“Success is dependent on effort.”
Sophocles
The story a brand tells needs to be relevant to make any sort of impact on its audience. Unfortunately many brands tell stories that have no relevance to their audience. The best way to tell a relevant story is to establish a personal connection with your audience.
Why Do You Need To Establish A Personal Connection With Your Audience?
Without a personal connection with your audience they have no reason to care about your story. As humans we have a finite attention span and we will only care about stories that matter to us. We need to hear brand stories that we can relate to on a personal level.
The storytellers that we like best position our lives and problems at the heart of their storytelling. We feel that they care about us and their stories reflect our successes and failures.
What Makes Us Care About A Brand Story?
The reason we will care about a brand story is when it affects us on an emotional basis. A brand needs to identify where their story and their customers story overlap and highlight this as much as possible in their storytelling.
How To Find A Personal Connection With Your Audience?
The brand that that tells the best brand story is the brand that understands its customer best. That brand knows what really matters to their customer, even anticipates a customer need before they do. Steve Jobs was very good at this and his brand storytelling reflected emotional requirements his audience did not even know they had.
Moving On
“True knowledge exists in knowing that you know nothing.”
Socrates
Brand storytellers need to combine their unique audience knowledge with innovative storytelling. It is not enough to put your audience at the center of your storytelling. You need to do this in a way that is innovative and different. With so much brand storytelling available the packaging really matters. Think about ways of telling your story in ways your audience have not seen before.
Personal connections are dependent on emotional connections and making your audience feel unique. Every brand story should be reviewed against a single criteria, “will this make your audience feel special”. If the answer is no maybe you should redo your story.