Man has always been driven by narratives, just think of the stories told in cave paintings and how human communication is established in the attribution of meanings to words. Today, the practice of storytelling is adopted for several purposes and the strategic communication of brands and companies emerges as one of them. Storytelling has thus become a powerful marketing tool.
The term storytelling refers to the practice or technique of presenting a good story. With origin in the English language, this concept comes from the notions “story” and “telling”.
Man has always been driven by narratives, just think of the stories told in cave paintings and how human communication is established in the attribution of meanings to words. Today, the practice of storytelling is adopted for several purposes and the strategic communication of brands and companies emerges as one of them. Storytelling has thus become a powerful marketing tool.
When applied to a company’s branding, storytelling can be understood as a strategy whose goal is to establish an emotional connection with customers so that they trust the company and become loyal to it.
In fact, studies carried out in the field of consumer psychology reveal that people tend to remember 22 times more from stories than from mere mathematical facts and defend that narratives activate areas of the brain responsible for the formulation of speeches, the ability to generate empathy and even pain. Thus, human nature itself is also very sensitive to the construction of narratives.
In this sense, the stories created by companies contribute to help create recognition, understanding, empathy and to build the meaning behind organisational identities. For example, telling real narratives behind brands to explain their origin is a way to make the public not only know the company, but also create an identification and emotional bond with it.
Internally, storytelling is also an important tool since, through the narrated stories about the company it is possible that its employees build a connection with it. Once the employees are involved with the company and its purpose, it is easier for the storytelling culture to be transmitted to the public, also involving them in the narratives and preferably making them the protagonist of the story.
While the market is more and more saturated with material goods, brands look for ways to differentiate themselves and the challenge that many go through is to represent their values in a solid way. Storytelling emerges as an excellent strategy to communicate them.
But how can you effectively apply storytelling in your company?
Storytelling can be applied in marketing in several formats, including commercials, video stories, social media posts or even blog articles.
To start, the ideal is to define very well the goal you want to achieve with the story, to know very well your target audience in order to captivate them choosing the best tone and language possible. Next, you should build an element of identification so that the target audience can identify with the narrative and consequently create an emotional bond with it.
Based on these elements, define a story with a beginning, middle and end and with a plot aligned with your company’s identity. The way in which you can transmit the narrative depends on the media channel chosen, such as digital platforms, television, radio or press. In the case of digital, we talk about digital storytelling, which involves the use of digital software to build multimedia narratives in image, video, text or audio.
To conclude, storytelling reveals itself as a marketing and communication strategy that adds value to companies as it promotes their recognition and differentiation from the competition and allows the creation of an emotional connection with the intended target audience.
By: Margarida Oleiro, Digital Marketing Trainee