Insight

Millennials aren’t just the biggest group of consumers today; they are also the most connected. This audience segment is more prone to conduct extensive research online before making a purchase which makes content marketing the ideal way to reach this
audience segment.

If you’re looking to target millennials, you will have to align your content strategy with their concerns, interests, and behaviours to resonate with them on a deeper level. Here are 4 tips to help you get started:

Appeal to instant gratification

• As digital natives, millennials are used to having nearly everything available immediately.
• Brands can appeal to this need for immediacy by incorporating elements of instant gratification in digital campaigns.

Be authentic

• Millennials prefer to buy products they believe in; from companies they trust.
• In the past, it may have been unacceptable to speak out on political stances or social justice in the marketing world, but today, these things can actually help brands connect better with the target audience and strengthen support.

Embrace uniqueness & stand out

• By creating a product/concept that’s unique and stands out, brands can expect better response from millennials.
• This will also encourage more likes and shares, offering better campaign mileage.

Get interactive

• Incorporating interactive experience in digital campaigns can be a great way to grab millennials’ attention.
• If you can get them engaged, you can expect stronger brand affinity and loyalty in the long run.

Need help reaching millennials for your next digital marketing campaign? Get in touch with us today.

The pandemic outbreak and stay-home policies not only changed the way businesses operate; it had also caused a shift in consumer behaviour and media consumption.

As a digital agency providing consumer-centric strategy for brands, we needed to adapt to these changes and find alternative ways of working to adequately support our clients during this trying time, as many of them placed renewed emphasis on their digital footprint.

Here are a few ways how we have embraced the opportunities from the pandemic.

Adjusting to the remote working life

Similar to many other agencies and businesses, we instated the work-from-home policy, to comply with the government’s preventive measure and prioritise the safety of our employees.

Being a digital agency, we are fortunate to experience a smooth and less daunting transition to remote work as we are used to working ‘online’ with infrastructure and resources already in place that supported the change.

Virtual pitches take centre stage

As physical meetings couldn’t take place, we leveraged on video conferencing platforms, such as Google Meet and Zoom, to present our creative pitches.

Virtual pitches aren’t a replacement for face-to-face meetings, as connecting with people through a screen requires a lot more preparation and consideration to overcome situations such as technical glitches. But when done right, this form of pitching has proven to be effective as we have secured new business wins during this time.

Shrinking borders across the globe

The pandemic has normalised remote work and altered the perception of needing a physical, local presence to execute work in a different country, especially for our industry.

With digital acceleration leading to more virtual collaborations, great campaigns can still be achieved – without compromising on the quality of the creative outputs and in-depth understanding of the local markets.

Digital executions across markets

As a result, we rose to the challenge and continued producing great work for Malaysian clients as well as brands across different countries in the Southeast Asian market.

Some of our notable 2020 campaigns include:

1) Grab empowers small businesses in Southeast Asia with personalised campaign

What we did: Popular e-hailing brand Grab launched a community initiative during the pandemic to support small businesses by offering free ad space within the app. However, this meant that they needed personalised ads to showcase the thousands of merchants, appeal to the varied audience sets, while taking into consideration local nuances in different countries. We leveraged our Digital Creative Automation (DCA) service and helped Grab to produce over 7K creative assets in just 2 weeks.

Why it worked: To generate multiple digital ads in varied languages, messaging, and creatives at this scale would typically take up to 2 months of production time and require more resources, incurring additional costs. By using DCA, we recorded an 80% reduction in required resources and saved 80% in overall campaign cost.

Learnings: Creative automation is a great way for brands to tackle the challenges in achieving personalisation at scale. By understanding Grab’s challenges and automating their creative process via DCA, the campaign was a great success and drove maximum exposure for the small businesses.

2) Haier hops on video trends to foster the Raya spirit

What we did: With COVID-19 leading to the first-ever social distancing Raya celebration, we helped leading home appliance brand Haier uplift consumers’ spirits while strengthening its brand awareness through our two-pronged campaign via Facebook Live and TikTok branded hashtag challenge.

Why it worked: By leveraging on social platforms that were trending at the time, we effectively reached Haier’s target audience, the millennials, with relatable content. As most people were looking for entertainment and a sense of community in a time of increased isolation, our #AdaHaierAdaRaya executions helped foster the communal spirit of the festive season, virtually.

Learnings: In times of uncertainty, brands should be nimble and rethink their marketing strategies to ensure relevancy. One way to do this is by leveraging on trends and platforms that are suitable for the brand/target audience.

