It Is The Emotional Connection

It is essential in today’s current business environment to forge a powerful emotional connections with the audience you are trying to reach. In a world where there is a lot of competition, those who succeed are the ones who are able to build understanding with their clients. Having a story to tell about your company is an important component of modern branding since it helps establish an emotional connection with consumers. Your company’s history should serve as the foundation for the explanation that provides your branding with its significance. It takes your “why,” your “passion,” and the desires of your target audience and shares them in a story that illustrates how you are the same kind of people who want the same things.

Start With The Target Audience

First, you want to focus on who it is that you want to connect with. This is why thorough research is crucial to successful branding. For businesses with multiple segments, you want to try to find a common psychographic to build your story around. There are several factors that you want to consider in order to make a connection with your target audience. What things and values they hold dear. What their dreams and aspirations are. What they fear. These should be geared around their use of your product or service. You want to understand their buying motivations. Consider a bowling alley that attracts a lot of people who come in groups as friends between the ages of 25 – 40 years old. The owner talks to the people who visit their alley, and he realizes that many come together as a low cost way to hang out with their friends. The values that bring them out are connection with friends and spending time with friends. The fear they have is that they will not be able to afford an event that they can enjoy together. It’s from this information that you will start thinking about your possible story options. You could talk about the friends you made during bowling. You could talk about the fun memories you created at the bowling alley. You could discuss the relief of being able to meet up with friends for just a few dollars. There are multiple points of opportunity and focus that can be created once you understand the ideal customers that you want to attract. The next step is to determine why and find an overlapping match.

Your Story Is Your Why

Your passion is the fire within you. Your passion is extraordinary. Your passion is something you can sense within yourself. Your why is fueled by your passion, which is composed of your own values and beliefs. This is why, when conveying the business story, it is so important to draw from your why. It has the potential to become your emotional link to your target market. If you haven’t spent a lot of time self-reflecting, determining your why can be challenging. Here’s a method for trying to determine your why. Make a list of all significant emotional experiences in your life. Consider incidents from your youth, life experiences, places you’ve lived, and so on. This will assist you in better connecting with your emotional bonds. Then evaluate why you wanted to establish your business in the first place. Consider what was going on in your life at the time. Consider what aspects of doing it aroused your interest the most. Then, using your brainstorm list, look for connections to the reason you became interested in your business in the first place. This will help you develop an emotional connection with your business.

Storytelling Is The Key

Every good story will usually have both a hero and a foe. The hero will face a challenge that must be conquered. Consider the following four conflicts for the challenge: character vs. self, character vs. character, character vs. nature, and character vs. society. Including these issues in your story can help you create a more emotional and relatable story for your target audience. Consider the following exercise: Who is it you want to galvanize as the enemy for your audience? This will help you determine the right antagonist. Be careful about using real people as enemies in your story, as this can backfire and limit your market. It is better to use societal enemies rather than making someone bad. Self vs. nature is often a great middle ground for creating unity for doing something, but it is often limited by constant accomplishment, so new enemies need to be created. It’s important to understand that every story needs a struggle. It’s also important to understand that creating an enemy will build a sense of unity. However, it’s important to be very thoughtful about who you struggle against. Struggles against specific people or cultures can create a strong, united group. However, these strong feelings of hate towards individuals will often alienate people who don’t feel strongly about the situation. At the same time, struggles against oneself tend to lead to lower unity, because the majority of people don’t hold enough self-awareness for this type of struggle to truly unite them with others. The advantages are great when you find the right balance to use, as it builds unity between a common enemy and a common goal. One of the most common types of storytelling is the hero’s journey (customer success story; also known as customer’s journey or buyer’s journey). This entails crafting a scenario in which your company is ultimately the life-saving aid. Your company saves the customer from whatever situation they have gotten themselves into. Bounty is a fantastic example of this. They position their brand as the one who can save the user from the sadness of a mess. All of their advertisements and marketing emphasize how it saves the customer money and messes. Through documentary storytelling, you can also use narrative to demonstrate your history. This is accomplished through talking about your own experience and the effects you’ve felt and generated. This can be beneficial if you are a well-established company with a history to tell. Scott Edwards Architecture’s narrative is an excellent example of this. They discuss their history as well as the impact they’ve had on Portland and the architecture community. This type of storytelling allows you to connect with others who share your concerns. Storytelling can also be geared toward a challenge. Consider the stories that showcase how, together, we can make a better world. Boomba is a great example of this. Where it’s a struggle of self vs. society. They share and talk about the power of socks for homeless people. They also share the impact of those socks on the people who receive them. Storytelling can also be geared toward a challenge. Think about the stories that illustrate how, by working together, we can make the world a better place. One excellent illustration of this is Boomba. where there is a battle between one’s self and society. They give socks to those who are homeless and discuss the impact they can have on their lives. They also discuss the effect that the socks have had on the people who have received them.

Now that you have a greater understanding of the emotional connection to your business, as well as the emotional connection and story style of your target customers, it is time to outline and write your story. You want to use the similarities between your own experiences and the findings from your research on your target consumers. These similarities will assist you in crafting a story that fosters understanding. The next step is to determine the storytelling method you wish to use. This will assist you in determining who the hero (the customer) and villains are. After you’ve decided who these characters are going to be, it’s time to sketch out the plot of the story. What took place, who was involved, how did it affect the person, and what actions did they take as a result of it? Last but not least, make certain that you are aware of whether or not the conclusion of the story was favorable for the primary character, who is your customer. After that, you will be able to compose the story, make changes to it, discuss it with people you know, rewrite it, and utilize it.