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Episode 78
Brand Story explained: What it is and why your business needs one

Dive into another episode of Story Slurp Podcast:

Podcast show notes

 

What’s your Brand Story? Some people say Brand storytelling is a bit ‘fluffy’, or ‘nice to have’ for their business, but I believe digging deeper into your Brand Story has the potential to transform it into your dream business.

Far from being ‘airy fairy’, your Brand Story is the beating heart of your business, the solid foundation. And there are endless benefits to getting it right. The only brands that thrive are the ones that truly understand this. And the ones that don’t, usually fail.

That’s goes not just for global brands, but for small businesses too.

Brand Story is often misunderstood by business leaders, so in this episode I explain what your Brand Story is and why it’s essential to understand it if you are a business leader.

In this episode you’ll find out what your Brand Story is, the many benefits of getting cleary on it and why digging deeper into your Brand Story could give you the answers you didn’t know you needed.

Find out more about I can help you get clear on your Brand Story here.

Takeaways from this
Brand Story podcast episode:

  • 🟠 Brand story is everything in your business.
  • 🟠 A Brand Story isn’t ‘fluffy’ or a ‘nice to have’, it’s an essential solid foundation for your business.
  • 🟠 Brands that do not truly understand their Brand Story are more likely to fail.
  • 🟠 Big brands need brand stories, but small businesses do too.
  • 🟠 Your Brand Story is made up of your: Brand foundation (purpose, vision, values); Understanding your customer; understanding what you do and what makes you different from your competitors; Origin Story.
  • 🟠 Understanding your brand story has lots of important benefits.
  • 🟠 Your brand story helps you brief designers effectively.
  • 🟠 Understanding your Brand Story helps you make better decisions and save time.
  • 🟠 Standing out in the marketplace is crucial and is an important part of your Brand Story.
  • 🟠 Knowing your brand story empowers your team to work more independently and make better decisions.
  • 🟠 Attracting the right customers is essential for business and is an important part of your Brand Story.
  • 🟠 A strong Brand Story makes you feel good about your business.

Resources featured in this episode

⚡️Brand Story Challenge

⚡️Sign up for my Story Slurp newsletter (to find out when the next Brand Story Challenge goes live.)

⚡️Small Business Brand Story Package

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Chocolate oranges and being yourself on social media with LinkedIn trainer, Gus Bhandal

Episode 66:

How to share stories with authenticity with Sustainability and Speaking expert, Mark Shayler

Victoria Brown (00:00)
Let’s talk brand story. And the comments I sometimes hear from people about brand story,

I don’t need a brand story. Brand story is not important. Sometimes I hear that brand story is nice to have, but I don’t need it for my business. And I’m here in this episode to really help you understand what your brand story is and why you might be missing

a really sensible way of building your business if you completely discount the idea of a brand story. Because the truth is brand story is everything in your business that you stand for. And if it doesn’t add up,

the business won’t add up either. If you have a strong cohesive brand story, it’s a really good indication of a stronger business And so I challenge you to think of it not as a nice to have, not as something fluffy, but actually the solid foundation on which your business sits, without which your business

will probably crumble or not have any kind of stable foundations.

This is the most obvious in the really successful brands that we see every day. The obvious examples for us living here in the UK in particular, the brands like Apple, the brands like Nike, the brands like John Lewis, although they haven’t been doing as well the last few years. But what those have in common is a really clear idea of who they are, of who they serve.

of what makes them different. And everyone from the most junior people in the organization to the most senior understand it. They understand what it is that makes them different, what they stand for, how they serve their customers, who it is that they work for. And that is so, so powerful. It’s no mistake that these brands have made such a success of what they do.

It’s because they are so crystal clear on their brand story. And you might be sitting there thinking now, okay, I get it. Big brands need brand stories, but how about small businesses? We don’t need brand stories, but here’s the thing you do because there are so many benefits for you understanding your brand story, having a cohesive brand story that pulls everything together.

What is the most common complaint I hear from small business owners? They don’t have enough time and having your brand story for a start can help you so much with not having enough time. It can really, help you make quicker, better informed decisions. So I am going to again challenge not only the concept of the importance of the brand story in your business, but also

for you if you’re a small business owner, just as much if you’re a corporate massive global brand. You need to understand what your business is about, what it stands for, where it’s heading, who it’s serving, what you do. And it sounds really obvious, but it’s actually not always obvious and it can become very muddy in time. And what makes you different in that?

sometimes very saturated marketplace. What is it you do or what is it in the way that you do it that is different from other people out there that means that someone has a different choice when they choose you. All these things are really important and that’s what makes up your brand story. It’s not some airy, fairy, fluffy story time sitting down with a picture book and having a story. Your brand story is

literally the building blocks of your brand that sits underneath your business. Without that in place, it will crumble. We’ve seen it numerous times with very large brands. If you’re in the UK, you’ll remember brands like VHS, Woolworths, who once were so clear in what they did and

