Have you ever met someone representing your customers who asked to be taken on a customer journey? Did you ever hear someone other than marketing professionals who were craving some brand activation? I bet the chances are very slim.

Why not challenge yourself and your brand to create something really exciting for your audience as their next brand experience. Invite them to join you in the next level of experiential branding, the brand adventure.

However, before we aimlessly head all excited into the woods, let us define a common understanding of what the meaning of adventure is as a fundamental part of an immersive, engaging brand experience.

If you want people to experience an adventure, it needs to take them outside of their comfort zone, expose them to risks, and send them on an emotional roller-coaster ride. As is (usually) the case with the roller-coaster experience, the danger is not necessarily real, and the ride may only last for a few minutes.

You know what makes a great experience? It is not only the nice, safe, cute things, but things that made enough of an impression to make a lasting impact. And your goal in creating a brand adventure is to create a memorable, shareable experience.

‘There Should Be A Tear’

If you are a marketing professional who is used to evoking happy feelings, and have become experienced in avoiding any kind of negativity or possible controversy, you may know that stepping into this arena also presents a series of pitfalls.

However, you will also need to recognise the possible drawbacks of only presenting shiny, happy people and not putting a dynamic narrative to good use. In doing so, things often simply end up being perceived as superficial, artificial, and boring in the hearts and minds of your audience.

You may or you may not like Walt Disney, but it is hard to ignore his impact on popular culture around the world. He once phrased a great embodiment of the dynamic needed in a classic story. “For every laugh, there should be a tear” is a simple, yet great reminder about the power of narrative dynamics for anyone working to reach and engage with people.

Just think about it for a minute.

Getting Started

Let us agree for the matter of argument that you are now ready and willing to move beyond business-as-usual marketing communications and challenge yourself and your audience with a brand adventure. By the way, you should be applauded for doing this. To many marketers, it will be a bold move. Luckily, there are a few general guidelines that can help you in this leap forward in experiential marketing to make certain that you do not lose your way.

To get started as a brand adventure creator, start by asking yourself these key questions:

What are the brand message and values that you want people to experience?

This is your anchoring point for what should happen as part of your brand adventure. You may need help from someone who is capable of translating your brand message or values into an experience. 

Who is your audience, and what are they willing to do?

Welcome to the wonderful world of creative experience design, where you will need to consider what you can ask of your audience.

What will be your element of danger, real or not?

This is key to creating an adventure, and to enabling your participating audience or your brand to become a hero.

Where and when will you present your brand adventure?

If it is for a limited time or a limited audience, then how do you make certain you can achieve a certain reach to those who are not there? Also, how do you get the most out of the context your brand adventure will be set in?

What will you need to create an extraordinary setting?

This is an important part of the adventure, and, even if you have only a corner, you should find a way to create an exciting space.

What kind of technologies and specialists will you need?

If you think you can do everything yourself, chances are you are not pushing your brand adventure enough, or you are in for a bad surprise when things go live.

What kind of measurable ROI are you aiming for?

You can set up a whole host of KPIs that are measurable, and it is surprising that many professionals do not apply this to their experiential, event, and conference activities.

What can go wrong, and how do you proactively address bad situations?

Design for errors and address real risks proactively—it’s better to be great at risk management than being forced into damage control mode.

Finally, do not forget to have some fun exploring what your brand can become to your audience. After all, you have just begun your own adventure into the next dimension of brand experience design.

Throughout human history storytelling has confirmed shared culture and beliefs, passed knowledge down from one generation to the next, and helped humans understand the world around them. The significance of stories is embedded in our collective mindset, so it’s no wonder that storytelling keeps returning to the marketing spotlight. 

Unlocking the power of storytelling has the potential to enable you to create something that is more memorable than anything your competition is doing.

But how do marketers even begin to tell “The Great Story of Your Brand”?

Ask Yourself Why

First of all, ask yourself why in the world you would want to take on the role of being a storyteller. It is nothing like doing another marketing campaign. The task is laborious. And you will have to look in the mirror lots of times if you want to be ready to tell a believable—and honest—story. 

