In this article I take you through how to tell an overarching insight-driven brand story using concepts from framing theory. I also explain how to test and structure that story on a story arc that fits into our work as marketers. I use samples of content to clarify my points.
Have you ever looked at the entirety of the campaigns your organisation has run? I mean really looked at them, looking at the “essence” that is carried through each of your campaigns. This essence is what defines who you are as a brand.
If you do, you might see that the essence, is not there. It’s missing, or it’s jumbled like when you first get your Christmas lights out of the box in December, they all still shine, but they’re confused and messy.
There is a way to untangle those lights, that might be obvious but is rarely clearly expressed.
Why tell stories?
Stories are the way we make sense of our world. It is the way we connect our beliefs, values, and emotions and tie them all into something that shapes our identity. These stories give us a sense of a shared reality, a common understanding of how things around us function. Stories help us connect deeply with our audiences and present information that motivates and inspires. They allow us to tie many complex bits of information into a memorable whole. Storytelling is most useful as a branding tool which gives life, familiarity and emotion to our brand.
In this article I share ideas on how to use your marketing or engagement channels to tell a consistent and captivating story. This is something that often our branding work lacks, as our audiences sense the absence of integrity and consistency in our campaigns.
To make my points clear in this article I will use a made-up social enterprise, that sells adventure sports clothing in order to provide employment for local communities, and to produce low environmental impact apparel to customers. Let’s call it KlipSpringer Clothing.
To tell effective stories we need to lay the foundations of who we are telling these stories to, and how we as a brand are perceived.
Who is your target audience?
The first thing we need to understand is who we are talking to. I am not just talking about the demographics of your target audience, I am talking about all of it: demographics, geographics, economics and psychographics. I will go deeper into this in a later article, essentially though, what is important to know is in what ways your audience see and understand your brand, your organisation, or your products. AND how they see themselves in relation to your brand, organisation or products.
For example: target audience x, persona y, or segment z, might understand KlipSpringer Clothing as sustainable, socially responsible, adventurous, sporty, or outdoorsy, with all the related emotions those conjure up. They might choose KlipSpringer Clothing because those aspects of the brand form part of how they see themselves, or how they want to see themselves, both individually and as part of a group.
We also need to understand what values our audiences hold in relation to our brand. In the case of KlipSpringer Clothing these could be values of purity, being part of nature, autonomy and adventure.
You might be thinking at this point, “Heck, I don’t know this about my audience”. If you don’t know these things, I would really recommend you find out! You don’t necessarily have to spend thousands on market research agencies. You could already have these insights in the form of personas, survey or focus group data, social listening, CRM call logs, even competitor social media. A vague idea is better than nothing.
As an example we could have something as simple as this:
Our target audience see themselves as adventurous, sporty, and courageous. They see themselves as part of nature and care that they purchase ethical and sustainable products. Their core value set is that of respect for nature, adventure, courage and independence.
Who are we as a brand or organisation?
The next thing we need to understand is who we are — our brand. Here I am not talking about our logo’s, typeface, or any physical manifestation of the brand. I am talking about the “deep stuff, man”: our brand essence, purpose, character and personality, all the things that make us cool to hang out with. For KlipSpringer Clothing, our audiences might see the brand as: quietly strong, courageous, ethical, responsible, nature-loving, and passionate.
What we are looking for in the answers to these two questions is the brands congruency with the audience. We want to understand how our brand and our audiences “align” or “mesh” together, and what values and models our audiences use to understand our brand.
After this exercise, you might end up with something that resembles this:
We are a purpose driven brand that strives for the ethical and sustainable production of quality apparel. We enable our customers to be courageous and live the life they choose to. We believe a better world can be achieved through respect for nature, exploration, and adventure.
Those two questions are the foundation of building a good story. Let’s start telling great stories.
1. Building the story
The next thing we do is build the story. Many marketers think of digital storytelling as coming up with great story-based pieces of content. You know the ones I am talking about: softly lit, true-life, emotional videos. The ones with champion or underdog protagonists that look like you and me. Those are great singular pieces of content that will form part of the greater overarching story we are trying to tell, but this is not what I am talking about here. I am talking about that overarching story that ties all of these distinct pieces of content together across campaigns. The overarching story that conveys our brand.
