Brand storytelling that truly connects with your customers

What do you think Contentful does? If you said manage content or personalize digital experiences across every channel, you’d be right, but it's so much more than that. 

Contentful brings people and technology together to tell brand stories. Brand storytelling is what companies want to do but struggle to achieve with the tools they have. It’s the ultimate way to influence how people perceive and experience your brand throughout the customer journey. 

In this post, I’ll explain why brand storytelling is so exciting, what it takes to get it right, where brands go wrong, and how Contentful is helping brands transform transactional content into engaging customer journeys. 

Brand storytelling builds memorable brands

Great brands are not built on superior products, marketing campaigns, or a strong digital presence (though these things certainly help). The elusive quality that sets great brands apart is brand storytelling. Brand storytelling converts casual browsers and shoppers into loyalists and evangelists. Brands that tell compelling stories build fanatical fans who love them and share their stories.

These brand storytelling masters immerse customers in a cohesive brand experience that pulls them into the story and carries them through the customer journey. Every touchpoint — mobile app, social media, website, in-store, or customer service call — reinforces the brand identity and values while being tailored to your customers personally. 

Brand storytelling at its best makes the entire journey more enjoyable. 

For example, our family is a Nintendo family. It started with wondering if Nintendo was family-friendly. Could we bring a Nintendo Switch into our home and enjoy it with the kids?

From that first research question, we were immersed in the Nintendo brand story: Nintendo is a family-friendly company that’s about entertainment. Now we play all the games, we have a family membership, and my son plays eSports in school. We’ve deepened our relationship with Nintendo because it brought us into a consistent brand story that we enjoy being part of.

What is brand storytelling?

Brand storytelling is how you weave the core elements of your brand identity or product together in a way that resonates with customers. It’s not just brand guidelines or a consistent message. It’s how you bring your brand to life. Successful brand storytelling elicits an emotional response and goes beyond superficial engagement to form a deeper connection with your audience.

Your brand narrative, messaging framework, and style guide tell you what to say and how to say it. Brand storytelling takes those components to the next level, weaving them together with traditional story elements like conflict, character journeys, story arcs, lessons learned, and teasers that keep your customers eager for the next chapter. 

Brand storytelling sparks curiosity and engages customers with new ways to explore your brand and become part of the brand story.

Brand storytelling examples: Brands that are getting it right

Kraft Heinz: A compelling brand story that’s all about you

A great example of authentic brand storytelling is Kraft Heinz. They’ve modernized their brand with immersive storytelling that invites you to be a character in the story.

The brand story is not about them; it’s about experiences in your life. They want you to tell them about the last time you used their ketchup, how it made your barbecue or family dinner more memorable. They want you to share recipes and try recipes from other customers. 

They’re a brand that’s getting brand storytelling right in a very modern way. It’s playful, engaging, and appeals to a broad demographic.

Ruggable: Making the mundane memorable 

Another one I like is Ruggable. The washable rug brand transformed the mundane task of buying a rug into a more personal, memorable experience. They started by recognizing that people buy washable rugs because they have a problem: a cat that sheds, a dog that tracks in mud, messy kids, or a tendency to spill their wine. They carved a niche where customers can talk about this stuff and find solutions.

Then they took it a step further by personalizing content based on those audience segments, resulting in 7x higher click-through rates and a 25% boost in conversions. 

Now they’re bringing customers further into the brand story with an AI-powered feature that lets you upload a picture of your room, get personalized recommendations, and compare how different rugs will look in your virtual room. The feature is fun to use and aligns perfectly with their brand story of convenience.

KFC: Localizing stories keep customers craving more 

KFC, the quick-serve restaurant specializing in their Finger Lickin’ Good® chicken, revamped its brand story and gave teams the tools to tailor storytelling for individual markets.

Consistent branding and compelling stories are credited with a 43% increase in year-over-year digital sales. New brand loyalty programs, secret menus, and other innovative campaigns give customers something new to look forward to and a reason to share a bucket of chicken with their friends.

Barriers to authentic storytelling: What brands get wrong 

It’s easy to tell when brands get storytelling right. You feel yourself swept up in a good story, clicking through to one more page, downloading the app, or Googling secret menus. But how do you get that magic mix of storytelling ingredients right? I’ll get to that in a minute, but first, let’s look at a few places where brands go wrong.

