Marketing Secret For Building Brands

Stories have an important place in our lives. They help us understand the world, popularize ideas, and act as shortcuts to many complex concepts. Stories have power to create interest, generate emotions, hold attention, form perspectives, and bring hope. There are various types of stories related to superstitions, mythology, successful people, environment etc. Moreover, stories have created multi-billion dollar industries of novels, movies, TV serials, video games etc.

One of the major roles of marketers is to spread their brands and for that they have to keep their customers & prospects engaged through various channels such as advertisements, useful content, PR, events etc. Marketers can share their messages through these channels in forms of stories and sales pitches. Many times, people ignore interrupting sales pitches, but they remember and share interesting stories.

In order to create compelling stories, marketers should focus on all the ingredients such as theme, plots, heroes, villains, conflict, and resolution. Let's have a look at a few examples of advertisements with interesting stories and well showcased usage of respective brands' products:

1. 'The Last Game' by Nike Football: One of the most important element of Nike's marketing strategy is that it creates inspirational content with stories around athletes and shows its respect for various athletics and athletes. Its animated advertisement 'The Last Game' has around 95 million views on YouTube. In this advertisement, there are various elements of a great story:

2. 'Reunion' by Google Search: In this advertisement, it is shown that by organising information and making it accessible, Google Search has become an important part of people's lives. This advertisement has around 13 million views on YouTube. In this advertisement, there are various elements of a great story:

Along with advertisements, marketers can use various other channels to share the stories with audience. To name a few: Movies - The LEGO movie demonstrating its toys, Cast Away movie demonstrating voyage and return of a FedEx employee, The Pursuit of Happyness movie showcasing the rags to riches story of Chris Gardner; Biographies and Business Books - Steve Jobs (biography By Walter Isaacson), Richard Branson (Losing My Virginity) and Andrew Grove (Only the Paranoid Survive), It happened in India (Kishore Biyani) etc.

Movies act as popular story telling medium and have an important place in our lives. Like movies, businesses also have various similar elements that contribute to their stories. Let's compare various elements of businesses with various elements of movies.



Though we can learn a lot about story telling from successful movies, it is important to realize that every year, many new movies are released and compete for audience attention and time. But, only a few movies become box office hits and gain popularity. If similar stories are repeated again and again, if stories are vague and boring, if characters don't perform well etc. then movies are not able to establish the right emotional connect with audience. Similar success failure scenario is present in other storytelling mediums such as novels, biographies, TV serials, games etc.

Like movies, novels, TV serials etc., many new brands are launched every year and compete for potential customers' attention. Story telling can act as a powerful tool to gain customers' attention, but marketers have to keep in mind that though good story is necessary for success, it is not sufficient. Other important elements such as product & service quality, customer experience, leaders' image, employees' contribution, good vendors, sales channel etc. also play very important role and can't be ignored.