Storytelling is a great way to help you forge a deeper connection with the people you are trying to reach. But brand storytelling does not mean sharing a narrative where everything is awesome. In fact, if you set out to create an authentic story and your audience sees it as dishonest, this will have a terrible impact on the brand. 

As marketers, you will need to consider what it is you want to achieve from sharing your story. Is it to make employees relate to your brand culture? Is it to prove that your brand is actually living its values? Is it to make people understand your brand by knowing its background? In any of these cases, you will need to decide who it is exactly your brand wants to connect with.

Create The Connection

Great stories are capable of creating real connections: whether between the audience and the hero, people and their heritage, your customers and your brand, or your employees and your brand culture.

That relationship is created with the audience when they find something of relevance in the story. When they hear something that convinces them they should care about your brand. It may be because you share certain values with them, or because they can see something of themselves in your story.

Understand Your Platform

As with any words or imagery you want to put in front of an audience, you will need to design your delivery platform, be it video, online posts, a speech, or something else entirely.

Be true to yourself and your story. And be ready to admit when you need help to tell the story in the right way for the format. This may be from a videographer or a professional writer, and sometimes what seemed the obvious choice for a collaboration may not be the right choice. Just because they work in communications doesn’t mean the specialists that marketers typically work with are necessarily good storytellers.

Messages v Storylines

Chances are that most of the marketing you are involved in is structured as formulaic messages, such as “Look at this great product, it can make you or your life better, buy it now.” Imagine any good story you know forced into this format. Now it is a little less worthy of your appreciation, wouldn’t you agree?

To captivate an audience, you need to present a more nuanced scenario. Often it’s the stories about overcoming challenges and adversities, or coming of age and taking responsibility for one’s faults to grow humbler and wiser that captivate us as an audience.

They are stories of evolution that takes the main character—in this case the brand—forward and adds more dimensions. Many of the fictional characters we stick with may have their flaws, but they become relatable, three-dimensional beings who we care about and even forgive.

Compare this to the typical, one-dimensional talking head proclaiming the authenticity, or uniqueness of a brand. Nobody believes in this anymore. And given the communications overload nowadays, almost nobody is listening.

Don’t Believe The Hype

As new technology and new marketing disciplines emerge that promise the only way forward, it’s easy to become distracted. New technologies can be a great format for telling your story, but technology or special effects will not make a bad story better. It does not matter whether you are putting “digital,” “integrated,” or “non-linear” in front of “storytelling.” If there is no dynamic, no good and bad, no relatable characters, your audience’s interest in the story will quickly fade.

Good Stories Take Time

You cannot whip up “The Great Story of Your Brand” in a few hours, and you cannot expect it to make its impact in the hearts and minds of people in an instant. If you think otherwise, that’s a habit of working in marketing communications.

Remember, “The Great Story of Your Brand” is more than a chronology or a list of achievements. You should go back to the first thing you put down in writing several times over, and put this in front of people for critique.

Furthermore, be prepared to scale when the story starts spreading. Be ready to respond to questions, curiosity, and negativity—another reason why it is immensely important your story is not perceived as a lie. You may not win everybody over, nor should you aim to, but at least you will have their respect for your honesty and transparency.

So, are you ready to tell “The Great Story of Your Brand”?

Would you like your brand to be conceived as a true and relatable hero?

This is hard to achieve through traditional marketing communication of features and benefits, but by combining storytelling and social media you can add another dimension to your relationship with your existing and potential customers, as well as your employees and other stakeholders. They are all your audience.

Storytelling speaks volumes about the values and culture of your brand. It will help your audience gain a deeper understanding of who and what you are, and the ups and downs you have faced or are facing. Even though you can never proclaim your brand a hero yourself, you can set the scene for someone else to do so.

Regarding heroes, for starters there are three pivotal things to consider about what I believe defines a relatable hero:

Relatable Heroes Are “Flawesome”

You know what is really boring? Heroes without flaws. Just think of some of the most beloved heroes in adventure movies. Even though Indiana Jones eventually will save the day, he makes mistakes along the way. You can have flaws and still be awesome, in fact you can be “flawesome”, which is much more relatable and sympathetic to most people.

