The secret to winning brand marketing: Know how to tell stories

If someone asked you, if you don’t want to stay in a hotel when traveling, but want to rent someone’s home, which company would you think of first?

While there are many companies that fit this profile, the first one that comes to mind is definitely Airbnb. Why is this? It’s not because Airbnb is the biggest. (HomeAway actually does twice as many gross bookings per year.) Nor is it because it's been around the longest. (Airbnb is actually new.)

That’s because they are the best storytellers in the industry.

Most vacation rental brands approach their marketing from the same angle:

“Look, we’re listed!”

“Look at how many cities we’ve entered!”

“Look how popular we are!

Make no mistake: Companies like HomeAway and Trip Advisor do have an advantage over Airbnb in certain areas, like revenue and number of listings, given their age and acquisitions. However, when considering growth rate, Airbnb has dominated the scene over the past few years, expanding much faster than most of its competitors combined.

This hyper growth is the result of a combination of factors: timing, market disruption, strong leadership, smart business models , strategic decisions, great UX, etc. Perhaps one of the most important factors in their success is their mastery of storytelling.

What makes a good story?

Storytelling in business is different from storytelling simply for entertainment. As your team works to develop a story that communicates the value of your products and services, make sure you pay attention to these five points.

(Note: These suggestions apply to both your company’s internal and external storytelling. Gaining internal alignment and support for UX decisions is just as important as marketing to your customers, so your internal branding efforts go hand in hand with your external efforts.)

Your story should convey something unique about you, not a “me too” message

The last thing customers need is cookie-cutter information. Because they are bombarded with thousands of marketing messages every day. How can your marketing make you stand out?

Figuring out your differentiation requires looking at your competitors and peers in the right light (even if you don’t consider them a threat). What kind of stories and materials do they use? What is unique about you in the eyes of your audience?

If you can’t hone in on a key feature that sets you apart from your competitors and is relevant to your users, you’ll end up being nobody rather than stand out.

Your story should resonate with your users’ needs, not serve your business

Whether it’s a new marketing campaign , website redesign or product idea, it’s important to have a goal in mind when embarking on a project. Most of the time, this goal is business-related: driving sales, increasing revenue, and improving customer engagement and retention.

These goals ensure that your efforts are directed towards achieving profitability for your company. However, these goals are not the only focus.

When business goals take precedence over audience needs, it’s hard to keep your product popular. The interesting relationship between brand strategy and design is that you can only achieve long-term business goals if you put the needs of your audience first.

Your story should be about one big idea, not lots of ideas.

When you tell a story to a friend or colleague, you can’t help but start thinking about all the different fragments of memories you want to share. Companies often take the same approach in marketing, filling your story with as many features, benefits, and information as possible.

However, when you try to tell someone everything, they end up remembering nothing. That's why the big idea is so important. This is the core of your brand strategy: a concept or idea that you want people to remember. This idea has great potential when it can differentiate your business from your competitors.

Your story should convey why, not what

Steve Jobs was a master at this. For example, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, brands like Dell, Intel , and Sony all produced tiny MP3 players with all the cool features like hundreds of megabytes of memory and cool designs.

Meanwhile, Apple's marketing focuses on the concept of "Think Different," which is very different from Dell's "Easy as Dell" and Intel's "Intel Inside" slogans. People not only need this kind of divergent thinking, but also resonate with it and want to own this product.

Apple then delivered a simple story that focused on the overall experience of the product: 1,000 songs in your pocket. This story not only propelled the product to success, but also changed the entire industry.

Your story should showcase a genuine and authentic brand, not just a facade.

If the brand itself isn’t particularly attractive or interesting, it’s normal to embellish it. But sooner or later the audience will know the truth, and the harm caused by it will be much greater than telling the audience the truth at the beginning.

