It’s a crowded marketplace out there, and having a strong brand story is essential to standing out and connecting with your audience. A brand story goes beyond just selling products or services—it conveys the deeper reasons for your brand's existence, your core values, and the vision you aspire to achieve. It's a narrative that encapsulates the why and where your brand began, the what and who that distinguishes its authenticity, the challenges it has faced and innovations it’s embraced, and the impact it aims to make in the world.
Let’s explore what makes a brand story compelling, break down its key elements, and guide you through the steps to creating a story with professional support that resonates with your audience and sets your brand apart.
A brand story is an element of a brand narrative. It tells the story of:
These elements capture your brand's purpose, values, vision, and mission. A brand story will often include things like your brand’s evolution, innovations or milestones, information about the owners and staff, and the clients and customers it serves. Like any story, there will be a beginning and a middle; however, in the case of an existing brand, there is no ending but rather an evolving brand narrative to carry it into the future.
Apple’s brand story, for example, starts with the company’s humble beginnings in a garage and goes through the creation of new technologies, focusing on their desire for innovation and to challenge the status quo. Their “Think Different” campaign, used in the early days between 1997 and 2002, focused on visionaries in all industries to create an association between their brand and the sort of change that notable people brought to the world.
Your brand story is comprised of four main elements: your brand purpose, values, vision, and mission. These can be used to help reinforce the history of your brand, owners, and staff to create a cohesive story that compels potential customers to choose your brand and services.
Now that you understand the key elements of a brand story, we’ll walk you through the steps to creating a compelling story that will help engage your potential customers. However, keep in mind that these steps are not accomplished overnight. Often, it’s beneficial to bring an expert perspective on brand marketing, like our Marketing + Design team at TAAG, to help focus your efforts and strategize accordingly.
You want to create a brand story to appeal specifically to your target market. Once you identify this, you can create a customer profile—or multiple, for every segment of your target audience. These personas can include details like age, education level, employment, hobbies, interests, values, and more.
The goal of creating a customer profile is to know who your ideal customer is—what their relevant needs and desires are, their shopping habits, where to find them, as well as their personal lifestyle or professional characteristics—depending on whether you cater to consumers or businesses. Anything significant that will influence whether they would be a good fit or interested in your brand and becoming your customer should be included.
Having a clear core message will help you define the elements of your brand story and clearly convey them to your audience. Ask yourself what the main message you want to convey about your brand is and how you want to position yourself vis-à-vis your competitors.
Make sure that your core messaging and positioning align with your brand story—it should be cohesive, understandable, and resonate with your audience. At TAAG, we work with you wherever you are in your brand journey, whether that’s exploring your corporate DNA, formulating new ideas, articulating your core message and tone, or extrapolating an established identity.
Outlining your brand's history is a crucial step in crafting a compelling brand story, as it provides the anchor for your narrative. Your brand's origin story is more than just a timeline of events—it's the heart of your brand's identity. It tells your audience why you started your business, the passion that drove you, and the unique journey that brought you to where you are today.
Highlighting key milestones not only showcases your achievements but also humanizes your brand by sharing the challenges and obstacles you've overcome. These experiences help build trust and credibility with your audience as they demonstrate resilience and a commitment to your mission.
Together with TAAG’s Marketing + Design team, you can also hone in further and turn these pivotal moments of inspiration, breakthrough innovations, or hard-fought victories into engaging ‘chapters’ of your brand story that can then be showcased on your print, web, video, digital and social media assets. A form of content marketing, micro-storytelling helps to create a deeper emotional connection with your customers, making your brand more relatable and memorable while reinforcing your unique value proposition.
Our years of experience have given us the tools and processes to collaborate with you to explore and curate your authentic brand identity to inform a narrative arc that is emblematic of your corporate genesis—who you are, what you do and how it is distinct, why you do it and for whom, how you started and where you’re at now. Together, we can discover your brand essence and create your brand story. Some questions to ask when crafting your story:
Using emotional triggers in your brand story is a powerful way to connect with your audience on a deeper, more personal level. Emotions are one of the driving forces behind decision-making, and when your story resonates emotionally, it has the potential to inspire action, build loyalty, and create lasting impressions. At TAAG, we’ll work with you on a brand narrative designed to evoke the emotive characteristics and qualities that align with both your brand story and your audience’s quest for a product or service that is also in alignment—such as empathy, excitement, or inspiration, to name a few. Our goal is to make your audience feel something meaningful as they engage with your story, whether that’s through design, content or ads.
