To tell a good brand story, you must learn the four golden principles

Why do brands need to tell stories?

Stories are a form of information organization that is most easily accepted by the human brain. Humans have been hungry for stories since childhood. For brands, the essence of story is a brilliant communication strategy that integrates knowledge from multiple fields such as creativity, emotional intelligence, consumer psychology, language expression skills and even neuroscience. A good story can help brands convey information more efficiently and achieve better persuasive effects.

More important than learning to tell a good story is being able to judge what makes a good story.

A good story can touch the audience’s emotional buttons

“If you want to build a ship, don’t hire people to gather wood or assign them any tasks. Instead, inspire people to yearn for the ocean.” If you want to inspire people to yearn for the ocean, tell them a story about the ocean.

Psychological research shows that vivid, emotionally arousing stimuli enter the mind more easily and are more fully processed by the brain when encoded. A good story has the ability to stir up strong emotions in people, whether it is emotion, sadness, ecstasy, anger or fear. If the emotion is strong enough, it means it is easier to form a memory.

A major characteristic of human emotions is that they are "universal", with commonalities and regularities. From young girls to elderly people, joy, anger, sorrow, happiness, sight, smell, taste and touch are all part of their shared sensory world. Everyone cares about their inner world, desires self-growth, and wants to achieve fulfillment and happiness. It is based on these common inner needs that good stories can capture the hearts of many consumers like a net.

Swedish home furnishing brand IKEA has always been well versed in playing the emotional card. When it wanted to convey the message to consumers that "IKEA's prices remain unchanged all year round", it did not explain it through a bunch of boring data, but instead made a 1-minute short film.

In the short film, a mother takes her son to choose furniture in IKEA store. The young son shows extraordinary maturity. For example, he can identify the texture of the table, chat up beautiful staff, carry heavy objects, and take out his bank card to pay the bill. It was not until he sat in the driver's seat that the audience realized that the son was already an adult, and the little boy before was just him from his mother's perspective. "It would be nice if some things could never change," such as a child in a mother's eyes and the prices at IKEA. The wisdom of IKEA's storytelling is to move the shrewd housewives rather than confront their shrewdness.

Baidu initiated the "Discover the Good Craftsmen Around You" campaign and shot a series of documentary story shorts, allowing the "Good Craftsmen Around You" to impress small business groups and the general public. The "good craftsman" here is a little different from the "craftsman" that many people are talking about nowadays. Carpenters, barbers, watch repairers, manicurists, training teachers, ... they are in the streets, doing ordinary things that are not obscure or sophisticated. They have ideas and personalities, and make the ordinary things unique.

Small and medium-sized businesses can be seen everywhere. In the past, their business was somewhat dependent on the weather, and was very far away from such words as "getting rich overnight", "tens of millions in financing", and "valuation of hundreds of millions". It is precisely because of this that this group of "craftsmen" appears particularly real in the hearts of small merchants and consumers, enough to touch their common emotional buttons: the persistent pursuit of something, there is a reward for hard work, and people with personality can also live a fulfilling life... These elements actually meet the expectations of most people for daily life, and brand appeal is thus formed.

A good story is a mini value

It is not enough for a brand story to be merely interesting or impressive. Since stories reflect people’s value system to a certain extent, they also become an excellent carrier for brands to convey their values. In the era of consumption upgrading, the interpretation of values ​​has become more important. A brand with aligning values ​​is like a reliable and opinionated friend to consumers, making the brand more credible and approachable.

The best way to spread values ​​is to do it silently, in a subtle way rather than in an inculcating way. The traditional way of conveying brand values ​​is relatively "rough", mainly hoping to make consumers "surrender" by demonstrating the power of the brand; however, the way a good story conveys values ​​is precisely to focus on details, using small ideas, behaviors, and concepts to express them, which has the effect of impressing consumers and making them actively spread the word.

PX Mart is the largest local supermarket brand in Taiwan. Earlier this year, the main value they promoted in their marketing advertisements was “saving money”. But how can we popularize this seemingly stingy and outdated value system and gain recognition from consumers, especially the majority of young people who expect a luxurious life?

PX Mart’s approach is to select a series of ordinary young Taiwanese people and let them each talk about their own shopping aesthetics and attitude towards life. The people who appear in the advertisement are not middle-aged or elderly people who are keen on supermarkets, but young people who look fashionable and have a cost-conscious consumption concept. Copywriting such as "PX Mart won't make you fashionable, but the money you save can make you make yourself fashionable" and "Why should I pay ten dollars for something I can buy for eight dollars?" conveys a PX Mart-style , money-saving and fashionable consumption concept.

A good story does not preach, but inspires a sense of immersion

The way of thinking in a good story is inspirational rather than "conclusionary"; the values ​​conveyed by a good story are not expressed in a "preachy" tone, there are no stereotyped typical images, and the ideas conveyed are by no means "unique".

