling.