5 Essential Ways to Build Consumer Trust Through Effective Storytelling
By Brandon Ross
There is a common notion that storytelling is something that belongs entirely to creative inputs; writing fiction and nonfiction books, screenplays, and even the lyrical aspects of storytelling seen in poetry and songs. While these direct forms reign true to the idea of storytelling, it’s important to note that alongside books, screenplays, and songs, storytelling is just as equally a business tool that can be utilized to define and differentiate a brand from its competitors.
Since the rise of wide-scale public relations, marketing, and communicative practices in the latter half of the twentieth century, business storytelling styles have been used to communicate a company’s purpose and value to prospective customers. Catchy incorporations of music in company advertisements would play on television, specific corporate acts would be used to communicate a company’s values (community-related events, philanthropic acts), and the continuing presence of emerging technologies would allow companies to communicate themselves to customers in innovative, transformative ways (corporate social media accounts).
It has become commonplace for B2C (business to consumer) and even some B2B (business to business) companies to dedicate entire teams to refining their brand image and presence amongst the public (Microsoft, Apple, Amazon to name a few). As both a book publishing and storytelling organization, We Write Stories has specialized in building effective forms of storytelling for organizations and individuals. We have learned that effective storytelling allows consumers to trust companies and individuals. This is achieved when the company/individual’s storytelling matches their claimed purpose and value towards consumers. Here are a few essential tips we have learned for gaining trust through effective storytelling:
Focus on the consumer experience within the story
Like reading a book, it doesn’t matter how powerful the story is described to be on the back - if the reading experience proves to be dull, the reader may find themselves unsatisfied. The same goes for consumer journeys. Companies can boast about how their products or services are “better”, “unique”, and more “advanced” than that of competitors. However, if these bold claims aren’t supported with genuinely innovative product/service characteristics meeting and exceeding your potential customers’ expectations, chances are those customers won’t turn into regulars.
Alongside being clear and straightforward about your company’s products and service offerings, consumer trust can also be built by finding compelling ways to describe your company’s story. By story, we don’t mean how your company started, but how it can appeal to consumers’ current lives. One way many companies enlist fascinating forms of storytelling is through the creation of brand experiences. Considering the growing popularity of viewing brands as “experiences”, companies and start-ups alike have picked up on the usage of brand activations. Unlike traditional or digital marketing, brand activations want to quite literally immerse consumers into a brand by creating an active experience (event, in-person campaign) that will attract interest towards the brand. These activations range anywhere from Reese’s having a Halloween “Say Trick ‘r Treat” into a microphone to get free candy pop-up, to Sprite having a literal restaurant-sized machine at a beach to act as a “shower.”
These are humorous, eccentric, and slightly overexaggerated forms of showcasing a brand. Meanwhile, these brand activations capture the exact ideas of those brands; clever, rambunctious, and fun incorporations that make consumers associate those ideas with the brand’s products. So when you think about telling the story or creating a brand activation around your brand, ask yourself, what kind of brand experiences/ideas do I want consumers to have? Will it bring ideas of sophistication and intelligence like Penguin Random House (which has also recently begun the process of incorporating its brand into its products and marketing)? Or will it gear towards being stimulating and energetic, like RedBull, Tinder, or even Uber. The choice is yours, but aim high in your brand storyline and the experiences you want to provide consumers! Make your activation or brand concept so attractive, distinguishable, or sophisticated that your brand will be irresistible to consumers. That may be considered wishful thinking, but your brand deserves a good storyline; make it beautiful.
2. Find the Right Individuals that Match Your Company’s Story
The celebrification of advertising has shifted how marketers view promoting products or services to consumers. Look around today to see Jack Harlow collaborating with KFC, SZA with Crocs, and more. Though numerous celeb-to-brand collaborations have raised some concerns, specifically within fast-fashion launches, the use of finding the right individuals to promote a specific campaign for a company has proven to generate revenue and build a strong brand image. For a majority of companies, especially start-ups, it may not seem beneficial to spend a costly amount with major influencers or celebrities to forge brand partnerships. What can be taken from these successful individual-brand-personality to company-brand collaborations is that individual storylines can be brought into the forefront of your company’s story.
