PBL session 4

How to communicate the brand through storytelling and social media?

1. What is a brand story and what makes a good brand story?

There are several definitions of a brand story:

• Your story isn't just what you tell people, it's what they believe about you based on the signals your brand sends. The story is a complete picture made up of facts feelings and interpretations, which means that part of your story isn't even told by you. (The story of telling)
• A brand story is a cohesive narrative that encompasses the facts and feelings that are created by your brand (or business, if you prefer). Unlike traditional advertising, which is about showing and telling about your brand, a story must inspire an emotional reaction. Things that can influence your brand include your product, price, history, quality, marketing, in-store experiences, what other people say about you... (Echostories)

Or this image of Quicksprout:

What makes a good brand story? Some tips: (Kissmetrics, Forbes - Susan Gunelius)

• Your story must be driven through personality: the story isn't a biography of an individual, it's the evolution of an entity, told with personality (generates trust)
• Story should be simple: problem --> solution --> success - science confirms that short stories are better for companies than long and complex ones
• Story shapes your reason for existence: why does your brand exist? The answer should be a story
• The story must connect with your customers: tell your story in such a way that people understand you and can relate to it.
• Customers should buy a part of the story, not just a product: they engage the story by purchasing from the business that tells the story
• Get other people to tell your story: a good story is shareable
• Speak truthfully: honesty and transparency are important; be creative but don't stray too far from your brand promise
• Create characters your audience will root for: they don't need to be fictional, create buyer personas and tell stories from their perspectives.
• Don't give it all away: leave your audience wanting more and come back again and again and again

You can find some examples of successful brand stories on these links:

• Linkdex
• Huffingtonpost

There are also a lot of brand story matrix' like this one explained in a video:

2. What is storytelling and how does it affect people?

My dad (Walter Vandervelde) teaches creative storytelling at my home university. Besides that, he also runs his own business in which he has deepened his knowledge of brainstorms, storytelling, creative business management and so on. For this question, I used his knowledge and the PowerPoints he made for his students about storytelling. It's a very interesting matter of which there's a lot to tell, but I'll try to keep it a bit shorter for this question. His course was structures using the CAST method. 

Storytelling is part of our human nature. We love stories and in businesses, they're so important. People don't make a choice based on their ratio, but based on emotions. And that's what storytelling is all about.

In a presentation of TEDx (Garr Reynolds) gives 11 interesting tips for storytelling:

1. Turn off the computer: don't start on the computer, use post-its, paper... it generates more ideas
2. Audience comes first: your story is their story. What you say is personal, but the theme is universal --> make me care!
3. Have a solid structure: there is a basic shape to storytelling (beginning, rising tension,  conflict, solution...)
4. Have a clear theme: what's your point (message)?
5. Remove the nonessential: everything must have a reason
6. Hook 'em early: break the ice early
7. Show a clear conflict: what is the problem? Character - struggles - goal
8. Demonstrate a clear change: life is change, show it clearly
9. Show or do the unexpected: what can you do to make your audience 'shocked'? Your idea will stick into their heads more deeply.
10. Make 'em feel: data and so on are important, but only feelings can really engage people
11. Be authentic: allow yourself to be vulnerable, take a risk

There are a lot of theories about storytelling, but the goal always has to be as follows:

• Get audience attention
• Teach your audience something or make them enthusiastic
• Inspire your audience to take action

--> Make them care

Storytelling always has a basic structure:

1. The situation: 

• Exposition: introduce the characters, relationships and the current situation
• Encourage: the hero comes across the problem

1. The confrontation:

• No way back: problem arises and the hero starts to act on it
• False hope: it seems like a break-through, but finally it isn't
• Everything seems lost: here does his utterly best do save the situation

1. The solution:

• Climax: is the hero succesful or does he fail?

In his courses, my dad talks about different approaches towards storytelling. It brings us too far to talk about them in detail. These are the main approaches:

• The seven classic plats (for example 'the search', 'the comedy', 'the tragedy', 'the journey and return...')
• The six basic structures 

Ah, this is all so interesting! There is a lot more to tell, but this will take us too far for this specific question. Why storytelling is important? Well, no matter how genius, innovative and powerful your idea is; if you can't convince the stakeholders, it will remain an idea and not a fact. Show facts and data, but most of all: use emotions to convince your audience so that they believe as much as you do. 

