Align Your Marketing Story with Your Brand Promise

Storytelling in marketing needs to align with your brand positioning.

Storytelling is all the rage and for good reasons—as we outlined in our article on the importance of storytelling to marketing.

However, a story can be true, it can catch attention, it can compel your target audience—and it can still not be the right story for your company. Any story your company tells must align with your company’s overall branding.

First, a refresher: Your company’s brand is not a brandmark or logo. Rather, brands are promises. Brands are statements through which a company promises to serve a certain function for its core audience and to do so in a certain way. (For the full scoop, read our white paper on branding.)

If, like Coca-Cola, your brand promise is “to inspire moments of optimism and uplift,” you should not tell a dark story that instills fear or worry in your target audience. Instead, you should invite your audience to “teach the world to sing.” (As Coca-Cola so memorably did.)

If your brand promise is to help people to find their inner beauty, don’t tell marketing stories about or feature images in your marketing stories of people squeezed into shapewear or with features markedly changed through makeup.

If your brand promise involves accessible luxury, don’t show celebrities dripping in diamonds driving candy-apple-red Ferraris to super yachts.

You get the idea.

This means that storytelling—something we so often take for granted—is more difficult than it seems. Simply having heard and loved stories all your life doesn’t mean you can create a good one. (Sorry.)

Marketing storytelling involves art—and it involves shrewd calculation that balances several different factors, including your company’s brand.

So when you’re working to craft a powerful company story, bring in power players to help.