There is no more important tool for rolling out brand positioning than a great brand story. The best brand stories can create gravity around a brand and also help build a strong brand community. They show the concepts behind the brand positioning in action, making it more than words on a page.
Does your organization have legends or stories that have been told and retold over the years? How the brand got its name? How the founders of your organization first met? The original problem they were trying to solve by developing your product? Perhaps your particular worldview or internal values became very clear at one moment in the organization’s history. Most organizations have internal legends, stories, and fables that are already being told. Your existing stories and legends are powerful because they are illustrations of who you are and why you do what you do. Often, these stories serve as building blocks for a larger brand story.
A brand story is an attempt to articulate the brand positioning by answering the deepest truths about the brand, things such as:
– Who are we?
– Why are we here?
– What do we care about?
– What do we do?
– Why does it matter?
In all likelihood, your brand story is already partway being told in the form of these stories and legends that follow the brand around everywhere it goes. Consider collecting as many of these stories as you can as background research and inspiration. An authentic brand story won’t just be made up on the spot. Great brand stories have a lineage and a heritage that are built over time and with the hard work and perseverance of many people.
In attempting to articulate the brand story, your job will be part historian, part archeologist, and part sculptor, taking the existing building blocks that have been provided to you by those who built the brand and merging them with the new brand positioning you’ve developed. You’ll need to mold these two views together into an overarching brand story that is both authentic to the brand’s past and relevant to the brand’s future at the same time.
It is hard work creating a great story that will get passed on from person to person. You’ll need to recruit the best storytellers you can find to the cause, including your organization’s top writers, designers, and poets (or if you work with an outside firm, bring their best folks in, too).
But based on my experience helping develop brand stories for organizations over the past decade, I can tell you that the effort is worth it. A great brand story will not only help you attract new people to your brand community, it will become a powerful guiding force within your organization as well.
If you’d like to learn more about the brand stories we created during my time at Red Hat, take a look at the following posts:
– Sharing your brand story (and here’s ours)
And here is an example of one of the original Red Hat “legends” that we collected during our time building the brand.
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If you found this post helpful…
Consider taking a look at my new book The Ad-Free Brand (not an advertisement, mind you, just a friendly suggestion:). It has some nice tips for how to build a great brand without the help of… you guessed it… advertising!
Only $9.99 for the Kindle, but available in each of these formats:
Book | Kindle | Nook | EPUB/PDF
Dark Matter Matters 
Chris, one of the best things I’ve seen on telling a company story was a lecture given to the UC Berkeley business school by David Riemer, former CMO at Yahoo, here:
It’s a bit long but worth the time for anyone who is interested in this topic. David uses the development of Pixar’s Toy Story, and the elements of great literature, as a lesson in how to articulate a company story.
(Shameless self-promotion alert): I also wrote about this topic in “A Business Lesson from Buzz Lightyear” here: http://wp.me/p1ss93-o5
Posted by @barrettrossie | November 7, 2011, 1:52 pm