Want to make your brand stand out? Tell a story!

Just like that English Lit class you snoozed through, a good narrative needs a beginning, middle, and end. And, lucky for you, crafting the perfect brand story only takes 7 steps.

Trust us, even big brands like Jeep, Apple, Nike, and Dove use this framework to make their audience crave their products or services.
So, put your audience in a pickle and make your brand the solution to their problems. Boom, you’re a marketing master.

To clarify the picture, let’s dive deeper into these 7 steps:

So what is the 7-Part storytelling framework:

1. HERO

There’s always a hero for every good narrative. This main character that goes through the obstacles to reach success is you, the audience, the customers.
The hero in the story is not your product or service. It’s not even your brand.
All and everything is about the customer and how your brand can help this hero.

Trust this, no one gives a flying f*ck if the new airpods are black or white. It’s about what the white ones make the customer feel or what the black ones add to the customer’s confidence or “vibe”.
See what I mean?
Think of what your brand can do to the Hero… because the Hero is the focus of it all.

2. PROBLEM

The product or service you create and decide to offer is supposed to solve a problem.
The aim is to help customers solve their problems… or rather make them feel like they have a problem and that only you can solve it.
Let’s be honest, marketing a product or service is about making the customers feel like they are missing something that they NEED to have.

So every time someone buys something, they solve a problem.

Cold hands? Gloves

Bad breath? Gum.

You want an effective message to be conveyed to the audience? You have to portray the problem you are offering to solve in your marketing strategy and your marketing campaigns/ads/designs.

Look at the example in the video.
What problem is being portrayed?

See how the struggle was portrayed?

Okay, you get the point

Next step is…

3. GUIDE

For every hero in a story, a “guiding” character.
Think Mufasa in The Lion King. He guides Simba and indirectly gives him a plan of action… he remains the point of reference for the plan.

That’s where it becomes about You, your brand.
You are Mufasa.

After presenting your customers with a problem, you give them support or a guiding plan for them to “resolve” their problem. (they solve it, you’re just the medium).

So when you are trying to sell your product/service, there’s this character you build that is here for your customers. The face of what you offer.
Like Steve Jobs being the guide to a new innovative technological future.
He’s not the solution, he’s the guide.

4. THE PLAN

It’s the art of selling without telling your customers to buy it.
This is where you present the plan that puts your brand at the center.

The plan that sells the hero YOUR solution.
Basically, you position your product or service at the center to make the customers feel like THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT I NEED.

Sell your product or service as the “must have” between all the other competitors.
That plan you have to solve your customers’ problem that no one else has.

5. CALL TO ACTION

You can’t forget about the CTA.
But you also can’t be too direct with it. It’ll be too mainstream and way to lame.
You don’t want to be lame.

Instead of telling your customers what to do, show your customers what they can become.

Look at Nike.
They use “Don’t Change Your Dreams”, “Lose Count”, “Never Settle, Never Done”.
Not your regular CTA right? But inciting.
It makes you want to keep going and not change your dreams, so that’s how NIKE becomes the guide to the solution you didn’t know you were looking for.

6. HELP AVOID FAILURE

Our inherent desire to “not fail” is greater than our desire to succeed. I’ve seen this sentence a lot, to a point where people would do something just to avoid losing something else.

Let me explain…

By showing your customers what they might lose if they don’t “take action”, you’ll push them to take action.
By showing your customers ONLY what they will gain from taking action, you might or might not push them to consume what you’re offering because they might think that they can gain this somewhere else.
So show your customers what might happen if they don’t take action… then watch them take action.

Mac or Pc?<br>
You’re probably gonna want to look like Justin Long here on the right. (or you’ll lose and look like this guy… no offense).

7. SUCCESSFUL END

After they follow the plan, the narrative needs to end with success (obviously)
After showing what your hero may become without your product, show what they might reach WITH that product.

This can be done directly with a before and after video ad campaign…
OR, try the indirect way that feeds the message subliminally.
Such as this video where the Hero starts somewhere and ends in a completely different mindset.

A better mindset, a happier lifestyle, a solution to a problem.

So,
If you want your brand to be memorable and effectively deliver your message to your audience, you have got to try giving them a narrative they can hang onto. A story that speaks to them. A story that will inspire them. But -most importantly- a story that will make them feel like they can’t miss out on this.

A sense of urgency, with a sense of safety, topped with a bit of hope and exaggeration.

With this 7-step storytelling framework, watch how all your campaigns, presentations, seminars, designs, and ads will conform and strengthen your position in the industry.
Becomes:

A hero, has a problem, then meets their guide, who puts them on a plan, and calls the hero to take action, to help them avoid failure, and reach a successful end.

Creative thinking is needed now more than ever.

In today’s world, businesses look for creative minds that will not only look outside the box, but will turn it all inside out for an innovative idea.