3. What is the role of community management in brand building and how to engage customers?

First of all, what is community management? 

Community management, at its core, is about relationships and how your brand seizes opportunities to interact with your community in public online spaces. 

Your community consists of your current customers, target audiences and all the people who interact with your brand directly and indirectly online.

The term is sometimes confused with Social Media Marketing. There is a difference:

• Social Media Marketing is the product and distribution of social content to reach new customers and communicate with your current ones. Here, you might be focused on things like reach, engagement and how much traffic a post drives to your site. It's actually just using social media to promote your business. GOAL: drive more people to buy your business.
• Customer Management is what happens after and beyond your social media publishing. It's part customer service, part listening to the internet and part being active in discussions that relate to your brand. It technically is every attempt to cultivate, nurture or engage with a given audience. GOAL: make the current community stronger and bigger.

--> If you for example post something on social media with the intention of building your social media audience, these two disciplines overlap. 

You can break community management down into 4 parts:

Why is it so important? Because community management shows your brand as a likeable, knowledgable personality that others can't help but want to engage with and it surfaces opportunities to fuel positive discussions about and around your products. It will give you a loyal fan base who's willing to advocate on behalf of your brand.

You can't only reach customer loyalty through enhancing their functional and economical benefits (price discount, coupons...). It's important to create loyalty through a solid brand community. Research indicates that there is a significant positive effect of brand community commitment on repurchase intentions and word of mouth. The more people are committed to the community, the greater their brand loyalty, which in return increases the purchase strength. 

Other research confirms the strength of community management:

• Online community commitment is a key influence to brand commitment
• Online community participants possess stronger brand commitment than consumers who are not member of the community

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Sources for this question:

• Shopify blog
• Forbes
• Article: Building Brand Loyalty - Won-Moo, Kwang-Ho & Minsung
• Article: it takes a marketplace community to raise brand commitment: the role of online communities 

4. Analyse or design a brand story for a chosen company

A very strong brand story is of course the one from Apple, but let's try and find another interesting one.

A nice example would be the brand Dove. What's Dove's main focus? Changing society's perception about beauty and individual's negative perceptions of self. Dove believes beauty should be a source of confidence and not an anxiety. They help you raise your self-esteem.

Dove already did several beautiful ad campaigns in which their vision is crystal clear. Look at this famous one for example:

Let's analyse this one. We can see a certain structure:

• Situation: introduction of the characters and explain what's going to happen
• Problem: not exactly a problem, but people start describing themselves and they highlight all the things they don't like, for example 'my chin is quite big'. They describe themselves in a quite ugly way. 
• Solution: other people start describing the person they met and that makes a change in the story. We can already hear that the descriptions are way more optimistic. Finally we get to see the result: the first sketch is compared with the second one and we can all see that the one they described themselves is uglier than the one the others described. The women themselves see that too and realise how they actually see themselves. Some even get emotional.
• Core message: you are more beautiful than you think

The powerful thing is that there's actually never a soap product in these kind of things. This confirms the statement that you actually buy the story (the why) en not the product (the what). 

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Sources for this question:

• Ozcontent
• Dove
• Allegory
• SalesForce

5. How could the chosen company build the brand in social media?

Dove already has a very good Facebook page. This is the Belgian one.

What they do good to create a good customer community:

• Answer questions
• React on positive as well as negative feedback 
• Use pictures of 'natural' people, not always photoshopped models
• Do competitions (people need to react on a post by posting a text or photo and Dove later pics the best one)
• Share pictures of the products in a consistent way
• Use the holidays to make relevant content (Christmas, Mother's Day...)
• Share videos with typical Dove-stories

This is their Instagram page. What they do well on it:

• Use very pretty pictures of the products
• Post quotes which are aligned with the vision (considering accepting yourself and so on)
• Post pictures of 'natural' women
• Use gifs in a subtle way
• Make sure everything is edited the same way