Brand Storytelling, Integrated Advertising, Promotion, and Marketing - Essay Example

With the clutter of content that a customer encounters each day, it is worthwhile for any company to distinguish itself from competitors. Stories have the capability of provoking emotions and feelings at the right stage of the buying cycle, the awareness stage. In addition, stories easily convey the message of the content by allowing customers to visualize the vision of the brand easily. On the contrary, messages based on facts do not create a long-lasting impact on the customers as stories do.

Effective stories have; entertaining value that engages the audience and relates to the personal needs of customers. These features let the customer ‘live’ through the story of the brand. For instance, by posing a problem in the story with the brand as the solution makes the audience assume a true experience. Instead of the audience grasping the product pitches, the idea of the brand story is taken in (Barry 2014). Storytelling, no matter how many companies adopt it, will always emerge as the sure way of excluding a company from its competitors by creating a more appealing and effective story than the other companies.

Question 2
a) Desire for control
Almost everybody enjoys the feeling of being in control of the environment, future, and their lives, among other things. For that reason, companies should use storytelling to evoke emotions of the desire to control. The story makes it clear to the customer how the brand makes him or her in control, albeit in the subconscious mind only.

b) Honoring Family values
By embracing family values in the brand story, the audience is emotionally influenced, especially married couples. For instance, Cerebos Pacific, a sauce additives company, uses Asian family values that relate to food to convince customers to buy their products (Temporal 2013). In Asia, food cooking is not just an act rather it is a way of emotional expression.

c) Fulfilling wishes
A brand story that relates to the audience and through their ‘living’ through the story, their wishes are fulfilled and emotions are evoked. The brain encodes the value in things and remembers wishes that were vicariously fulfilled.

d) Love
A brand story that evokes emotions of love can convince the audience to purchase the product. Love emerges as the most fundamental emotion ever known to human beings. Integrating love into a brand story translates to marketing success. For instance, Cheerios presents a brand story that poses it as the best that loved ones should use for breakfast (Clow 2009). Through the showing of the positive cholesterol level brought about by the cereal, Cheerios elevates above its competitors. Family pictures with the words “Your heart has better things to do than deal with heart diseases” (Clow 2009) are an apparent win over the audience.

Question 3
a) Progression
The story should contain a beginning, middle, and end. However, a transformation should support the essence of the story. The transformation should also aid the audience in understanding the reason for the existence of the story. The transformation may include a partnership, vast sales, or even a breakthrough. Just like any good literature, the transformation should be used as the foundation of the moral of the brand story. It is from this transformation that the audience will be enticed to buy the product and pass the message on to their peers.

b) Passion
A great brand story should be a story of passion, something that the narrator embraces with much enthusiasm. The audience will never appreciate a brand that is not appreciated by the person recommending the brand to them, through the story. 

By presenting the story as something that the narrator loves and has embraced and he is letting others know about it, and even try it out themselves. The audience’s emotions are engaged and they are ready to spread the word to others.

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