By relating to your customers and their situations, you allow your audience to see themselves in your brand story and narrative—reflected in the struggles, challenges, and triumphs you present. This relatability fosters a sense of connection and understanding, making your brand more than just a business—it becomes a part of their story, too. Our content strategies encompass every emotive aspect of brand marketing:
Emphasizing these emotional triggers can transform your brand story from a simple narrative into a powerful tool that drives engagement and fosters a deeper bond with your audience.
Crafting a strong brand story requires more than just the narrative structure—you need strong language and storytelling skills and engaging visuals that work for the platforms where you want to reach your audience. Additional tips for crafting a compelling brand story include:
You want to be authentic and honest from the start of your brand story. Tell the truth about your brand history and origins—this will help you build brand trust from the very beginning.
Use simple and clear language in your story. Your brand story isn’t the time to break out a thesaurus and try to use more complex language than is natural for you. You shouldn’t, however, talk down to your audience or speak in a way that isn’t natural to you or your brand.
Once this brand foundation is established, it’s time to design, develop or refresh your visual identity. TAAG Marketing + Design can help to ensure essential graphic elements, such as logo, colour palette, typography and imagery, are emblematic of your brand and define your style.
Your brand story should include visual and multimedia elements, but you also don’t want it to be too cluttered and busy. Graphics and imagery that are easily adapted to and shareable on social media will be the best way to connect with your audience—this way, you can adapt parts of your story for your brand’s social media accounts and provide easily shareable graphics for your audience.
TAAG’s Creative Convergence Process can help you with everything you need to enhance your brand story’s visuals and find success. Our design and marketing services include:
Apple is one of the most well-known brands in the world, and that’s due in part to its successful brand story. Steve Jobs wanted to convey the message that “The ones who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.” In 1984, they ran a Superbowl ad to this effect, but it almost didn’t air—the ad tested poorly with the audience.
The key to Apple’s success is taking the risk of airing it anyway. Since 1984, they have based the ad on George Orwell’s novel, of the same name, creating a commentary against their corporate competition and the larger culture and saying that Apple’s products are revolutionary.
Google is another incredibly well-known brand. People use Google to mean any sort of web search, no matter the platform–a credit to their success in branding. The secret? Their focus is on human stories and the value they bring to people’s lives. Their commercials often feature minimal branding, focusing on the problems and solutions while keeping their logos and branding to a minimum. They focus on emotional impact to make you feel like their products will make your life happier, healthier, and altogether better.
Old Spice is a deodorant brand that takes a different approach to identifying its target audience. While its deodorant is primarily for men, it targets its advertising towards women with its famous The Man Your Man Could Smell Like campaign. It sells the story that its deodorant will make ‘your man’ smell like the perfect man, encouraging women to buy Old Spice for their partners. Its quotable advertising also inspired many parodies and spin-offs, further increasing brand recognition and awareness in all markets.
Nike’s Just Do It campaign is iconic, especially when paired with its simple and recognizable swoop logo. Their ‘angry chicken’ campaign manages to confuse and intrigue audiences, starting with a character—a man—who has a problem–that he’s being followed by an angry chicken–and a solution—his Nike shoes helping him scale walls and parkour to get away from the angry chicken. While this isn’t a problem that most people are likely to face, the strangeness and unanswered questions–why is the chicken following him, and what will it do if it catches him?–are why the campaign was successful. It got people talking and was memorable the next time someone was shopping for sneakers.
A compelling brand story is a powerful tool that can connect your brand with your audience on a deeper level. By clearly defining your purpose, values, vision, and mission and weaving them into a relatable narrative, you can create a story that resonates and inspires. Crafting your brand story is not just an exercise in creativity—it's an essential step in building trust and loyalty with your customers. We encourage you to start crafting your own brand story today, and we'd love to hear it! Share your brand story in the comments below.
If you're ready to take your brand story to the next level, contact TAAG today. Our creative convergence process will help you design a story that captivates and engages your audience across all platforms.
