What is brand storytelling?
A story has a character who wants something, an obstacle in the way and a change by the end. Brand storytelling applies that shape to a company: the founder who started it, the maker who still does the work, the customer whose life it touched, the object and where it came from. It is not a slogan, and it is not the paragraph of boilerplate under the heading Our Story on a website. It lives in films, documentaries, long-form articles, social series, retail spaces and the way a brand talks about itself when nobody is selling.
It is distinct from brand messaging, which is what a brand says, and from brand voice, which is how it sounds. Storytelling is the vehicle that carries both without announcing them. And it is different from advertising in one basic way: a story asks for attention and earns it, while an ad buys it.
The best brand stories are found rather than written. A company that has been around for a while has more of them than it knows, and the job is often to listen long enough to hear the one that is true.
Why it matters
Why brand storytelling matters
People remember stories and forget claims. A story carries a brand's values without stating them, which is the only way values are ever believed. It builds the thing advertising cannot buy, which is affinity: the sense that you know who these people are and would choose them. And it produces a body of material that keeps working for years, where a campaign line is finished the day the media stops.
Honest storytelling is also the antidote to category sameness. Every brand in a sector makes roughly the same product claims; nobody else has your founder, your makers or your customers. The risk runs the other way too. An invented story reads as invented, and audiences have a very good detector for it.
In practice
How brand storytelling works in practice
- 01
The work starts with finding the story: research, interviews, time with the people inside the company. The real story is often not the one in the brief, and sometimes not the one the brand expected to tell. Then a choice of form. A documentary, a scripted film, a series of short portraits, a long piece of writing, each suits a different kind of story and a different place it will be seen.
- 02
Production follows the rules of the form rather than the rules of advertising. Real people where possible, real locations, real voices, and an edit built for the story rather than for the message points. The brand appears as the world the story happens in, not as the hero of it. Afterward the story is distributed in layers: the long version on owned channels, cuts for social, stills, a title treatment, a piece of writing. One well-made story feeds a year of content.
At RIOT
Brand storytelling at RIOT
Most of what we make is brand storytelling in one form or another. The Lew Frankfort "Bag Man" documentary tells the story of Coach through one person rather than through product. The "Making the Mascot" documentary for the Washington Commanders turned the Major Tuddy mascot reveal into a story about how a team's new identity actually gets made. The SoulCycle instructor documentary series found seventeen stories inside one brand by looking at the people in the room, and The Medusa film for Tiffany & Co. tells a house's story through a single piece.
Watch out
What people get wrong about brand storytelling
Making the brand the hero. The customer, the maker or the founder is the character; the brand is the setting. Using the word storytelling for everything, until a product description is a story and the word means nothing. Inventing an origin story, which works until someone checks. Telling a story with no change in it, which is a description. And cutting a story down to fifteen seconds and wondering why it does not land: a story needs time, and the fifteen-second version is the trailer, not the film.