They didn’t really stand for anything. They didn’t really sell anything in particular. It was just all a bit wishy-washy. And now if you look around the marketplace, particularly in the retail space, because the retail place is so visible for us, you can see the brands that…

you might be worried about because maybe they’re just not standing out like they used to. Even if at one time they were a heritage brand like Woolworths, I mean who remembers Woolworths, Bick and Micks right? They were legendary yet they crumbled because their brand story wasn’t cohesive, it wasn’t strong, they didn’t understand what they were there for anymore, they just kind of lost their way which is really sad. So if you have a business

you might be wondering, okay, what are the specific benefits of me understanding my brand story? And there really are so many, I’m gonna go through some of them now for you. firstly, the most obvious one of all is that if you understand your story, you can tell your story better to people. You can create better content.

that talks to the right people, that has the right messages that they need to hear in order to buy your product or service. It helps you create better content. It makes it easier and quicker to create content because all of a sudden your choice is narrowed down on what you can say because you’re not trying to speak to everybody about everything. You understand exactly what you need to say and to who.

and therefore you are much more focused. That makes it much, much easier to create content. It makes it easier to target that content to a specific audience. And it makes it easier to know where to funnel that content to and not just throw it like spaghetti over a wall, but actually target it. And do you remember what I said about the brand story, save your time? There you go, just one.

really easy way to save you time as a business owner is to make your content easier to create, easier to review if you get somebody else to write it for you, just to make it easier to create the content strategy. And it makes it more likely that that content strategy is gonna work as well. So straight away, you’ve got one massive tick box.

And a similar note, makes it really easy to brief designers. if your website is about to be redesigned or you feel that your brand identity is a little bit tired, the first thing you’re going to need to do is brief a designer or a web developer on exactly what your brand is about.

So, so often people go to web designers or graphic designers with only a vague idea of what they want in the hope that that graphic designer or that web developer is gonna be able to extract it out of your head, and create a brand for you.

If you’re lucky and you have a designer that knows your brand very well already, you might stand some chance of success.

the chance of them creating a website that you like, that you feel really speaks to your audience, that does what it’s supposed to do and that feels right to you is very slim unless you brief them properly. And to brief them properly, you’ve got to understand on a deep level what it is you’re about. This is not a time for guessing. This is a time for deep thought and analysis.

about what you are really about deep down in your brand foundation. So when you have that brand story, all of a sudden it becomes so much easier to brief those designers. if you are already outlaying thousands and thousands of pounds on creating a new website and you don’t do it very often, it’s a huge project. The last thing you want to do is rush the brief and end up

with a website you hate because I’ve heard that a lot. I’ve heard a lot of people that come away and say, my website’s not looking how I wanted it to be. And sometimes it’s not the fault of the web designer. Sometimes it’s just because the brief wasn’t deep enough. If you have your brand story then you can just send that to your designer and they will get it.

If they’re a good designer, they will get it and they will be able to bring something to life that you are proud of, that connects with your customers and that truly represents your brand. And when someone does go through that process, you can tell because their brand is so much more cohesive and they feel so much more excited about it because they know it feels right for them. And that’s why it’s a joy to work with people on their brand story because

their face at the end of it when they realize that they’ve been heard and that this truly represents them is so, so special. those are the first couple of reasons why you need a brand story. First of all, create content easier, create better content, save time creating your content. Secondly, to brief your designers or your web developers.

well so you get an end product that you are really proud of that truly speaks to you, that does what it’s supposed to do, saves you stress and just for you to get excited about your new website or get excited about your new brand identity because you know it the visual representation of the foundations of your business.

Another really, really important part of the brand story is understanding your place in the market. We all have been in industries where they are very saturated. So it’s really important that you understand what it is about your product that makes you different and makes you stand out. And in marketing speak, this is called your unique value proposition.

When we create the brand story, this is something we look at quite heavily because it’s so important that you understand where you are in the market and how you serve your customers and how that’s different from other people. Because if you don’t understand that, you can’t create a visual identity, a website, a brand that stands out from other people’s. You won’t stand out in the marketplace. And sadly, if you don’t stand out in the marketplace,

people are not gonna come and buy from you. They might not see you, they might not want to buy from you, you might just be completely invisible. So standing out in the marketplace is a huge, huge thing and it’s a huge part of your brand story.

The next reason why you need to get clear on your brand story is about decision-making.