Take Volkswagen , for example. This fun, quirky car brand always does things a little differently. Their story seems a bit exaggerated: a cool car powered by diesel does not pollute the environment. However, what this nice story tried to hide was the truth that Volkswagen’s in-car software masked their fuel by showing lower pollution levels—a move that ultimately cost the company billions of dollars in fines and severe reputational damage.

While sugarcoating your marketing may seem like a smart move that’s worth a try, if you stick to authentic messaging, your brand is more likely to attract the same type of customers and ultimately avoid pitfalls. A good copy can also make your brand charming and interesting.

How to curate your story and brand strategy

The above points may seem simple, but they are still difficult to implement. If you don't know where to start, or you're still polishing your story, try the following.

Empathy Map

Design thinking starts with empathy. Empathy maps can help teams better understand their users by brainstorming their audience’s feelings, influences, tasks, pain points, and goals. Repeat this exercise for the typical users in each customer segment, and then think about how to position your product to resonate with their emotional needs rather than focusing on product features and benefits.

Five Whys

This technique was originally used in manufacturing to explore the true cause of potential problems. It has the same advantages in UI/UX design and storytelling.

Think about why a typical customer would choose to buy your product. Then ask “Why?” five times to get to the deeper reasons that could be the main selling point of your brand story.

For example:

Why would someone buy a project management tool ? Just to make it easier to manage multiple products?

1. Why does this product improve their experience? Because they face difficulties in keeping records.
2. Why is record keeping important? Because they won’t feel overwhelmed.
3. Why is it important to allay their anxiety? Because they can spend more time thinking strategically and handling important tasks, rather than spending a lot of time on day-to-day management.
4. Why is it critical that they spend more time thinking strategically and working on important tasks? Because then they have better output and think proactively rather than reactively.
5. Why are good output and proactive thinking important? Because only then can they find confidence and realize their value in their work.

By digging deeper through this practice, you’ll get the best explanation behind why customers shopped around and ultimately chose your product (confidence and value realization), rather than the strategic, boring features that everyone is promoting (easy project management).

Discrimination Matrix

Identifying your brand’s key differentiator is always more challenging than expected. We all think our products are unique, but can the average consumer tell the difference? Using a differentiation matrix can help you identify your company's unique selling points and what your customers care about most.

Here’s how it works:

1. Write down all the features that you think make your product or brand different from your competitors and peers. Write each characteristic on a separate sticky note.
2. Then look at your competitors and peers’ marketing (their websites, products, collateral, packaging, newsletters, etc.). What messaging do they use to promote their brand? How does their advocacy make them different? (Remember: it doesn’t matter whether they actually follow through on these promises, because the prospect doesn’t actually know the truth.)
3. Next, review your empathy map to understand the characteristics that your customers care about most. What is most important to them? What characteristics will turn the tide and make them choose you over your competitors?
4. Finally, place the sticky notes in the appropriate quadrant of the matrix based on how unique each characteristic is (see question 2) and how relevant each characteristic is to your audience (see question 3).

The feature on the far upper right corner is the highlight of your story.

Brainstorm with a content strategist or copywriter

Sometimes you need a talented person to express your ideas. Content strategists are particularly skilled at organizing information and understanding multiple perspectives. Copywriters are experts at using the most appropriate words to convey your message and guide your audience to take action. Both types of people are valuable resources who can absorb all the ideas generated in the above practices and find the most concise and attractive way to express them.

What’s your story?

From day one, Airbnb wasn’t at the forefront with its features or benefits. They have always focused on one thing: real experiences, including "the experience of traveling like a human" (their 2008-2009 story), "finding a sense of belonging somewhere in the world" (the 2013-14 story), "living like a local" (the 2016 story), etc. Their designs may have changed many times, but one thing has remained constant: their talent for telling a compelling, consistent story to clients, investors , employees, and everyone in between.

Airbnb’s storytelling skills took them from startup to global giant valued at over $30 billion (and growing). Can you harness the power of storytelling to become the next Airbnb?

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