Searching for inspiration for your brand story? You might first want to look into these five cool and examples that we have found interesting. Get inspired by brand names, campaigns, and storytelling techniques. Learn what brand driven storytelling is, how you can come up with a brand name, and why good storytelling is important.
Many organisations have written stories before us and many will follow, but what makes a companies’ story an inspiring one? And what exactly is branding? This is when your audience builds a relationship with your organisation, and resonates with your vision, voice, visuals, and values. In order for them to resonate with your brand image, you’ve got to tell a story. This story will enable you to create a coherent and consistent brand identity that people can connect with.
But how do you write a consistent and interesting brand story, you might ask? That is all around the values, images, tone of voice, and vision you have for your company. By bringing these elements together, and by getting inspired, you can start creating the story behind your brand. Many brands have done this before, and by creating interesting campaigns and using certain storytelling techniques, these companies were able to build a strong relationship with their audience.
Sometimes, organisations need to look into their marketing and branding story for them to realize change is needed. Many businesses have gone through a rebranding phase, from which some of them came out stronger, and some of them didn’t. The key for success is to really listen and research what your audience wants and needs. By growing with your listeners and catering to what they want from you, you will gain the most success when rebranding your business.
You can use this checklist to help out with writing your story. Just follow these simple steps:
(Re)branding your business will help you to align better with your target audience! How? We will discuss it in our free workbook.
How to use storytelling techniques to increase likeability? What kind of brand story examples are out there? What can we learn from bigger and smaller companies, and even influencers that have built and rebuilt their businesses before us? Let’s look into 5 brand inspirations and what we can learn from them.
As Phil Knight, the founder of Nike, says in his book Shoedog: ‘You are remembered, prophetically, for the rules you break’. And rules he did break. Phil was a pioneer, someone who built his brand a whole lot differently from his competitors at that time. As Phill knew from the beginning of building his sportsbrand, working together with celebrities and professional athletes would help grow his brand tremendously.
By asking athletes such as Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, Rafael Nadal, Christiano Ronaldo, and many more to promote their Nike products, Phill and his team knew that people were more inclined to belong to their brand. Nike has always been good at building a ‘story’ and a ‘feeling’ for their brand. With clever one liners such as ‘Just do it’ they tied customers to their brand without pushing on sales down their throats.
What can we learn from this?
By giving yourself, and other influencing people a voice, you can easily build a brand that your audience will connect and resonate with.
Joe Gebbia, the co-founder of Airbnb, sarcastically says within his TED Talk that the moment that Airbnb pitched their ideas to their future investors they were so enthusiastic about the concept. Their pitch was the following:
‘We want to build a website where people publicly post pictures of their most intimate spaces, their bedrooms, their bathrooms – the kinds of rooms they usually keep closed when people come over, and then, on the internet, they’re going to invite complete strangers to come to sleep in their homes. It’s going to be huge’.
The investors didn’t quite agree with them, and saw the problems that Airbnb really needed to work on. These problems were around the deeply rooted stranger-danger social biases that were very much consistent within many, mainly western societies.
This is where Joe Gebbia and his team went researching everything that had to do with building trust. If not being able to trust one another was the main pain-point of the people they wanted to target, then they had to find out how to take away this problem, and make that into the strength of their platform. Together with Stanford University, they researched what makes people trust each other, and what doesn’t. Based on the research results, they created the well-known reputation system. Using this reputation system on their platform made it much easier for the users to trust one another. This was one of the reasons why Airbnb grew out to be a huge success.
What can we learn from this?
Know your audience’s pain-points. What are the things they avoid? What are the things they don’t want to do? How can you solve this problem? Research, test, and see how you can turn your plan’s weaknesses into your plan’s strength.
Gary Vee, investor, entrepreneur, writer, and CEO of his own company Vayner X. He is also a well-known public speaker and some might even call him a motivational speaker. Listening to Gary, you will find yourself thinking about topics regarding marketing, comms, and branding. He is the master of creating pillar-content, explaining topics in great detail and then sharing this content in the form of micro-content via multiple social platforms.
Gary has gotten himself a following of millions of people and it doesn’t seem he wants to stop soon. As Gary says himself: ‘I’m building for the long term because I think it’s about the brand. Many of you are in it for the quick sale, and you are going to be forgotten’. Gary thinks about his brand in a strategic way and just like his brand grows, he grows with it.
What can we learn from this?
Branding is a long-term investment. Creating pillar-content and micro-content and sending out your message in various ways enabled Gary and his team to reach and tell their story to a huge audience. Through this process, they keep on consistently investing into building their brand identity.
One of the amazing companies that we have worked with is Qualgro. We have gone through a rebranding phase together with them. We guided them through a website redesign, improving website usability, search engine optimization, and brand image optimization. Qualgro contacted Mowgli to help with making their website more user-friendly and to help provide a better representation of their brand.
Because of the rebranding phase and the implementations that were needed to have an up-to-date brand that resonated with the target audience, Qualgro found itself having a huge success. The speed of the website was improved by almost 20 seconds. The bounce rate was lowered by 10%, and people stayed longer on Qualgro’s website, with an average of 30 seconds longer than before.
What can we learn from this?
Rebranding might be a daunting concept, something that your business might shy away from. However, if done correctly, your business might experience some tremendous growth thanks to it. You can read more about Qualgro’s case study here.
One of the most influential marketing and storytelling techniques is playing onto your audience’s emotions. Whether these emotions are positive, such as focusing on creating happiness, trust, and the feeling of belonging, or focusing on more negative emotions such as sadness, fear, and guilt. These emotions based marketing techniques often work wonders on how people feel about your campaign, product, and/or brand.
Coca Cola is one of the best examples when it comes to sharing the emotion ‘happiness’ through their commercials and marketing campaigns. They even use this word often throughout their marketing materials, for example with the slogan: ‘Open a Coke, Open Happiness’. Their commercials are often accompanied with upbeat music, colourful images, smiling people, who open up a cold Coca Cola can in a summer-setting.
What can we learn from this?
Look into which emotion you want your audience to be left with after interacting with your marketing campaigns. Do you want them to feel happy? Then implement happy imagery and slogans just like Coca Cola always does.
Need help developing a solid branding strategy? That’s what we are here for. Get in touch today to book a call, we’ll be happy to assist you in growing your business.
