Storytelling: Humanizing your Brand to Connect with Consumers - Anouk Pappers
Anouk Pappers, a brand anthropologist and CEO of Signitt.com, specializes in branding techniques, one of them being storytelling. The marketing strategy behind storytelling is compelling as it creates a relatable brand for customers. Customers do not want to feel as though they are buying products from a faceless giant cooperation. If a brand is able to tell a unique story and build a relationship with their customer, they automatically become more desirable. Storytelling humanizes a company’s brand which then allows for human connection to the brand. This is what Anouk Pappers is able to do for brands.
Anouk details the science behind why storytelling and humanization of a brand works.
“To begin with, stories are much easier to digest than other information. So if you integrate your key messages in stories, you do a better job at transmitting but also reinforcing the messages. Besides, we don’t tend to remember more explicit information, but with stories we do.”
“Stories relate to our emotional side of the brain. Stories help us make sense of a complex world. Brands are part of this complex world. So therefore stories can help us make sense of brands. From a psychological perspective we use stories to help us understand brands.
“Storytelling is one of the main ways of humanizing a brand. The use of stories also encourages people to think about brands in terms of values that are not purely short-term and financial.
“Stories showing the real people behind the brand are very strong. For example, we work with the CMO of Pepsi China. For us, this brand is very authentic. Why? Because we work with a person, whom we trust, who shares great stories and who cares about more than just profit.
“Brands can tell different stories, for different audiences, from different angles, all supporting the same key messages.”
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