Learn More

3) How Tohtonku brands stayed relevant during the lockdown

What we did: To help personal care company Tohtonku maintain its brands’ relevance and engage with Malaysians during the Movement Control Order (MCO), we executed a series of livestreams under its brands. For Ubermen and Nanowhite Men, we organised live grooming sessions as people were unable to get haircuts at the time. Meanwhile, we partnered with selected influencers to co-host educational Instagram Live sessions under its Nanowhite brand and designed a series of self-healing themed Facebook Live sessions, led by local wellness instructors under its Nutox brand.

Why it worked: Rather than hard selling the products, we angled our strategy toward helping Malaysians cope with the lockdown blues and provided a form of escape from the hard-hitting COVID-19 news.

Learnings: By adapting quickly to the changing environment, brands will be able to subtly inject themselves into trending conversations and strengthen their relevance. A crisis can be turned into an opportunity to stand out and build trust for long-term brand affinity.

See The Media Coverage

While we are still working from home, we’re fully operational and available to support your digital marketing needs. Looking to expand your digital footprint? Get in touch with us.

The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in more people staying indoors and spending time online. As the competition for consumers’ attention intensifies online, it’s now increasingly challenging for brands to engage effectively with consumers and stay ahead of the competition. To overcome this challenge, brands should employ digital innovations in marketing campaigns, which can encourage two-way conversations.

What can brands do?

One of the ways brands can do this is by incorporating immersive experiences or gaming elements into the campaign strategy. By adding the element of interactivity into digital campaigns, brands will be able to capture audiences’ attention and offer experiences that resonate with them.

In fact, 79% of marketers agree that interactivity can enhance brand messaging retention.¹

Redefining the customer journey through interactive experiences

Here are some ways we have used interactive web experiences in our campaigns:

Shiseido: #MyUltimuneStrength

Japanese skincare brand Shiseido has an Ultimune product range that fights signs of ageing by strengthening skin barriers from within. To celebrate the launch of its new Ultimune Eye Concentrate, we leveraged on this ‘strength’ unique selling proposition (USP) to produce an interactive video, allowing viewers to discover their inner strength through the story of a blind first date. Taking a cue from Netflix’s ‘Black Mirror: Bandersnatch,’ the video allowed users to decide how the story played out. The choices reflected the strength the participants excelled in and they received Shiseido products catered to these strengths.

This campaign successfully attracted over 7K unique visitors, with more than half of the users watching the entire interactive video. It also recorded a 3-minute, 27-second average session duration – surpassing the average benchmark by 50%.²

Key Takeaway:
When you can get users to interact with your content, they process information that is being shared better, spend more time on your site, and engage with your brand. By using interactive video, we transformed Shiseido’s consumers from passive viewers into active audiences, while allowing them to learn about the product and its USP in a more memorable way – leading to deeper brand affinity.

Try It Out

Nutox: Wheel of Radiance CNY Campaign

Chinese New Year (CNY) is not complete without ang pows and the game of chance. To help skincare brand Nutox stay top of mind during the busy festive season, we combined these insights with digital innovation to create the ‘Wheel of Radiance’ campaign. Hosted on a dedicated microsite, users could create custom digital ang pows with personalised greetings and share them with their loved ones. Users could also spin the digitised wheel for a chance at winning Nutox prizes.

We succeeded in engaging Nutox customers during one of the busiest festive seasons as over 6K customised ang pows were created in just 3 weeks. Moreover, 77% of them had shared their custom packets with their family and friends.

Key Takeaway:
Incorporating audience insights and interactivity in digital campaigns can help brands deliver a more dynamic and personalised experience. This may also change the way users engage with a particular brand and encourage deeper connections.

Spin The Wheel

Kingdom Digital: What The Fatt CNY AR Initiative

Augmented Reality (AR) has been trending around the world – thanks to the popularity of mobile apps such as PokemonGo and the surge of AR filters on social networks. However, these are often app-based and getting users to download an app can be challenging. Realising that convenience is a key factor today, we created an interactive web-based AR game as part of our agency’s CNY initiative to overcome this challenge.

This webAR game, titled ‘What The Fatt’, allowed users to hunt for signature Malaysian Chinese ethnic dishes directly from the convenience of their mobile browsers. This made the game easily accessible without needing to download a mobile app, which contributed to higher interactions.

Key Takeaway:
One of the things brands should do to be more customer-focused is maximising the convenience offered to consumers – especially right now. With interactive experiences such as webAR, brands can create seamless customer experiences and engage them in an innovative manner. When an interactive campaign is hassle-free, it can also encourage users to share it, allowing brands to reach a wider audience segment without relying solely on paid channels.