Missing the story

Some brands confuse storytelling with staying on brand. They have all the elements to keep their brand voice consistent, but they forget to weave those elements into authentic stories that draw people in. Other brands, especially those with siloed content management systems, have stories that feel disconnected and fragmented or might even stray off brand, undermining customer trust.

To strike the balance between consistency and creativity, Contentful gives brand storytellers powerful tools that foster creativity within guardrails.

Trying to control the narrative too much

Consistency is important, but trying to control the message too tightly will alienate people. Correcting detractors on social media, enforcing rigid definitions, or telling customers what to say in reviews spoils the magic of authentic storytelling. 

You want to give people ways to engage with your brand story rather than forcing them into your world. This means crafting simple messages that will echo through the market as people share your story in their own way. For example, instead of defending its original recipe, Kraft Heinz embraced customer “Mac Hacks” with a contest that gave fans more ways to enjoy the cheesy goodness.

Assuming the story is the same for everyone

We interpret stories based on our own experiences. I’m reading The Hobbit with my son, and we pick up on different things and identify with different characters within the same story. The same thing happens with brand stories. Customers get excited about different products, features, and parts of your story.

Brand storytellers need to provide target audiences with meaningful ways to engage with the brand story. Personalized content is one way to make your story richer and more relevant; without it, brand stories feel flat and stale. 

See how Contentful Personalization with built-in AI is helping brands create compelling stories at scale.

How Contentful enables brand storytelling

Telling compelling stories that sweep customers into a world you create takes more than storytelling techniques and creative flair. You need a platform that brings people and technology together to tell your story, market your story, and expand it into an immersive storyworld. All while keeping the storyline consistent.

Contentful meets these needs with a digital experience platform that provides:

Structure and organization

A lot of brands throw content out there and hope customers will find what they need, but that’s not how people want to experience a brand. They don’t want to assemble the brand story themselves. Great stories start with a solid foundation. A book has chapters with different themes and a logical flow. Complex stories have a table of contents, character lists, maps, and a glossary of terms that help anchor the reader and guide them through.

Contentful provides the structure for brand storytelling by unifying content, defining content models, organizing content into reusable components, and providing the right mix of flexibility and governance to keep your story fresh and on brand. It's the consistent foundation your teams need to scale stories seamlessly across marketing channels, experiences, and touchpoints. 

A collaborative workspace

Stories are told by many people within your organization, including marketers, product managers, designers, and customer service representatives. Contentful provides a single source of truth — your brand canon — to ensure consistency. Custom workflows and permissions empower content teams to tell different parts of the brand story on your website, in social media, through ads, billboards, and in-store experiences. Contentful Studio gives marketers and designers powerful visual editing tools so they can bring your story to life in fresh, innovative ways.

Personalization and optimization

How do you keep people engaged in a story? You tailor it to them, adjusting the length, focusing on the elements they’re most interested in, and reading their body language for clues. With Contentful Personalization, you can tailor content at scale, creating contextual experiences based on customer data, where they are, what they looked at last, whether they like cats or dogs, etc. 

Connection to your storyworld

It takes many systems working together to build a brand and share your story. Your product information management system (PIM), commerce solution, content solution, customer data platform, knowledge base, etc., all contribute to your storyworld. The Contentful App Framework and Ecosystem integrates these tools and allows you to weave your story through all the technology that powers the customer experience. It eliminates inconsistencies and gaps that disrupt the customer journey and lets you tell a seamless story that strengthens customer relationships.

The bottom line: Brand storytelling 

I’ve seen customers like Kraft Heinz, KFC, and Harley-Davidson shift from static brand stories to interactive, immersive brand storytelling. They’re using Contentful to tell their stories in new ways, re-engage customers, and reinvigorate their brands.  

Newer brands like Ruggable and Pets Deli are bringing customers into the story with personalization and innovative AI-driven features. The results are impressive — Pets Deli increased conversions 51%.

The key is to put the right tools and processes in place. Empower people within your organization to tell your brand story on every channel in ways that resonate with different audiences, and then go even bigger by inviting your customers to be part of that story. That’s the success story Contentful makes possible. 

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