Your Story Is Your Brand: Finding Your Foundational Narrative
Having worked variously in and around journalism, communications, and brand marketing for the past 20 years, I think and talk about narrative and storytelling a lot.
I’m also guilty of tossing around the term “brand storytelling” as shorthand for the work I do. Guilty, I suppose, because it makes me complicit in obscuring the mean of the phrase.
So, what is brand storytelling?
Here’s one answer, courtesy of Michael Brenner, founder of Marketing Insider Group, from a blog post entitled “What Is Brand Storytelling?”:
Brand Storytelling is “Using a narrative to connect your brand to customers, with a focus on linking what you stand for to the values you share with your customers.”
I readily admit that I stumbled on this after Googling “what is brand storytelling,” but I do know Michael Brenner to be a leader in the field of content marketing. (I saw him deliver a keynote on the subject at a content marketing summit back in 2015.)
Brenner argued that brands—faced with the fact that no one clicked on display ads and that few had the patience even to sit through their 15-second pre-rolls—had no choice but to accept what Seth Godin had declared years earlier: “Content marketing is the only marketing left.” And if they really wanted clicks, likes, shares, and other online indicators of “engagement” from their target audiences, they needed to tell authentic stories about who they were and what they stood for.
Again, that makes a lot of sense—but it sounds much simpler than it is. It’s hard enough to tell a story effectively. It’s impossible if you don’t know what the story is to begin with.
Brand storytelling is about more than using narratives as tools or vehicles for communicating and connecting with customers. Narrative is more fundamental than that.
Brands are stories.
Every company or organization has a basic narrative structure at its core: “There is a need, and we exist to meet it.” Or “there is a problem, and we are the solution.” You could distill any organized venture down to that essential formula.
And because companies and organizations are composed of actual people, including the founders who were inspired to start the whole thing, the narrative naturally develops from there.
The essential narrative formula of Need/Need Met or Problem/Problem Solved provides the most basic answers to the questions of what the company does and why it does what it does. The origin story begins to deepen the why and sets the stage for the how—the values, principles, and practices that add substance to the brand/story.
This is what I call a foundational narrative.
It’s the story that every brand needs to establish before it can do storytelling.
A foundational narrative is a document—actual content that provides enduring value. But its most immediate value is in the process of creating it. And that process is necessarily collaborative. By talking with someone outside the organization about what inspires, drives, and guides the work we do together—by saying it loud and hearing ourselves say it—we formulate the story that gives meaning and purpose to what we do. It helps us to understand and honor where we’ve come from and feel a sense of forward motion and direction toward what lies ahead.
By clarifying the priorities and principles that define who we are and what we do, the foundational narrative has both cultural and strategic value. And by providing a single source of truth for anecdotes and narrative accounts from our growth and development, it provides the source material for the storytelling that happens in the marketing, advertising, and press outreach.
But that’s a whole other story.