Experience The Hunt

Check out more of our interactive campaigns here.

As pandemic restrictions continue to be implemented across the globe, consumers are turning to the digital world for a sense of normalcy and to remain connected. For brands to stay relevant, interactive web experiences could be an innovative way to replicate some form of the consumer connection virtually. This would contribute to strong brand loyalty that keeps customers coming back, even after the crisis has passed.

Looking to inject interactivity into your digital campaigns? Get in touch with us.

References:

1. Content Marketing Institute: Use of Interactive Content on the Rise [Research]
2. DataBox: Benchmarking Average Session Duration

Consumers today are constantly bombarded with a variety of content which has lowered their attention span. One of the biggest challenges in digital marketing is captivating audiences with the right content. The content posted by brands, especially on social media, has the power to transform them into a household name and turn followers into fans.

84% of marketers have even successfully used content marketing to generate stronger brand awareness.¹

This is why having a content marketing strategy is essential. A well-executed strategy considers the target audiences’ behaviour and appeals to them at different stages of the buying process. But, creating a content strategy isn’t easy. It takes research, insights, and time to develop one that delivers results.

To better understand content marketing strategies, here are some best practices and insights from our content team.

Key considerations for building an effective strategy

Brands must remember that there isn’t one cookie-cutter content marketing strategy that will guarantee success – the strategy differs depending on the industry and audience.

When developing a content marketing strategy, our first step is to understand the brand’s story, objective, as well as its target audiences’ problem. With a comprehensive grasp on these, we can then conceptualise a solution and convey the message in the most creative way.

In short, these are the 5 questions to consider when building a strategy:

1. What is your brand’s unique proposition?
2. What are your campaign’s objectives?
3. What do you know about your audience?
4. How is your competitors’ performance?
5. Which platforms/touchpoints do you intend to connect with your audience?

Maximising inspiration for compelling content

Inspiration is everywhere. It’s in the things we do or the things our friends/family say. Inspiration can also be derived from other brands, competitors, and even internet trends. With a strategic mindset, we will be able to convert these into compelling content.

Based on our experience, the biggest source of inspiration comes from the target audience. By putting ourselves in their shoes and looking from their perspective, we’ll be able to understand what appeals to them best.

A good tip is to always be on the lookout for great content ideas even when idly scrolling through social media. This helps us get a better understanding of what makes a thumb-stopping content.

Determining the ideal content format

For content to be effective, choosing the right topic is not the only vital element. We will also need to decide on the right format which gives the content the best chance of being consumed and shared.

Picking the ideal format is largely dependent on these 3 elements:

• The goal of the content
• The intended message
• The best platform to reach the target audience

Here are some great content-led campaigns:

e.l.f.: #eyeslipsface TikTok Challenge

This is dubbed the most-viral campaign ever on TikTok with nearly 5 million user-generated videos. The challenge involved a custom music track and specially curated dance moves. It successfully captivated audiences and built awareness on a key brand pillar: e.l.f. is for every eye, lip, and face.

100% Pure New Zealand: Good Morning World

Tourism New Zealand’s campaign involved its natives taking advantage of being the first to see the sun each day by sending welcome messages to the world. These messages were shared via social channels for 365 days and were effective in showcasing New Zealanders’ warmth as well as the land’s picturesque view.

KFC Malaysia: KFC You Soon

As dine-in reopens following the lift of the Movement Control Order (MCO), KFC launched a campaign featuring a humorous video of a lonely KFC store, pining for the return of its customers. The campaign also included a dedicated love-sick music playlist to serenade customers back to its stores.

Content marketing is an effective tool to stimulate interest in your products and services. When done right, the results can be truly transformational for your brand.

Need help creating a compelling content marketing strategy? Get in touch with us today.

References:

1. Content Marketing Institute: B2C Content Marketing 2020

Creativity in advertising has taken a back seat as most marketers/brands today are more focused on data and media targeting.

However, it’s important to keep in mind that creativity is still the ultimate benchmark for successful advertising as it is quality creatives that attract the average consumers’ eye.

A recent study by Nielsen even revealed that creatives were responsible for 47% of a campaign’s sales – ahead of other key metrics: reach, targeting, recency, and context.¹

We caught up with our creative team to get their insights on what creativity means to them and how their creative process generally occurs.

Creativity is the key to strong branding

Our creative team unanimously agreed that creativity is the bridge between consumers and the brand. Although the speed of media consumption in this digital era is increasing rapidly, the attention span of users is decreasing.

By applying creativity well in your ad creatives, you will be able to produce engaging and thumb-stopping content which can entice consumers to know more about your brand. A good, creative ad can help nurture strong brand awareness and encourage virality, which can improve sales.