1. 1 Calendarise your campaigning year.
Start off my calendarising your campaigns. Easier said than done, I know. For larger enterprise sized organisations with many marketers working across many products, a campaign calendar isn’t always possible. If you can, this would help you choose what stories get told, and, how these stories get told.
1. The simple crux: framing your story
In our context framing is the way in which we present our brand. The frame through which we present our brand indicates to the audience how we would like to be perceived. In the same way news media don’t only just deliver to us the hard facts. They also decide how to present that information to influence the way we think about a subject. As an example, you might read an article talking about poverty in your country, which might be the fact of the matter, but the article might frame the issue of poverty as an issue of collective responsibility, in which they see poverty as a societal issue that needs government, collective or community action. Alternatively, they could frame the issue as individual responsibility, in which we see the poor in this economic situation only by actions of their own.
Different personality types might respond differently depending on which of these two frames are presented, moreover, framing might influence the way in which we determine the possible remedies to poverty. Audiences to whom collective responsibility resonates more, might vote for welfare reform, while audiences that see it as an individuals responsibility might vote for nothing to help at all, as they don’t see it as their, or their government’s responsibility.
In our KlipSpringer Clothing example we will be launching a new marketing campaign to increase sales on our eCommerce store and to highlight our new range of sustainably made hiking shoes, which we aim to run during the holidays of this year.
We know from answering the question above on who our audiences are, that our audiences hold purity, being part of nature, autonomy and adventure, as values important to them. These are the frames and values that we will use as the centre of our stories.
So this is the deviously simple trick to it all. By framing your campaigns around a single frame you are able to communicate many different things on a variety of channels that seem like separate messages, but actually have something that tie them all together.
1.3 Running experiments
Prior to selecting your frame it is important to run experiments to find out which frames work for your brand. There is benefit however, to continuous testing and learning throughout your campaign. Although we would ultimately decide on one way of framing your campaigns, there will undoubtedly be different manifestations of how creative and message reflect that frame. Learning how your audience respond to these creatives will inform you on which creatives will provide the best results.
There are many ways of running experiments, and it would be dependent on your objectives and what resources you have available to run these experiments. What is important is that you are able to measure which frames achieve most of the desired objective, or which positively move the metrics and KPIs that you have chosen for the campaign.
Let’s imagine that from our research and the experiment results we see the frame “we are part of nature” come out significantly better than any other, and we have moved to production of the creative assets. Below are examples of what this might look like, six different pieces of content, some emotional, some factual, all with a variety of intention, yet they all align to a singular frame: we are part of nature.
Depending on what each campaign or item of content is for, aligning your framing with the users value-set or model of understanding can elicit positive emotionality and repeated enough could lead to positive attitudes toward your brand and improve performance for both online and offline sales.
2. Structuring the story
Now that we have the heart of our story — our frame — we need to build a story around that. The story itself is just like any other story created from the time of the ancient Greeks to Shakespeare, a story that has a beginning, a middle and an end. Here is an example of what our campaign’s story looks like.
It has been a tough year, we have been stuck in our offices and our homes for far too long. It’s time to unwind, to get out, to explore. It is now or never, it’s up to you to make it happen. Once a year we all get a chance to do what we truly love: these holidays we are getting back to nature, finding ourselves again and recharging. Make these holidays meaningful, and start the new year fresh with vigour and excitement.
Here is how the story is structured as a story arc.
A. ORDINARY WORLD
(aligned with your hypothesis of any environmental pushes that lead your customer to a purchase):
It has been a tough year, we have been stuck in our offices and our homes for far too long.
Here we try and connect with our audiences situation and context. We want to make a link between what they are experiencing and feeling. We also consider what might be pushing them into taking action. This could be that this year was particularly stressful for our audiences and the need to get out is chief among their desires, or that this year’s weather was particularly bad, and outdoor activities weren’t possible.
B. THE CATALYST
(aligned with your hypothesis of functional, emotional or social value your customers will extract from your brand):
It’s time to unwind, to get out, to explore.
This is the enticement, the vision of how your product will enable the audiences desires. How will they feel? How do we as a brand actualise their ideal selves? It is a taste of the value we offer, something that will pique their interest.
C. BARRIERS/ENEMIES/OBJECTIONS
(aligned your hypothesis of any barriers/habits/anxieties your audience might have in buying your product):
It is now or never, it’s up to you to make it happen.