Who are your company’s ideal customers? And more specifically, who and what are those customers interested in? Furthermore, if you had the opportunity, what would be your dream individual-brand-personality to your company-brand collaboration? Take these three questions and find out their answers by gaining a sense of: a) your current demographic, b) your intended demographic, and c) like-minded individuals who would be interested in collaborating with you to build upon your company’s storyline. This may help you decide who the right faces for your brand are (whether it be through micro, mid, or wide-scale influencer campaigns or even just like-minded individuals who aren’t follower based, but suit the company’s image anyway).
3. Incorporate Strong Visual Communication within Your Company’s Story
If confidence is key for a first date, then visual communication may be key for your potential consumers' first impression of your brand. Imagine this: you are walking down the street and spot a logo for a smoothie bar. In your opinion, which logo best represents in your head what a smoothie bar’s logo would look like?
Though the interpretation of each logo may be subjective, notice how each logo brings a specific personality to the company. The green of the first logo may prioritize health and wellness. The second logo may feel minimalistic and calm (due to the light coloring), while the last logo’s bright coloring and diverse smoothie colors may make it feel more energetic and fun. So, which is the best logo? This really depends on what the smoothie bar had in mind for its storyline. If they want to highlight healthy smoothie options, Logo 1 may be the stronger candidate. However, if they wanted to showcase diverse smoothie flavors, Logo 3 may be the strongest candidate. In that sense, the visual communication can be effective if it fits the intended concept of the company. What can be universally agreed upon in terms of what weak visual communication looks like can often be looking at poor/mismatched color schemes:
Where are the cohesive colors? What’s with the all-over-the-place color schemes? In this example, the color schemes make the smoothie bar logo look more like a disoriented Slurpee advertisement. This showcases how important effective color schemes are in your company's storyline. Toy around with your logo on design platforms like Canva to ideate the strongest color options for your brand. Ask others which logos/color schemes best fit the concept of your company. To start with visual communication is to start with finding the colors that best suit your company’s goals and characteristics. So, in that case, when you define your company story, define the colors that will best visually suit that story.
4. Build an Established Community Around Your Company’s Story
Your company doesn’t have to have a C2C (consumer-to-consumer) business model to bring consumers together. Community can simply mean incorporating your consumer’s story into your company’s story. It can be as simple as listing positive reviews from consumers on your product/service on your company website to fleshing out fully-formed interviews to see how your product/service transformed an individual’s life. It’s worth noting these brand-driven consumer stories may appear less authentic as brand activations since they may appear less as brand experiences and more as advertisements (especially with for-profit companies). However, if done tastefully and correctly aligned with the brand’s personality, like GoPros’s live-consumer campaign, which broadcasted GoPro users live-streaming themselves, it will help build a communal and intimate setting around your company. Through that, brand-driven storytelling may bring further loyalty and trust from consumers toward your brand.
5. Redefine Your Company’s Story Or Approach to Storytelling When Necessary
Whether your company is expanding into new physical territory, or attempting to reach a new audience, different forms of storytelling are necessary to translate your company’s values to an uninformed audience. Too often have successful companies expanded into new countries without questioning whether what made them initially successful in one country will make them successful in another. Target’s inability to see the consumer relationship-building tactics required to reach Canadian customers made it ultimately shut down nearly all locations in the country (the US is primarily value-driven over consumer-relationship driven, which is a major marketing differentiation between the two countries). Though a large example, the Target case proves that the reinvention of your company’s storytelling is required when your company is attempting to reach a new demographic virtually/in-person, or possibly expand into new virtual/in-person channels.
Another aspect of storytelling is ethical storytelling. In this article, we’ve discussed celebrity brand collaborations that, while may be successful, have also caused widespread criticisms with many claiming quick celebrity/influencer partnerships in fashion promote fast, disruptive fashion efforts that violate human rights and negatively impact the environment. If a company reaches a certain point of success, they must ask themselves, “is this storytelling causing damage?” That same question is exactly what caused global-renowned brand Victoria’s Secret’s brand image downfall due to its “dangerous fantasy” of promoting eating disorders and starvation diets. The ideology of worshipping unattainable beauty standards, which made Victoria’s Secret successful, eventually backfired as the years and opinions surrounding beauty standards/body ideologies shifted. For that reason, remember to bring up ethical questions surrounding the storytelling of your brand; that may save its own life down the line.
A good story is not certain to equal commercial success. However, utilizing effective storytelling techniques allows your company to be painted in the light of a distinguishable, immersive, and put-together brand that potential customers may trust with their time and money. At We Write Stories, linking the need for commercial success and consumer trust has allowed us to find impactful, beneficial, and progressive forms of storytelling from companies to their ideal consumers.
