A brand story is the foundation of your company’s marketing and communications. It outlines how—and why—you talk to your customers by sharing who you are as a brand.
Shared with all employees, and maybe even vendors and suppliers, a brand story unifies how employees view their brand and shows them how to best portray it to customers and potential customers.
Unlike brand guidelines, a brand story is an internal document. Guidelines include minute details about a brand’s logo, color palette, slogans and more. And they are shared with media outlets, marketing agencies and anyone who works with your brand to ensure consistent marketing. Meanwhile, a brand story is about the big picture—your brand’s promise, values and personality.
What Does a Brand Story Include?
Your brand story is not goals or aspirations; it is rooted in reality. It outlines your company as it is now in the climate your industry is currently in.
Nor does your brand story contain proprietary information. A brand story is created for internal use, but it should not include information you wouldn’t share with the public—your customers, partners, vendors, etc.
A thorough brand story includes the following…
Company Pillars
Company pillars are the brand’s DNA: mission, values and strategies.
These aspects may sound simple, but it takes great care to create a concise, meaningful mission, values and strategies to achieve them. These pillars are the core of your company; it clarifies what you aim to achieve, who you support and why.
To learn about how to pinpoint your mission statement and see effective examples, check out this article.
Competitive Analysis
Create a list of your competitors—and potential competitors—and examples of how they serve your target market, what you like and dislike about their approach and how your brand stands out.
Also consider doing a SWOT analysis for your brand. SWOT stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. Analysis of these four areas is important to understand where your brand stands now and where it can improve currently and in the future.
Promise, Purpose & Position
A brand promise is the statement that encompasses how your customers should feel when interacting with your brand. If a brand can deliver on its promise, it will be in the position to delight customers and help them meet their goals. Your brand promise is the value and purpose of your brand to the customer.
For example, in ColinKurtis’s brand story we state:
“An integrative approach is our mindset. From Digital to PR to every platform in between, we curate crave-worthy brand messaging for our clients’ products and capabilities across all content and assets.”
This statement is not inspirational. It is the current mindset of the brand that surrounds our services and what promises we aim to fulfill for our clients.
Personality and Voice
Like a person, your brand has a personality that makes an impression on customers and potential customers.
To articulate your brand’s personality for your brand story, answer these questions:
- What is your brand’s point of view?
- What’s your mood?
- When you speak to your customers or audience, what tone of voice do you use?
- What are some of the key words you use when speaking to your audience?
- What is your workplace culture like?
- What are some of the words your employees use to describe their workplace?
All of these questions can be used to determine your brand personality as well as your brand voice. The brand voice isn’t just what you say, it’s how you say it—dictated by tone, word choice and writing style.
For example, at ColinKurtis this is how we describe the tone in which we talk to our clients:
- Confident
- Knowledgeable
- Honest
- Smart
- Friendly
- Caring
Your brand’s personality and voice should coincide with one another and make sense together.
Why Your Company Should Have a Brand Story
Your company doesn’t NEED a brand story; not all companies have one. But strong brands with cohesive marketing efforts, a strong following and delighted customers often do have a brand story.
A brand story is a unifying piece that brings mutual understanding to all employees in your company. It’s what you need to clearly convey who your brand is and, as a result, delight your customers with cohesive, effective communication and marketing efforts.
If you’re looking to determine your brand story to share with your team, the experts at ColinKurtis Advertising are dedicated to building brands in the ingredient, food, beverage, health and nutrition industries. Contact Mitch Robinson at Mitch@colinkurtis.com or call 815-965-6657 EXT. 1 to learn more.
Blog post from:
Valette Piper-Bledsoe
Vice President, Client Services
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