Why S for story comes before B for brand in the marketing alphabet

In the last few years, the field of brand marketing has discovered storytelling. 

Now there’s an explosion of content, interest and hype-driven sales storytelling around the concept.

From AdWeek to Entrepreneur to MarketingProfs and numerous other marketing publications, the concept of brand storytelling is now the rage. The attention and focus on one of humankind’s oldest and most effective communications vehicles is well deserved. 
 

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All the excitement and hype, though, miss a fundamental element of storytelling in business communications: Your story trumps your brand. Huh? Let me put it this way: If your organization has a brand, it may reflect the organization’s story. More likely, your brand and your story are unfortunate, lonely souls who’ve probably never been introduced to each other, living separate and unequal lives inside your organization.

How can this possibly be? You probably employ internal and external marketing folks who are agog at the colors, logo, tag line, slogan and other paraphernalia associated with your brand. You may be equally in love with these marketing assets.

Yet ask yourself: How do these marketing assets, which probably cost your organization a fair amount to create, maintain and promote, relate to why your organization exists? How do they connect to why someone would want to work for you, partner with you, buy your products or services or invest in you?

In our work at WordWrite, we have too often found that shiny brand syndrome has replaced a focus on the important fundamentals that define your organization’s communications with important stakeholder audiences, and more importantly, your organization’s reason for being.

In the information-soaked, time-insensitive 21st century, we are awash in shiny brands that are disconnected from the meaning of the organizations they represent. This is why we have focused on defining what we call the capital “S” story of the organizations we work with as clients. We seek the answers to those questions I posed a few paragraphs earlier about why any stakeholder would deign to engage with you.

Brand, as most brand marketers frequently apply it, is disconnected from the passion of the founder, the genius of the inventor and the dedication of the team that makes it all happen. Granted, it’s pretty darn hard to represent these concepts in the appropriate PMS colors of a logo.

That’s why we focus on identifying the capital S story for our clients and helping them share it authentically through fluent storytellers in the organization, always reading the stakeholder audiences to ensure there’s actually two-way communication going on.

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Paul Furiga is president and CEO of WordWrite Communications.Paul Furiga

You can find him on Twitter @paulfuriga.

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