A brand narrative or brand story is an essential ingredient when building a strong brand strategy. It should encompass an organisation’s purpose and reason for being. A well-defined brand narrative considers what your core target audience needs and wants from your business, at this point and beyond.
Ensuring your brand narrative is aligned to the internal and external business helps to deliver more informed, strategic decision making.
Some of the most iconic brands have been sharing and shaping their brand narrative from their beginnings, and it is one central and very important aspect in their ability to build their longstanding brand identity and brand equity. Think Apple, Lego, Coca-Cola – their brand narrative has evolved to align to changing markets, customer needs and the pace of innovation. B2B brands can also capitalise on the power of a strong brand narrative. Communicating your brand narrative at every opportunity is the strongest and most effective way to embed your brand positioning into the market and the minds of your clients.
A brand narrative is a powerful communication tool, and it can go a long way in building trust between a brand and its client. Any communication coming from your brand needs to be clear, single-minded, consistent, and reflect your brand’s personality. There are a few rules of engagement when crafting your brand narrative.
If you are mindful of these guidelines when crafting your brand narrative, it will help you drive business growth by providing inspiration and direction for those inside and outside your organisation.
But it’s important to remember, your narrative is never set-in-stone. It is a piece of communication that evolves over time. It is likely that once you have crafted your brand narrative, you may look to refresh it further down the track to ensure that it is future-proofed and aligned to the evolving conditions in the market.
Revisiting or refining your organisation’s brand narrative can ensure your brand and its messaging remains relevant during periods of change.
Your brand narrative needs to directly reflect your organisation’s values and emotional benefits; it provides a reason to choose. Brand narratives also articulate tangible points of differentiation and help to create brand experiences that change existing perceptions.
Ensuring your brand narrative is suitable for the entire portfolio of brands helps build equity over the long term. As we’ve seen recently, many organisations have gone through mergers and acquisitions over the past 12 months. In cases such as these, it might be necessary to craft an overarching corporate narrative for their parent brand and then more specific brand narratives for their sub brands or product brands.
Refreshing your brand narrative can help reflect a change in internal and external purpose. This change is likely to have occurred in many of these evolving organisations who have gone through mergers and acquisitions.
And it is important to remember that a revised brand narrative has significant strategic implications that need to be considered across a variety of stakeholders.
As we’ve seen over the past year of turbulence, many businesses have shown agility in adjusting their narrative to incorporate a more empathetic approach around the pandemic, the general health messages, the stay at home movement and now the economic uncertainty of the times ahead that their customers are universally facing.
Whatever the level of change that occurs within your brand narrative when navigating these conditions, it is most important that brands stick to their values, look to showcase these values at every opportunity, and live up to their purpose. Brands have a real opportunity to build out a refreshed narrative in this context, one that will resonate with their target clients and understand their new pain points.
BrandMatters is in the business of building strong, enduring brands that enable business growth. To find out how we can help create or revitalise your brand and brand narrative, please contact us.
