Four Elements of a Good Brand Story

In his presentation at the Small Business Summit in Toronto this week, Tony Chapman, CEO of Toronto creative agency Capital C outlined the four elements of telling a really great brand story.

These elements include:

1. Framing your story. It’s important to help your audience identify your brand/business as “the ones who…” Your story should make it easy for customers to understand who you are and what you do.

2. Problems solved. Your story should help the audience to understand what consumer or business problems your product helps to solve.

3. Characters. Your should have clear characters which help to tell the story. This can be a spokesperson from your company (think Galen Weston in the Loblaws commercials), or fictional – like the Mac versus PC characters in the Apple commercials.

4. Plot. This is essential to making your story relatable. Chapman showed a video clip from Mad Men, where Don Draper introduced his agency’s brand concept for a new Kodak product. See the video via this link (the network has disabled embedding on YouTube). Notice that Draper makes a grown man cry – that’s when you know you’ve humanized your story!