In addition to positive energy stimulating people's sense of involvement, the "attraction" of negative energy can often bring good results. The coffee brand UCC BLACK has insight into the complaints suppressed in the hearts of urban people and launched a "Some Negative Energy Every Day" campaign. Through short copywriting, it outlines small stories with negative energy, which completely ignited the enthusiasm of netizens. "When everything goes well, you feel really great, and when you encounter troubles, blame Mercury retrograde", "Whenever you make up your mind to save money, there will be people around you asking you to be nicer to yourself"... These texts can remind people of some people and things around them, and can easily arouse the public's resonance and participate in this complaining contest.

Four principles for brands to tell good stories

From ancient times to the present, stories are the most widely circulated and longest-lasting form of information organization. In the context of the Internet age, stories are the easiest form to spread on social media and attract user experience and interaction.

As mentioned earlier, the essence of story is a brilliant communication strategy. Only by realizing this can marketers avoid confusing brand stories with fictional novels, film scripts, news writing and other fields that also focus on storytelling skills. You don't need a long and elaborate idea. A 10-word copy or a 2-minute short film can also accomplish the task of telling a story.

KISS principle: The mind is tired of complex information

The KISS principle originated from David Mamet’s film theory, which originally meant “ Keep it Simple and Stupid”. This theory is widely used in fields such as product design and is also applicable to storytelling.

Psychological research shows that the human mind processes information selectively, and the mind is naturally bored with and habitually blocks complex information. The mind likes to remember concise information.

"Our repairmen are the loneliest guys in town" This is an advertising slogan from Maytag Appliance Company in the United States. Although it is just a short declarative sentence, it contains enough information for the reader to reconstruct a story based on it:

"There was a group of Maytag repairmen who had gone through hard training and were eager to use their skills and knowledge to help others. Then came the tragic turn: Maytag, with its focus on quality, had trained a group of well-trained repairmen while also producing products that were indestructible. As a result, the poor repairmen never had a job to do their job."

This is such a story, short but full of imagination. There’s no need to fill your story with complicated information and plots; the most important thing is to let your audience experience it and fill in the context on their own.

Distillation Principle: Finding the Heart of the Story

Most advice on how to tell a story is to build a story from the outside in. Literature or scripts provide examples such as the eight-point storyline: background, trigger, exploration, surprise, choice, climax, reversal, and resolution. This is obviously an illusion. If you know these criteria, you can piece together a good story.

Sometimes, but saying too much can diminish the power of the story. The birth of a good story requires a "distillation" process. You need to refine complex information into a wonderful story and make it attractive.

“Prototype Psychology”: Arousing Emotional Resonance of Audience

Let scholars study plot types and perfect story lines. The focus of marketers is to use stories to convey emotions. Emotions bring alive thoughts and the information that expresses them. Like color and shape, emotion is an important component of the audience's various experiences, adding details to the audience's memory and imagination.

Swiss psychologist Jung believed that "archetype" is a theme and a common symbol of human culture in the collective unconscious. There are always some story characters or types that appear repeatedly in different stories. Psychologists' archetypal psychology has developed and summarized six archetypal concepts from archetypal psychology: orphan, wanderer, warrior, altruist, innocent, and magician. Careful observation reveals that many famous stories are derived from these six archetypes.

Human emotions are varied and unpredictable, but they are all relatively easy to be hit by these six archetypes because they can activate the psychological experiences accumulated and inherited by humans since ancient times.

The sensory principle: opening the floodgates of imagination

The famous writer Mark Twain once proposed a writing rule: "Don't just describe the old woman screaming, but bring the woman to the scene and let the audience really hear her scream." Psychological research shows that stories are encoded by the areas of the human brain responsible for social and emotional aspects - the limbic system, the amygdala, and important parts of the brain that trust sensory perception more than the part of the brain that is good at remembering symbols, numbers, and letters. In this respect, numbers and language are far less representative of facts than memory and images.

Marketers need to know how to mobilize people's five senses to perceive the world - smell, taste, hearing, touch, and vision, in order to simulate an influential experience. The first time you heard the story about a man who woke up in a bathtub filled with ice in Las Vegas with his kidney removed, you could almost feel the chill of the ice in the tub and the snap of it as the man stood up. You could almost see the handwritten note the perpetrator left telling him to call the hospital quickly. Such a story full of sensory details can make people's imagination produce this feeling before their frontal lobe has time to doubt the credibility of the story.

Conclusion

Telling a good story instead of letting your monologue become the toxic hydrogen that kills consumers' interests has become an important task for marketers in the era of "information overload". There are various "technical" techniques for the creation of good stories. Many writers have shared their writing skills. The "KISS principle", "distillation principle", "archetype principle" and "sensory principle" are the weights that marketers need to remember at the "Tao" level, and are also the yardsticks for measuring an excellent brand story.

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This article was compiled and published by @乌玛小曼 ( Qinggua Media ). Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting!