Customers connect with brands not only for their products but for the values they represent. In today’s fast-paced market, where countless companies are vying to capture consumers’ short attention spans, purchasing decisions often come down to a brand’s story.
Whether you’re a marketing professional trying to grow your brand’s competitive edge or an entrepreneur launching a new venture, understanding brand storytelling is vital.
“Brands that tell compelling stories have the power to break through the clutter and truly engage their audience,” says Harvard Business School Professor Jill Avery, who teaches the online course Creating Brand Value.
To help you get started, here’s an introduction to brand stories, their essential elements, and five compelling examples to highlight their impact on company performance.
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Brand storytelling is a strategy where a company uses narratives to communicate its brand identity, values, and message to customers.
Brand stories add meaning by sharing ideas and experiences—making the brand memorable, creating an emotional connection, and keeping it at the forefront of customers’ minds.
“A story can capture someone’s attention, make them feel strong emotions, and develop empathy, leading to engagement and action,” Avery says in Creating Brand Value. “This journey from awareness to purchase is why storytelling is such a powerful tool in a brand manager’s arsenal.”
To help enhance your toolkit, here’s a step-by-step guide to creating your own brand story.
How to Create a Brand Story
1. Pinpoint the Conflict
Every notable story begins with conflict. To craft a meaningful narrative, identify your customers’ key pain points. Consider the following questions:
- What does your customer yearn for?
- What’s missing in their life?
- What obstacles are standing in the way of their ideal life?
Once you understand these challenges, pinpoint the primary conflict to form your brand story’s foundation.
Consider the everyday task of buying eggs. Pasture-raised organic egg brand Pete & Gerry’s illustrates a real-world example of determining customers’ conflicts in Creating Brand Value.
Pete & Gerry’s created three sub-brands to address specific pain points and meet their audience’s needs. This approach allowed them to deliver targeted messaging aligned with each brand’s values and priorities:
- Pete & Gerry’s Organic Eggs addresses the concern of customers struggling to find certified organic products.
- Nellie’s Free-Range Eggs resolves the worry of families seeking safe and high-quality eggs.
- Pete & Gerry’s Pasture-Raised Eggs tackles the lack of transparency around egg production.
Select the conflict that generates the most tension and offers the greatest relief to your customers, framing your brand as the solution your target audience needs.
Related: Listen to Professor Avery discuss how to build a winning brand portfolio on The Parlor Room podcast, or watch the episode on YouTube.
2. Position Your Customer as the Hero
The next step is to focus on your hero: your customer. They’re the central character in your brand’s story, embarking on a transformational journey, with your brand acting as their guide.
Understanding your customers’ needs allows you to tailor your narrative to address their pain points.
“It’s really important to understand your consumer target when you’re designing a brand and building a brand story,” says Pete & Gerry’s Chief Marketing Officer Phyllis Rothschild in Creating Brand Value. “It’s so critical to be relevant to what matters to them, what their attitudes are, what their needs are, and how they go about purchasing.”
When you center your story on your customer, they can begin envisioning their role in supporting your brand.
In Creating Brand Value, Pete & Gerry’s exemplify this by segmenting their audience into three distinct groups, each represented by a “hero” character archetype. They translated each segment’s needs into unique brand identities and targeted stories, shaping elements like brand names, logos, messaging, and packaging. For example:
- The Health-Conscious packaging emphasizes “organic,” making it easy for customers to identify and distinguish the product from competitors.
- The Family-Lover packaging features the phrase “free range” alongside an image of a child holding a hen, reassuring customers of the brand's dedication to quality and safety.
- The Hen-Hugger packaging displays an image of a happy hen, appealing to customers who prioritize animal welfare.
By positioning the customer as the hero, Pete & Gerry’s not only stands out in the market but highlights the importance of truly understanding your audience and crafting a narrative that reflects their needs.
Related: 3 Effective Methods for Assessing Customer Needs
3. Develop Your Plot
Once you’ve identified the conflict and hero, you can bring your story to life. Remember that your plot must introduce and resolve the conflict. To guide your hero on their journey, consider including the following details:
- Your hero’s strengths and weaknesses
- Their daily routines
- The breaking point that prompted them to begin their journey
- Challenges they may encounter along the way
- Your brand’s impact on completing their journey
- How the hero has been transformed as a result
Pete & Gerry’s offers a valuable example of how to capture customer attention with a compelling plot. Each "hero" reaches a pivotal moment of frustration when products fail to resolve their concerns. For example, the Hen-Hugger is upset by the lack of transparency surrounding egg production methods. Yet, by the end of their journey, they gain confidence in supporting a brand committed to the humane treatment of hens.
4. Identify the Story’s Moral
To complete your brand story, establish a clear moral lesson, which forms the backbone of your narrative—making your message memorable and driving purchasing intentions.
Pete & Gerry’s embody this by tailoring lessons to each of their target audiences. For example, the brand story teaches Health-Conscious customers they can rely on Pete & Gerry’s eggs to be organically certified and produced with safe practices, aligning with their commitment to a healthy lifestyle.