Perhaps research told us that the biggest barriers to our audience achieving their desires, are that often, time and planning are an issue. Audiences feel that the holidays are busy and chaotic. We need to help them overcome this barrier. The antagonist here is time, schedule, or busyness.
D. CLIMAX
(aligned with your hypothesis of functional, emotional or social value your customers will extract from your brand):
Once a year we all get a chance to do what we truly love. These holidays we are getting back to nature, finding ourselves again and recharging.
This part is the audience seizing the prize: recognising the value we offer, and taking it. The audiences see themselves as the people they want to be, with help from our brand. This is where our call to actions are the strongest (if we have any).
E. TRANSFORMATION & RETURN
Make these holidays meaningful, and start the new year fresh with vigour and excitement.
This is the return to the audiences new life. They have achieved their desires. Here we reiterate our value for future relationship building with the audience. We nurture brand loyalty and delight. Here, is also an opportunity for social aspects of marketing, like sharing real stories from other customers.
2.1 Story as customer journey
We have gone through the motions and have our story. Our story has a central frame, it is compelling, emotional, and represents the deep values we share with our audiences. Also, very importantly for this part of the process is that our story has a structure or an arc. The reality is that it is hard to tell a longer term linear story on many channels both online and offline. The closest we get to this, is a smart direct marketing, email or retargeting strategy. So in order for this to work on all channels, what we need to do is to cycle our stories throughout the story arc, allocating different weighting to each phase of the story.
Our audiences might join us on our journey at any point throughout the 4 months of this campaign. If we were to tell the story linearly, they might only be exposed to the “Barriers/Enemies/Tests” part and we wouldn’t have had the opportunity to tell the whole story. This is why cycling the story is so important.
The medium is also an important factor to consider here. Things like TV ads would benefit from the entire story—from beginning to end—being told. Paid digital advertising, well, here we have a lot of control on how we tell the story. When it comes to organic social though, cycling the story is crucial, as this is where we lose a bit of that control.
You also might be wondering if the weighting of the story happens at a granular, per content piece level, or over a grouping of content pieces for each story phase. This would be dependent on the medium, so I would do whatever makes sense for your situation. Billboards ads and Youtube are two different beasts and thus, careful consideration of how the story is told through different mediums is important.
2.2. Mapping it all out
The final step is mapping the story out with samples of content, even rough mock-ups will do. This is an important step, it allows us to match our strategy with our story arc. Often, things might seem like a good idea in strategy, then in practice they fall apart.
In the image below I have very lean samples of content. No photos or illustrations, just a rough draft of what we intend our copy to communicate.
You don’t have to do this alone, actually, this process is best worked on with your creative, media and strategy partners, so that they can sprinkle some creativity into how you conceptualise and execute the story.
In this article I used one campaign as an example. The frame you use should persist throughout many campaigns. The story might be for one campaign, but the frame you use is a theme that ties many campaigns, over a longer period of time, together.
Recap
We understand that storytelling is a great vehicle to make your brand marketing work more effective. We also went through why understanding your audience and your own brand is vital to telling great stories. We navigated through building the story, and touched on framing and experimentation. After that we went through how to structure your story along a story arc, so that the story is told in the right way across multiple channels. Lastly, we mapped our content to each phase of the story and saw which content pieces would work for each phase.
Thanks for reading!
References:
Wagner, T. F., et al., Framing social media communication: Investigating the effects of brand post appeals on user interaction, European Management Journal (2017)
Zhiyuan Li, Social Media and Impacts of Frames on User Engagement in the Fashion Industry
Judith Hattke, Storytelling — A guideline and an application in the Bundeswehr’s (personnel) marketing (December 2016)
Arch George Woodside, Brand-Consumer Storytelling Theory and Research: Introduction to a Psychology & Marketing Special Issue (June 2010)
Ingrid Sundberg, Archplot Structure (2013)
Ernest M. Kadembo, Anchored in the story: The core human understanding, branding, education, socialisation, and the shaping of values. (2012)
Images:
Content examples: Photo by Kalen Emsley on Unsplash, Photo by Tanya Pro on Unsplash, Photo by Steffen Wienberg on Unsplash, Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash,