Building a brand is about so much more than aesthetics.
Once you have the look and feel of your brand nailed, you want to get down to figuring out how it sounds. Is it cool and current? A joker? Serious and sagely?
Who do you want it to appeal to? What stories do you want to tell?
Building a narrative for your brand takes time - and it takes PR!
You can read more about finding your brand’s identity here, but if you’ve decided that and want to move to the next stage, our communications manager, Amy, has some tips.
Tell a tale and tell it well
Humans love stories. We tell ourselves them for comfort, for enjoyment, and to help us make sense of the world. We read them because we’re interested in learning something new, understanding someone on a deeper level, or just because we’re nosey. Fiction aside, the world is built on stories.
A good story pulls you out of your norm and into something new. It makes you stop and listen (listening well also helps, as I’m learning in You’re Not Listening: What You’re Missing and Why it Matters by Kate Murphy, but that’s a different story). On some level, there’s an emotional response to what you’re hearing/reading/encountering.
In the case of PR, you want your audience to be pulled into your brand. We don’t just tell stories for the sake of it as PR professionals. In fact, firing out press releases with no real hook, just to hit targets (or because the client wants us to), isn’t the best use of time.
Through PR, you can craft compelling brand stories that win emotional investment with key audiences. You want to weave an overall narrative by telling compelling stories that fit together to make your brand.
Ear to the ground
Brand stories can come from all sorts of places. Your employees; a problem you’ve solved as a business; your life as a founder. The key is to use these stories to create a consistent narrative that resonates with your audience.
PR is about pushing this narrative into the minds of the people who matter. We talk a lot about ‘brand awareness’ in the industry, and it can sound fluffy, but it really matters. Telling good stories builds awareness about your brand - what it stands for, who works for it and why it matters to you. With your ear to the ground in your business, you can find stories all over the place.
Once we’ve found the stories that make up your brand narrative, we don’t bombard. We consistently drip feed good news that wins people over to what you’re trying to achieve. We’re led by our emotions when we purchase. And with the desire for authenticity and transparency from brands on the rise, consumers - particularly younger consumers - want to align themselves with brands that match their values.
And speaking of aligning, your PR and marketing should align, too. They need to be telling the same narrative in different ways to reinforce one another. Your brand has one narrative that’s told across platforms with different methods. PR keeps your brand ‘front of mind’ (that means people think it about before they think of your competitors) and marketing more tangibly tracks sales.
Once you’ve won people over with your PR stories, you want your email marketing, clickable links and ads to do the rest. The overall narrative you tell, if you tell it well and tell it consistently, keeps people loyal.
Stories won me over
I love the brand narrative of the electric toothbrush company SURI. The stories they tell are about sustainability, design-forward creativity and making teeth brushing luxurious rather than laborious. Their marketing efforts made me buy, because I got a 20% off code from an influencer I watch on YouTube, whose recommendations I trust. That’s how creating compelling brand narratives works to influence purchases.
Perhaps you can think of a similar experience you’ve had recently? Or maybe you can think of a story from a brand that didn’t sit well with you, and emotionally put you off purchasing from them again. That’s why the stories we tell for our brands are so important. Crises aside, we can usually control our brands’ narratives. If we can find the right stories to uphold it, we’re on track for success.
And honestly, who doesn’t just love reading a really good good news story? That’s what we give people with PR.