Successful brand stories invite audiences to draw their own conclusions and apply the lessons to their personal transformation.
5 Brand Story Types
Now that you’ve outlined your brand story, the next step is uncovering the most effective way to tell it.
Brand managers often leverage their company’s founding, milestones, and customer testimonials to refine their brand story. To help you with this, here are five brand story examples.
1. Functional Brand Stories
Functional brand stories differentiate a brand by emphasizing its products’ superior attributes or features, positioning it as customers’ ideal choice.
In Creating Brand Value, Chief Brand Officer of Turkish apparel brand Mavi Elif Akarlilar explains how they prioritized offering a wider range of jean sizes and lengths—a feature competitors lacked. As a result, their brand story evolved to focus on the “Perfect Fit.”
By catering to specific pain points competitors may overlook, these stories demonstrate a strong commitment to understanding and acting on customer needs.
2. Underdog Brand Stories
Underdog brand stories are effective when a brand faces disadvantages compared to larger competitors with more resources.
Brands must craft a story that displays their passion and determination to succeed. This often involves sharing the brand’s origin story, roadblocks, and significant company milestones to capture customers’ attention.
As highlighted in Creating Brand Value, the beverage brand Nantucket Nectars, created by two college graduates who started with a floating boat store in Nantucket, Massachusetts, embraced its modest position in the marketplace. Each bottle famously featured a label recounting its origin story: “With only a blender and a dream,” reinforcing the brand’s humble beginnings.
People naturally love rooting for the underdog. Many customers identify with them and see themselves reflected in the brand’s journey. By presenting themselves as smaller players in the market, brands can build stronger customer relationships and foster long-term brand loyalty as they grow.
3. Lifestyle Brand Stories
Lifestyle brand stories offer customers more than just products; they provide access to a specific way of living, unlocking a sense of empathy for the values and experiences associated with that lifestyle.
Mavi exemplifies this with its “Maviterranean” brand, which introduced a clothing line that evoked the fun, fashionable, and relaxed Mediterranean lifestyle it encouraged consumers to adopt. By connecting on an emotional level, Mavi expanded from its Turkish roots to a global audience.
The success of these brand stories lies in their flexibility. They enable brands to overcome cultural and geographic barriers to enter new markets and broaden their customer base.
4. Celebrity Brand Stories & Influencer Collaborations
Celebrity brand stories involve partnering with celebrities to enhance a brand’s image. It’s effective because it fosters a sense of familiarity and trust. When celebrities endorse a brand, they create an association between the brand and their personal image. This boosts brand credibility, increases awareness, and impacts sales performance.
Influencer collaborations leverage popular influencers as content creators who translate brand stories into their own voices. This approach makes the brand more appealing to the influencer's followers, driving engagement and inspiring purchasing behavior.
By demonstrating the brand’s value, influencers help bridge the gap between the company and potential customers, expanding awareness and engagement across digital platforms.
A notable example is the athletic apparel brand Gymshark's Gymshark66 campaign, a 66-day challenge that motivates customers to build healthier habits using the brand's app.
Gymshark partners with fitness influencers, known as Gymshark Athletes, who generate content showcasing their progress as they try new workouts, adopt healthier diets, and practice mindfulness. These collaborations not only tell the brand's story but inspire customers to strive to become Gymshark Athletes themselves.
This strategy allows brands to create authentic, engaging content that showcases the quality and performance of their products in real-world settings.
Related: How to Engage with Influencers & Measure Their Impact
5. Social Mission Brand Stories
Social mission brand stories allow brands to align with meaningful social causes, positively shaping customer perceptions when executed authentically.
By supporting social initiatives, brands show genuine commitment to raising awareness and driving change.
A notable example is Dove’s “Real Beauty Pledge.” Through this campaign, Dove traveled globally to explore how women define beauty, combating the widespread issue of low self-esteem tied to societal norms by featuring real women who challenged conventional beauty standards.
This authentic approach promoted inclusivity and reinforced Dove’s dedication to social impact, strengthening emotional connections with its audience.
The Importance of a Brand Story
Storytelling has always been a powerful marketing tool. A compelling brand story not only grabs attention but also conveys a brand’s deeper meaning and purpose, creating the empathy needed to truly communicate with customers.
"Through storytelling, brands bridge the gap between customers’ actual state of being ('what is') and their desired state ('what could be'),” Avery says in Creating Brand Value. “In doing so, brands provide a 'Band-Aid' for living."
Brand stories are vital in building meaningful connections with audiences, addressing customers’ emotional and practical needs, and transforming them from passive observers to active participants.
If you’re looking to integrate a brand story into your marketing strategy, consider taking Creating Brand Value. This course will help you build strong, differentiated brands that resonate with customers and give your business a competitive edge.
Ready to create your own compelling brand story? Explore Creating Brand Value—one of our online marketing courses—and download our interactive online learning success guide to discover the benefits of online programs and how to prepare for one.