How many decisions do you make as a business owner or business leader every day? Hundreds, and that’s not even counting where you’re gonna go to for lunch, whether you’re gonna have the crisps with a sandwich or whether you’re gonna have the healthier salad Decisions are all around us and they’re all time consuming and it’s been proven that

the more decisions we have, the more distracted we get, the less effective we are. When you understand your brand story, however, it makes decisions so easy because all of a sudden you’ve got a blueprint. And any decision you make is so much easier to make because you can check it against your brand story. For example,

imagine you want to collaborate with more brands and you’ve had two offers of different brands that want to work with you and you’re looking at them and you can’t decide because they are both huge brands. They’re both brands you love and it’s really hard, but you know you can’t pick both because you can’t devote enough time to doing both projects. Which do you choose?

Look at your brand values, look at your vision, look at your purpose and see where they align with the other brands that you want to collaborate with. If your values clash in any way, you should not be working with those people. If…

your values are similar in both, but maybe You feel they are more closely aligned with one brand than go with them. All it takes is a check through your values and use them like a lens to view that decision. And I promise you it will be so much easier to make a choice. It will be so much quicker to make a choice and you’ll be more confident that you have made the right choice.

how much time are you gonna save and stress and sleepless nights on making sure that you make the right decisions in your business. Which leads me on to the other benefit of knowing your brand story, which is very similar to this. And that’s about empowering your team to make the right decisions. Because when you’re on your own as a small business, it’s slightly easier to…

make a decision because you know your business inside out instinctively and you know a little bit more easily what is the right decision and it’s a little bit easier to make the right decision. When you have a team how do you make sure that that team makes the decisions throughout the day that are aligned with your brand? How can you make sure that they make

decisions which are in alignment with each other. How can you stop them keep coming to you to ask you all the time for every decision paralyzing you and stopping you be able to do anything?

How do you empower them to step up and make the right decisions? How do you encourage their creativity to think of ideas that are beyond what you could even think of

but still aligned with that brand and you can be confident in that. And that is by knowing your brand story. Once you have the blueprint of the brand story and you communicate with that with your team, they are so much more likely to understand.

what the right decision is. They can use those values and the vision and the purpose to think about ideas and whether they might be right for the brand. They can feel so much more empowered to make the right decision and feel good about it. They can feel good because they’re part of something.

And that is powerful. So in terms of teams, knowing your brand story is absolutely essential. It’s the only way huge global companies manage to keep consistency and keep employee engagement because they are all aligned on the same brand story. They understand what they’re all about. They’re all pushing in the same direction.

And that is very powerful indeed.

Have you ever struggled with attracting the right people to your business or even with attracting the wrong people to your business? So maybe you have a lot of people that come to your business and waste your time because they’re asking for a product that is just something you would never sell.

You don’t want those kind of people coming to you, but you do want to attract the people that are 100 % right to you that are just ready to buy. And again, knowing your brand story is the only thing that’s going to help you with this because you need to have a deep understanding of your customer, of who they are. And then you can view things from a different perspective. This is something I worked on a client with recently and they wanted to create a new website. And one of their issues was that

their website was attracting, well the whole brand really was attracting the wrong kind of people. The people that just caused them a little bit of a headache to be honest. And although these people meant well, they weren’t helping them because they were having to deal with queries from them and they were creating problems down the line. And they just wanted to repel those kind of people altogether.

And that’s why we looked at the brand then through a lens of those people and what we could do to discourage them from visiting the website and from contacting the brands. And it was really interesting. So we went through the brand story and then we looked at their current website and we looked at how the two aligned and

you could see some of the problems immediately just by looking at that brand story and then by looking at the website, the colors were going to appeal to that kind of customer you wanted to repel. The language was the kind of language that that person would have liked. The images again would have been the ones to appeal more to the customer we wanted to repel than the customers we wanted to attract.

it wasn’t immediately obvious until you have the brand story in front of you. And when we had that brand story in front of us as a cross reference to look at the website, because the website was lovely on its own, But when you look at the brand story and then you check to see if it aligned with the website, it was quite revealing as to why they were attracting the wrong customers. So again, without the brand story, you wouldn’t know that. You wouldn’t be able to see that.

The only way you’re going to understand how to attract your right customer is if you know who that customer is and what they are likely to want, what are their motivations. Those are all things that we look at in detail in the brand story. So if you want to work on your brand story, working on who your customer is, what their pain points are, what they want, that’s all.

really, really important

Because if you can’t attract your ideal customer and repel your non-ideal customer, you’re not going to be in business, to be blunt. And then the very last benefit I’m going to mention of knowing your brand story like you need another one. I mean, there are a lot there. I mean, it makes decisions easy, it will make your content easier, will make attracting customers easy and repelling the wrong ones. It make

briefing your designers, so you get a brilliant brand identity and websites that you can be proud of, help you stand out in the marketplace. It will make your team feel aligned and more empowered. But the last one is maybe the most important of all, and that it makes you feel good. It makes you feel like you’ve got it right. It makes you feel motivated to get out of bed in the morning because you feel like

You’ve got a purpose. You feel like your business has a purpose and it knows what it’s doing and it’s heading in the right direction. And everything that you do is going to contribute to moving it in that direction. Rather than kind of throwing things around and hoping it works, you’ve got an overall brand story strategy that you can head towards. And yes, sometimes we all make mistakes and we go slightly the wrong way.

but you can always anchor yourself in that brand story and create some consistency. And that is absolutely crucial if you want a successful business.

