If there’s a central linchpin in brand design, it’s the brand story.
Brand story is a narrative that connects emotionally and rationally with a target audience. It communicates your brand purpose and sometimes origin, as well as the value you deliver to customers.
- Purpose – The why behind your business; your mission, ethos, and values
- Origin – The history of how you got to where you are today and why. This is particularly important in B2C categories and challenger-brand start-ups
- Value delivered – How you actualise your why. The customer needs you meet and why your audience should care about your product or service.
It’s a central linchpin because without a brand story, you have no brand. You have no strategic message to put out to the market and no guiding principles to keep your strategy and design aligned.
Creating a brand story: the strategic thinking
A brand story is strategic in nature. It has to maximise on what’s ownable, distinctive, and disruptive about your business. And these unique factors have to resonate appropriately with your target audience to motivate them to act.
Every successful brand has a successful brand story behind it. But for brands in heavily commodotised sectors or competitive landscapes with a high degree of product parity, brand storytelling is everything.
There’s a reason why Innocent Drinks has a reputed 70-75% share of the UK’s juice and smoothie market and why Financial Services CMOs hold the highest marketing budgets of any B2B industry — with Tech Product CMOs following closely behind. Brand story is a crucial point of difference in these sectors.
A compelling brand story will set you apart from your competition. It becomes recognisable and persuasive for potential buyers and, when done right, it speaks to a core truth about your customers’ wants, needs, and outlook on life.
Questions to ask when creating a brand story include:
- What is our why? What problem do we exist to solve? What do we want to be known for?
- What’s our super-angle: the one thing we can say we do differently to other businesses in the space?
- What ‘reasons to believe’ do we offer to customers? Why should they choose us; how, in practical terms, do we impact their lives for the better?
Realising a brand story: the design execution
Design is essential in brand storytelling, too.
Design is the means of giving a strategic narrative life and launching it to the market. There’s an art to translating big strategic ideas into brand identity, marketing campaigns, or other visual or verbal deliverables. There’s a craft in realising these touchpoints to the highest possible standard to best represent your brand.
The articulation of a brand story must:
- Represent the strategic thinking in both rational and emotional ways (use all of the elements at your disposal here including colour, graphics, copy, sound, photography etc)
- Focus on the target audience and use semiotic shortcuts that have meaning to them
- Be executed cohesively across all assets in the visual and verbal brand language
Brand storytelling example: Vistra
Vistra, one of the world’s leading fund and corporate service providers, merged with Tricor Group (Tricor), a leading business expansion specialist, in 2023.
Rebranded together as Vistra, and under the strategic brand message of “feel the flow”, Vistra needed to relaunch its brand story to the market — a story of friction-less client experience and Vistra’s allyship in supporting client ambitions with its best-in-class technology.
The Unknown Creative played a central role in executing the brand story on a global scale.
We created a series of interactive publications, animations, and campaign material to support Vistra’s post-merger relaunch in March 2024. This was the first time Vistra’s new brand language had been applied to many of these channels, helping to shape the brand architecture moving forward.
Read more about our ongoing partnership with Vistra here.
Let’s tell your brand story
The Unknown Creative has been creating and executing brand stories for 15 years. We have the big-picture vision required to think strategically and the high-craft skill required to realise a brand story’s full potential in design.
Contact the team today.