How Meaningful Storytelling & Creating Strategies Define Brand Identity

Aaliya Amrin Jun 14, 2022

With a point, tap and billions of snaps - there’s no doubt that socials have become the world’s most valuable marketing tools. While content creation for social is not exactly straightforward for marketers, any brand owner knows that there’s way more to it than selfies and puppy videos.

Thanks to an ever-growing audience of more than hundreds of millions of active users (monthly) on Instagram alone, there’s a good chance the people you are trying to target are live and scrolling. Getting them engaged with your brand is all about creating imaginative and clutter-breaking content. We’ve all heard it from our clients a million times over, “we want something viral”.

The key, we’ve always believed, is to straddle purpose and profit. Simply purposeful content with meaningful storytelling won’t get you the sales, and simply sales won’t build a brand with longevity. It’s been our not-so-well-kept secret. Be it in design, technology, strategy or otherwise - a lack of substance will stand out like a sore thumb in today’s highly competitive and clutter-breaking market.

In our experience, working in corporate, freelance, and now the startup world, my cofounders and I have always aimed to design smarter ways to use simple things and even simpler ways to use smart things. For our clients, the goal is to create a narrative, one that talks back. We believe as a brand you don’t have to choose between purpose and profit. As an agency we are here to tell you that you can do both, purpose is your competitive advantage - and your agency is meant to design it for you, end-to-end.

Agencies help brands deal with who they are and stay true to that. Agencies also help brands not give into fleeting fads, short-life trends, or tokenism. For example, a pride campaign when you have no other pro-pride bone in your company body is simply meaningless. Brand storytelling is more than a gathering of a logo, fonts, images or colors you may like. The key remains in being real, in making sure your ideas reflect your brand and trickle down throughout your marketing output.

Content production is the creation of content that is relevant, entertaining, compelling, and valuable. Content marketing requires consistent publishing and can change the behaviours of customers. Content production does not involve direct selling but can help retain and acquire customers by increasing brand loyalty and awareness. For it to work, the content must be engaging (or inspire a reaction from the customers) because if it’s not, it really has no value. This is where ‘purpose’ comes in.

The idea of purpose is innately attractive to customers as well as employees. Mike Marcellin, CMO of Juniper, says “Purpose has an impact on the kind of people we’ve been able to attract. People are looking for a worthy purpose or vision they can believe in. The more inspired your employees are, the better the work they are going to do.”

For example, Sephora’s purpose is “inspiring fearlessness”. A small and nuanced thought far greater than the otherwise superficial products being sold. Sephora’s Head of Marketing Deborah Yeh said she is“ blown away with how profound it was to get at a deeper meaning with employees. Every day they choose to put on their uniform and spend time in our stores because they believe their work is meaningful. They will leap over mountains for each other, our brand and our client.”

With our own clients, I’m often stunned at how methodically each of them wants to approach ‘purpose’. It first starts with defining a unique purpose (which in itself can take multiple weeks or even months) and is

perhaps the most important step as it informs all others along the way. Then comes the application of said purpose into each step of the business trickling right down to marketing. Not missing any steps which are purely internal such as company culture. There’s a sliver of hope that if they get the purpose right, (long-term) profit isn’t too far away. The fusing of purpose and profit is what confuses people the most, right-brained strategy meets left-brained logistics.

*The author is Aaliya Amrin, Co-Founder of BTG