Thoughts around the future of brand narrative

Brand Strategy

Thoughts around the future of brand narrative

By Jason Brown

The building blocks of brand strategy involve creating a brand narrative, brand story or origin story. I’m going to explain why brand narratives are key to creating and applying value for a business, at whatever size, and also discuss why the quality of Brand Strategy or narrative currently falls short.

Brand Personality is big bucks.

The foundations of a company are linked with establishing a brand. The leadership typically rallies around a solution or driving purpose that solves a sector level problem, which is articulated in the form of a vision or roadmap of goals. These are realised in OKRs and they are more practical KPIs. The gives a good direction to uncover the values that the team stands for which can be used to express a brand story.

The brand story, in turn, works as a foundation to create a brand personality.

Brand stories have the power to provide both identity and meaning to entire societies. Defining the values of a brand story serves as the glue that holds a company together.

When a brand is running at a high level, the values, narrative and associations it draws upon will bound the internal company and external customers together, and that personality is represented in the ‘assets’ that customers engage with and are aware of.
Its assets, in the financial sense, are a representation of the brand that pushes the narrative of the company forward towards its goals or purpose.

To establish what a brand is about it is important to look internally first at their pre-existing culture, and discover what the company is about in order to find out what their culture is.
What values need to be brought to the forefront? What did they originally stand for and what cause rallies them and pulls them together?

The power of this comes later, as it allows the creators to use these values to both experiment and play with creative visual/motion applications to forge a consistent visual identity that resonates with customers and the rest of the marketplace.

When we look at research that is undertaken into branding and the advertising world, it generally falls into two categories: the brand, which is how the brand/industry behaves, or advertising, which is how the brand/industry speaks.

The lines are increasingly blurred between branding and advertising, as advertising itself is an extension of the brands’ presence. They get murkier still when you try to separate the content and product from the customer and their identity.

Research and creativity form strategy

Insight and creative license form the building blocks of a strategic narrative. The narrative is a means to an end, which is (for example) the position of a fashion e-commerce brand that is acting a certain way in the eyes of a target consumer or group of consumers to serve the goals of the business.

A brand narrative can change how you do business in numerous ways. The most fundamental difference is differentiation. If you’re struggling to make yourself known amongst the competition, you should reassess how you present yourself and why. Speaking to your customers is your first port of call. It can also help you break into a new market, but bringing new customers into the fold requires an understanding of who they are, so that you can be presentable to them.

Another one is talent, changing the outward perception in the right way, in the right setting can bring a windfall of talented individuals who can apply their skills for you. With the right messaging in place, it can set an agenda that employees can rally around, which includes loyalty, collaboration and approaches to innovation.
A strong brand narrative can give the industry the perception that the company is in a position of strength, with stronger ties to the customer, suppliers, and employees, and the ability to distance themselves from their competitors.
It also represents what we call a North Star, a constant aim that moves the business closer to its ultimate purpose.

A powerful brand also has value, realised in brand equity, which results from the customer’s perceptions. That’s why Apple is the most valuable brand in the world, according to Interbrand, because of its standout aesthetic. Apple’s brand operates like clockwork and changes infrequently. Every year at the WWDC and every day at its stores, it democratises cool culture with its unified aesthetic and product appeal.

That’s why it is a trillion-dollar company. Everything is so consistent and seamless in its brand execution that we ignore the fact that, apart from the MacBook, Apple uses almost the same parts as its competitors, yet we happily spend many times more on its products. Its stock is valued highly because of our perceptions, even though its market share is a lot less than some of its rivals.

The brand personality and representation of a company evolves as it grows. The brand narrative is also based on a story-arch of plucky upstarts competing against a global blockbuster. Apple, for example, has gone from garage hackers to status-quo challengers to today’s trillion-dollar goliath.
Simply put, you should speak to your customers authentically, based on the current size and maturity of your business, and reinforce that message over and over again until your customers tell you who you are. When this happens you have proof that it’s worked.

In the start-up world, we increasingly see the rise of ‘blands’, businesses whose aesthetics and rhetoric have become homogeneous. Their messaging is around optimisation and insufficient social change, while they position themselves as challengers to larger companies and the underdog. With these commonalities, it’s no surprise their brands lack an original narrative. For more details of these blands, see Bloomberg, 2020.

When it comes to articulating why you should start to optimise your brand strategy, think of it this way. Your service or product is a solution to your customer’s practical problems. It doesn’t matter what it is, it just gets the job done.

Your brand story/narrative is the emotional solution to the customer’s problem. It is not just the product or service making them feel a certain way, the brand personality does this too.

Ideally, the narrative around the brand should be so rhetorical, rich and imaginative it transports the customer to the brand’s world of the ideal condition. Although this, of course, will depend on what values, tone, positioning and purpose the customer prefers.

Stories around values

Films are a good example. The narrative in a film could be basic, and the values and message it communicates might have themes that are similar to reality, but the execution might be so sophisticated, it allows the mind to construct and expand its own interpretation of the foundation story. (which is why merc sells)

This is why solid advertising campaigns are built around good, novel stories that can be simplified into a single phrase or message around a behaviour.

Ultimately, when a brand’s narrative is followed so solidly the visual presence of the brand’s identity will resonate with your customer. Your business and the strength of your brand will grow as long as it appeals to the customers, and your products complement and add value to your core capability.

We should strive to build fantastical narratives and dreams that create progress in the private sector, while also planting the flag clearly in the ground, as it will attract new talent and capture customers’ minds, and when you also have a solid brand strategy, it gives creatives an avenue to do just that.

Thoughts around the future of brand narrative

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