What is a Brand Story?

My first post referenced brand stories obliquely—“Madison Avenue’s attempts to brand everything they would have us cherish.”  To be clear, brands are not stories because they do not retell a chain of events or a step-by-step narrative, but successful brands connect with their customer audience in a compelling or memorable way.  An effective brand practitioner will manage their brands in a disciplined fashion --through advertising, promotions and publicity or sponsorship events of all sorts—all of which become part of the unfolding brand story.

With almost $280 billion spent on all types of advertising in 2007, in the United States alone, it can be assumed that a great deal of art and skill has been applied towards creating brand stories, and that the techniques employed by the artists, copywriters, producers and marketers are sophisticated enough to confound and confuse the unaware consumer.  The level of proficiency required to get the most out of a brand story and to understand its relevance to our needs may be much higher than our attention spans will support.

On the other hand, with so many branded messages bombarding an individual on a daily basis, only

A cornucopia of branded messages...

the most shrill, clever or well-placed actually get through.  Even then, the advertisement may be effective at compelling us to buy or try a product, but it may not contribute to the overall brand story in a meaningful way.  A talented marketer (storyteller) understands that the brand’s narrative builds suspense —first this happened, and then that happened which caused this to happen…  If the suspense (the buying experience, the logo, the merchant, the site… ) is enough of a hook to keep the customer loyal, it will be that much easier to establish the brand’s relevance.  A vibrant, trusted brand has more success with brand loyalty and trial of new products and services.

So to simplify, a good brand story must have a narrative and must connect the story to its audience in some way.  As with other types of stories, the consumer must grasp how the layers or brand touch points are relevant to their needs, their lives.

A simple example: 

FDX, a relatively modest corporation accelerated its upward spiral by purchasing Caliber System Inc. which also had freight forwarding and logistics subsidiaries. In 2002, they changed their name to FedEx Corporation, not Federal Express, to cater to the fast-paced business environment where it took too long to utter the extra syllables. 

Find the white arrow...

The logo itself addresses speed with the almost hidden arrow embedded in the negative space between the “E” and “x”.  Every arm of the company is rebranded FedEx no matter what service they deliver and acquisitions are always designed for speed of use; Kinko’s became FedEx Kinko’s, and is now simply FedEx Office.

The FedEx narrative is all about advances in delivering speed to businesses worldwide as their tagline proudly proclaimed in 2002, “Don’t worry, there’s a FedEx for that.”