Luckily, creativity is not just for artists or geniuses. You can unleash your creativity to its utmost effectiveness with music.

According to studies, any music has an effect on us. It affects how we feel and thus affects our performance. 

You know what they say, the better we feel, the better we perform.

So if you’re looking for ways to improve your creativity, you better start letting your mind wander as you listen to music to unlock new grounds to divulge.

Why music?

Hans Christian Andersen once said, “Where words fail, music speaks.” 

Music transcends language. It speaks to you without always speaking and helps you speak without using your words.

In fact, music can be a key component in improving your productivity and focus while working.

One new study by Simone M. Ritter and Sam Ferguson shows how music improves cognition and impacts creativity. It provides employees with stress relief and increased concentration, which help with more creative possibilities they can access.

Here’s why this can help you when creating a design or writing content for a certain project:

A- It can bring powerful emotions

Emotions are more important than you think when it comes to work. Especially in the marketing world… Everything is based on emotions.

You attract customers by their emotions, you create content that speaks to emotions, you sway people with the way of writing or speaking that appeals to their emotions. That’s how the business world works and that’s how it will always be.

So, why not use yours when working on some creatives? Why not switch on those emotions to boost that creativity of yours?

Through music, the limbic system that is associated with emotions and memory is activated. All these feelings and emotions generated by the music in the background transfers into the work you are creating.

It’s really all about you and about perspectives.

Whether positive or negative, creativity is often birthed by emotions. Embrace it, don’t fear it. Let your projects, campaigns, designs, or content show those parts because humans relate to humans and that emotional creativity is either something people will relate to or feel inspired by.

B- Increases focus

Music and focus.

Believe it or not, not all sounds are distracting. 

And some sounds act as a distraction from the distracting sounds.

Music can help you frame the concept you are going with and section it.

With music and focus, your content will follow a certain pattern or rhyme that resonates with the bigger picture. Your design will feel coordinated and your content will feel well packed.

Let’s talk science…

Music can help you focus by providing a consistent and structured auditory stimulus. Repeated rhythm and consistent beat. By that, your brain tunes out all different inconsistent sounds that might interrupt your train of thoughts or train of creativity.

Music acts as a form of background noise that can help drown out distractions and create a more conducive environment to concentrate. So when working on a campaign and you’re looking for this consistent theme or concept that weaves throughout it all, you’re gonna want to focus on one vibe and follow through. 

An inconsistent and fragmented look to a project shows weakness in the execution… better get yourself focused on a mood and pick a genre that speaks to the project you’re taking on.

Quick tip: Classical and instrumental music have been shown to have a calming effect that reduces stress and anxiety, thus improving your ability to focus. 

But really… It all depends on taste.

C- Improves your mood

Music boosts your mood. simple.

It influences the release of neurotransmitters in the brain (such as dopamine and serotonin) associated with positive emotions. This reduces stress and anxiety and allows you to enter a place of calmness and relaxation.

By being in this state of improved mood, you can unlock creativity as your brain will break down mental blocks, get increased motivation, and attract more inspiration.

When you feel positive, you become more open-minded, less self-critical, and more open to see things in a different light. 

Think differently, not being afraid of exploring new grounds, seeing things from a different angle. All of these are necessary in marketing and creative thinking because they allow you to portray and sell more than what’s on the shelf- you sell possibilities and you sell solutions, that’s how you get creative. (all of this is influenced by your mood… crazy right?)

D- Sparks inspiration and kickstarts the creative process

Music can spark your inspiration and boost your creativity by stimulating the creative process. Starting with information gathering, to the incubation of new connections, reaching deeper layers of ideas, up until the verification process where the vision starts forming. Music can guide you through it all.

Whether it’s the melody, the rhythm, or the lyrics, music fosters some sort of “framed” or “specific” environment that helps target and narrow down creative tasks. 

So when you’re finding yourself lost with a project and don’t know where to start, playing some music can help you focus on a certain flow and find that theme for every project, idea, or design.

It will trigger the “declique” you might have been waiting for, that peak of inspiration- that aha moment.

Wondering what to write for that Christmas campaign that doesn’t sound like every other brand? Try some Christmas songs and throw in some Dean Martin or Mariah Carey for inspiration and how they play with words while singing.

Struggling to think of a design for a funky festival? Try putting some upbeat music and let the sounds create that atmosphere or mood for you to arrange and organize your ideas.

So, turn that volume up and let yourself soak into the music.

There are so many ways you can increase your creativity (via Creative Agency UAE) and help yourself when facing a creative block. But there is nothing more convenient and applicable on the daily than using music

So next time you’re feeling that Monday blues or that uninspired state of mind, try listening to some music (or feeling the beat and melody). The ideas will come to you naturally.