True Heroes Overcome True Obstacles

Heroes are defined by what they do in the face of opposition, and how they overcome their problems. The point when people stand up to someone or something, regardless of the risk, even if that risk is losing everything, is the point when they become heroes. Not because of their powers, but because they overcome obstacles despite of their weaknesses. This is why the public loves the underdogs that make it.

Heroes Fight Villains

Heroes need villains. In a traditional storytelling setting, it is someone or something that personifies what the hero is fighting against. In Star Wars, the struggle between the meanies of the galactic empire and the heroes of the rebellion is represented by the light sabre duels between Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader. If you want people to rally with or behind you, they need to understand what you are making your stand against, or what you have overcome.

In the real world, your villain does not need to be someone; most times it is something. Financial crisis, pollution, world hunger – whatever mission or missions you have chosen to accept. What is important is that actions speak louder than words. In fact, according to recent research, customers are more likely to buy from brands that are actively involved in doing something, rather than just making statements or donations. You need to actually do something to show you care.

Setting The Stage For Your Storytelling

Every story needs a stage. So far, most marketers have been used to presenting their messages within the frames of television, billboards, cinema, magazines and so on. In a modern marketer’s perspective this is the non-interactive framework of presenting content to an audience that cannot influence what they see. For many marketers, the tradition of one-way communication continued on interactive media, such as Facebook Page announcements with no comments allowed from the audience. That may be because so many disciplines and tasks within marketing and advertising have for so long been based on communication skills rather than interaction capabilities. But the first and very basic premise of interactive media is…surprise, interaction! So how do you tell your story while allowing for interaction? Well, let us take a step out on the stage that is social media.

The Social Media Stage

If you have read other articles by me on CMO.com, the chances are that you are familiar with my basic premise of interactive media: it is not about technology, it is about the interaction between people enhanced or extended by technology. That goes double for social media. It is all about people interacting with people. That means that your stage is more like a stage in a theatre, where interaction with the audience is not only allowed, it is encouraged. This gives you the possibility to add a whole new dimension to your relationship with your audience.

To get you started, here are four basic suggestions and proposed ground rules:

Take The Audience Behind The Scenes

Your traditional marketing communications such as the promotion of features and benefits, sales promotions through various online and offline ads, television and online spots still have an important role in pushing sales. If we consider this the frontal push of messages, storytelling is the behind-the-scenes access that adds character to your perceived brand. This is where you can invite people into learning a more personal back-story of all the things that have been going on, and are going on with your brand.

Apply A Cycle Of Publish, Wait, Respond, Review, Publish

Deliver your story in self-contained chapters that can both stand alone as individual stories, and act together as a whole story. Allow for questions and comments to your current chapter. You may want to let it affect what you say in your next chapter. And by the way, there is absolutely no universal, scientific proof that a certain length of a story has more value than others. The best length for your chapters and how long the story they make up is something you will need to figure out through trial-and-error with your audience. They will have their own preferences of what and how much is interesting.

Don’t Get Lost In The Discussion

Be open to discussion and comments, but do not lose sight of the basic moral and message of your story. Remember, you are still the official face of your brand, and this is still your story, regardless of how much you are letting it be influenced by your audience. Also, sometimes we need to ask people to continue certain discussions in private, and give them a number or an email to do so. If you consider an issue to be of common interest, please note that addressing a comment of confusion or negativity in public can sometimes work to your benefit.

Understand That Social Media Storytelling Is A Task For Your Experienced Brand Guardian

Your story is your brand, and once you enter the realm of social media storytelling, this is no longer by default a task for the intern, just because he or she is your designated millennial or digital native. As the saying goes, with great power comes great responsibility. You need to assign how you handle this to someone who can tell your story and guard your brand dynamically, and that person may not be the most tech-savvy on your team.

So, are you ready to let your brand become something else, something more, to your audience? Then it is time to go looking for the stories, big or small, that define your brand in reality. The moral of this particular story is that honestly sharing true stories about how you made it to this point, and what you need to do to get to where you are going, is your first step towards letting your brand become a hero to your audience.