Co-creating Your Brand Story with Clients

by Rob Wolfe

CustomerStorytellingToBuildBrands“Engaging your customers in your story can be just as valuable as engaging them with your product.”
~ Vanessa Merit Nornberg, Inc.com author & business owner

Among the brand elements that must be present to establish a brand’s personality and deliver the brand’s promise are stories that help define the brand. As social media marketing becomes more relevant each day, who is telling these brand stories and why they matter to buyers also becomes more relevant. There seems to be a growing trend of collaboration between brands and client advocates who help companies build stories for and on behalf of the brand.

According to Mark Lightowler, site author of Storytelling To Create Impact Brands, the best way of creating relevance for your brand is to ensure your brand plays a part in your target audience’s personal story. It is not just about you creating a great story for your brand, but about knowing your audience and their story and how your brand fits into that story. He suggests that you engage with your clients to create a new story together. This new co-created story is the one that gets told by the client to their network, getting your brand closer to more people.

While there are many articles and sites on the brand-storytelling trend, I suggest you check out the article, “The Human Side of Brand Storytelling” by Gunther Sonnenfeld, which provides examples of two companies— Whole Foods Market and Procter & Gamble – working with customers to create social media content and build brands through storytelling.

Do you have other inspiring examples of companies using client storytelling to build their brands? Have you or your company had personal experience in this area with your own story to share to spark discussion on this topic?

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