Why Brand Story Strategy is the Next Evolution of Brand Strategy

Pause for a moment. What’s the first big brand that pops into your head?

Whatever it is, the reason it does that, is because the guardians of that brand have spent time building a strategy so you’ll remember who they are and associate certain things with them.

In fact, Brand Strategy has been part of the brand building process for decades.

But Brand Strategy is evolving. And Brand Story Strategy is the way forward for brands who want to succeed in building brand advocacy with the people that matter.

Brand Strategy meets the Connection Economy

The reason we’re seeing a move towards Brand Story Strategy is because the way we do marketing has changed significantly over the past 20 years.

We used to live in an economy of interruption. The big brands that had the most money to shout the loudest won the customers.

It was perfectly normal to interrupt what people were doing to bombard them with well crafted, expensively engineered messages about a brand, service or product. We lived in a world where only those with enormous advertising budgets could compete.

Enter the digital age and the emergence of the connection economy.

Technology has broken down the barriers to entry for brands everywhere and it’s possible to connect with your customers in ways that it wasn’t before. And when you connect with them, you create opportunity for them to connect you with others that they are connected to.

Brand Story Strategy is Brand Strategy with heart

Customers today want brands to be a positive part of their life. The brands that we choose to buy from, are ones that make us feel like we belong to something.

Seth Godin would say, “People like us, do things like this”. And this is how a tribe builds around our brand.

The Connection Economy has paved the way for marketing that connects with our customers and allows them to be part of the brand story in a way they haven’t been able to before.

Your brand story is the story your customers tell themselves about your brand.

Brand Story Strategy is the way we help our clients build and tell the right stories

Brand Story Strategy is like the DNA of your brand. It’s the way we help our customers to tell the right stories about our brand. When it’s executed effectively, it helps your ideal customer to buy from you because they feel a connection, but also to become an advocate for your brand.

When you lay the right foundations within brand story strategy, it’s easier to know who your customer is, get clear on your message, meet your customer where they are, create a connection with them and then get them to tell the story of your brand to other people who are just like them.

When you get Brand Story Strategy right, you make brand communication easier. You’ll know exactly what message to communicate, what stories to tell and where and how to tell them.

Brand Story Strategy focusses on Shared Purpose

Brand Story Strategy is driven by a brand’s desire to connect with their ideal customer. It places a strong emphasis on purpose and how you can connect the purpose of your brand with the purpose of your customer.

Instead of just focussing on the Why of your Brand, it places the customer as the owner of the brand. It gives them the ability to create shared stories – and this is where brand storytelling as a marketing approach can garner so much power.

Everyone loves to talk about their Why. But the magic happens when you’re able to connect your why to the why of your customer. It’s about putting your customer at the centre of your brand.

Brand Story Strategy Places Your Customer at the Centre of Your Brand

Tribe is another key difference with Brand Story Strategy. Unlike Brand Strategy, Brand Story Strategy sees the customer as the owner of your brand.

To this end, it takes a very heart centred approach to the customer with an emphasis on psychographics. How does your customer, think, feel and see themselves in the world?

Story Strategy then looks at how to use your values, your customer persona and your points of difference to craft key messages as part of the strategy.

It balances visual identity with brand voice

Tone of voice is something that I frequently find missing from Brand Strategy, and yet it’s an essential way to create consistency with your brand when you’re communicating with your customer.

Many Brand Strategies place an emphasis on visual branding, when this is only one element of a brand. And while it’s important, it needs to sing in harmony with all the other elements to create a consistent brand message.

Brand Story Strategy balances voice with visual identity to create the missing link in creating a consistent message that connects with your customer.

Brand Story Strategy is about creating a Living, Breathing Brand

When you use a Brand Story Strategy to drive business growth, you’ll find there’s a strong emphasis on actual implementation of brand story strategy in your marketing.

Lots of Brand Strategy pays lip service. It’s about gaining ground, grand ideas that aren’t implemented in the day-to-day, a list of values so long that nobody can remember what they are and the colours the brand should use when creating graphics.

But in Brand Story Strategy, we’re always looking at how we can live and breathe brand.

We push the strategic element through to implementation. Once we have the strategy, we look at how we can roll that into the story we tell of our brand at every single touchpoint – across our actions, our communications and our visual identity.

How do you start to build your own Brand Story Strategy?

Brand Story Strategy starts with building six foundational elements – brand vision, brand mission, brand values, brand differences, the tribe and brand voice.

You can find out more about getting started here.

Find shared purpose and start to build messaging around that. How can you create connection with your ideal customer?

How often should you review your Brand Story Strategy?

When your tribe changes

If something about them fundamentally changes, or you add a new customer persona, then a review is a worthwhile exercise to make sure that the elements of your brand story strategy are going to serve your new or changed tribe.

You might also need to revisit your strategy if the way you deliver on your vision changes – this is your mission. If you’re delivering on your vision one way with one product and then you decide that you want to deliver your vision in a different way, then you might need to take a look at your mission and whether this needs an update.

Once a year, as part of yearly planning

As a rule of thumb, I’d be reviewing your Brand Story Strategy once a year, at the same time as you review your business plan or marketing strategy, just to make sure that it still rings true.

This is a good practice to get into anyway as Brand Story Strategy wasn’t meant to sit in a drawer. It’s meant to be embedded in every area of your business, so it needs to be front and centre in your day-to-day.

If you do this, it will become immediately apparent if your strategy needs an update, because it will start to feel out of sync with what you’re saying and doing. It will feel disconnected – and that’s the complete opposite of what Brand Story Strategy is meant to do.

Brand Story Strategy will set you apart from the competition

Having a Brand Story Strategy sets you apart from your competitors because that’s exactly what it’s designed to do.

Your Brand Story Strategy will be completely unique. And because it’s completely unique, you’ll end up with a brand that’s completely unique and a story that’s completely unique.

You’ll be able to deliver succinctly on brand storytelling as a key part of your marketing engine and it will be easier than it’s ever been before to create the right content to engage your audience.

There’s an absolute freedom and simplicity in being clear on your purpose and how that serves your customers that will allow you to put energy into the right marketing opportunities with the right message each and every time.

And consistency is the key to brand advocacy and a strong brand.