So can you see how important your brand story is?

It’s an old adage, but it really is like trying to build your house or your business on some sand if you don’t have that structure in place. It’s absolutely essential. And it makes me feel a little bit sad that people think of your brand story as a nice to have or fluffy because it is anything but that. It’s a solid foundation in your business. So how is your brand story? How clear are you on the things that underline your business?

that support all the rest of it. How clear are you on your vision, your purpose, your values, your customer, who they really are, what their pain points are, what is unique to you, what you do for people and how you do it in a way that is unique in the marketplace. How clear are you on all of those things? Because if not, you need to do some work.

I say work, but actually it is really fun work and you’re going to find so many benefits from it. If you’d love some help with your brand story, then I actually run a challenge called the Brand Story Clarity Challenge. It runs three times a year. it’s about to start in a few days on the 30th of June, 2025.

So if by chance you’re listening to this podcast before the 30th of June, then there is a challenge starting on the 30th of June. Just go to my website,

thevictoriabrown.com and go to the heading that says, work with me. And it says challenge, click on there and you can sign up. As I said, that starts on the 30th. So if you hear this podcast after that, then you’re gonna be looking more at waiting for a few months before that challenge goes live. But please get yourself on my newsletter and you will know as soon.

as it reopens because it is such an amazing challenge. I’ve had people get so clear on their brand that they’ve been able to create a website and a brand identity that means so much more to them. I’ll leave you with these words from Ben who was on my challenge exactly a year ago. And he says, I can’t say loudly enough how much I would recommend the brand challenge.

I’m a real skeptic and I’ve never done any kind of challenge before, but I trusted Victoria and it paid off. Just when you think you’ve hit a moment of clarity, Victoria will suggest an exercise or ask a question and you’ll find there’s a whole new layer of depth you can reach. And that is where the gold is. I think he explains it better than I do. Although it’s a bit weird to talk about yourself in third person. I will say genuinely that the brand challenge was life changing. He continues.

If you’re currently at a moment in the business where you are uncertain or have an idea but haven’t jumped right in or it feels like change is needed, do the challenge. So those are the words from Ben Hickman, who is the founder and coach from Reflexive Rebels, which is an amazing organization and only really exists because he allowed himself to immerse himself into what he really wanted to do as opposed to a business that just wasn’t him anymore.

He changed a lot when he became a coach and just kind of surrendering to that and realizing that things have changed and understanding what his brand story is now allowed him to take that step. And some of the comments when he launched his new brand were so amazing. Just things like, this brand feels so much more like you now, Ben, I’ve never met you, but I definitely think this feels like you. And just all those lovely comments.

and that can be you. If you’re in a place where you are struggling to kind of articulate what you do, you are struggling to feel aligned with your business, it just doesn’t feel like it matches anymore, then the brand story challenge is a great place to start. As well as the brand story challenge, I also offer a service where I…

work with you alongside you. So the brand story challenge is amazing. It’s more of a DIY option. So you do most of the work yourself with me, intervening, giving you tools, helping you and guiding you. But I also offer another package where I will work with you alongside you. I will create your brand story with you. I will have sessions with you. We will have coaching sessions and we will get to the bottom of what your brand story is

that is also something I offer again, just go to my website, the Victoria Brown.com, go to work with me and you will be able to find out all the details. Just drop me a message about it.

And it just leaves me to say, if you are at the stage where you are looking at your brand store, you are in for an exciting journey because getting to understand yourself and your business better is so rewarding. As well as all those benefits I talked about, it’s personally rewarding and feels so good when you get it right. So throw yourself in and just please enjoy that journey.

I hope you give it a go and if you do some work on your brand story and it’s helped you or you have any questions just drop me a line to hello at thevictoriabrown.com and let me know how you’ve been getting on on your brand story, work and mission because I love to hear those stories.

Timings from this Story Slurp Podcast Episode

 
00:00 The Importance of Brand Story
05:21 Benefits of a Cohesive Brand Story
10:20 Understanding Your Unique Value Proposition
15:21 Empowering Your Team with Brand Story
19:11 Attracting the Right Customers
21:35 The Journey of Crafting Your Brand Story

Brand Story Clarity Challenge

Get total Brand Clarity in just 10 days

Featured in this Story Slurp Podcast episode:

Victoria Brown

Host of Story Slurp Podcast and Story Coach, Victoria Brown works with Business Leaders to help them understand and communicate their business stories better. Based in Solihull, in the West Midlands, she has more than 20 years of experience as a BBC Journalist, Comms Professional and Coach.