But, what makes an ad creative?

Being creative in the ad world isn’t simply about being visually appealing. A creative ad should give users a fresh take on the brand and sell its unique proposition.

Think of ads as your introduction to your consumers – how do you want someone to remember you and how do you intend to maintain a good relationship with them? An ad that successfully attracts your audience, conveys your message well, and remains memorable is the definition of a truly creative ad.

Creative strategy must be supported with research

The key step to any creative ideation strategy is to fully understand the client’s brief by identifying the objective and the challenge. Following that, research is the next essential element. Look into the brand’s background and target audiences’ behaviour to develop an effective creative strategy.

From this, the process of looking for inspiration and idea generation begins. As creative ideas can spark in any second during a brainstorming session, all ideas should be welcomed – no matter how bold or wild. These ideas can then be refined and transformed into a strong creative strategy.

Get inspired by great creatives

If you’re ever in a creative rut, here are some examples of great campaigns supported by compelling creatives:

The iGery – Gery Malaysia

When the iPhone 11 was released, its unique camera design was trending. We jumped on the trend by creatively adapting one of Gery’s best-selling biscuits into the iPhone 11’s design which made it viral.

Lovin’ It – McDonald’s Thailand

This creatively suggestive ad concept prompted people to take a second look. At first glance, it may look like a pair of lovers leaning in for a kiss. But, look closer and you’ll realise that it’s actually a McDonald’s burger.

Game of Straws – Pepsi Belgium

Pepsi joined the ‘Game of Thrones’ hype to celebrate the release of the new season with its own creative take on the popular series – successfully capturing the attention of GOT fans everywhere.

Tech may help give campaigns an edge, but creativity is still imperative. Brands must remember that the priority of advertising has never really changed – it has always been about ideas and the human element. The goal here is to maximise your creatives to be impactful in the eyes of consumers. It’s for this reason that we encourage brands to break the mould when it comes to creativity in advertising.

If you’re looking to improve your creative strategy, we’re here to help. Get in touch with us.

Source:

1. Nielsen: When It Comes to Advertising Effectiveness, What is Key?

In this digital age and new norm, it’s no longer a question of whether to go digital or not. Let’s face it – almost everything is digitally connected today.

Consumer behaviour has certainly evolved. They are now constantly surrounded by extreme personalisation from Netflix to Spotify. In fact, 72% of consumers have even revealed that they only engage with marketing messages tailored to their interests.

Brands are aware that personalisation is important today, but many brands aren’t incorporating it into their marketing strategy due to certain challenges.

Steven Yap, Head of Digital & Operations, Kingdom Digital, shares how to achieve personalisation at scale for your brand.

Over the years of working with various brands, the common challenges and misunderstandings that usually arises are:

• Lack of expertise – brands are unsure where to start
• Insufficient time – personalisation requires a lot of resources to execute & can be time consuming
• Tech challenges – for efficient personalisation, tech integration is often needed & may involve high implementation cost

Based on our experience, here are 3 key points that have helped us in executing personalisation at scale for our clients:

Identify the right audience

• Segmenting high-value consumers that relate to your products or services.
• Finding the micro-moments in consumer’s buying journey where they are looking to fulfil their needs or wants.
• Looking into consumers’ pain points to tackle them with relevant messaging and visuals.

The creative automation approach

• To effectively reach different audience groups through personalisation, brands require multiple variations of creative assets. Don’t forget that Malaysia has 3 main languages & audiences may resonate with ads that speak to them in the language they are most familiar with.
• If brands are depending on traditional methods, this means they will require more resources to deliver multiple versions of an ad – this can be time-consuming and expensive.
• In our experience, we employed our very own creative automation tool, Digital Creative Automation (DCA), which drastically reduced the creative production time for our clients while saving up to 80% in required resources and the overall campaign cost.
• This helped our clients maximise their efficiency as well as their ad effectiveness across different audience segments – even without making any changes to existing platforms or integrating advance technology, which can be costly.

Test, learn & repeat

• There is no perfect plan or sure win campaign.
• At the beginning, we started with some small campaigns.
• We continuously tested and recorded learnings to better understand what works best for our clients’ consumers – as a result, we were able to gradually go bigger in terms of scaling personalised creatives.
• Keeping an accessible record of all the testing and learnings also helped us in better optimisation and understanding consumers’ needs and wants.

In short, brands can overcome the common personalisation challenges by:

1. Identifying the right audience via segmentation
2. Employing creative automation approach
3. And finally, testing, learning & repeating the process for better optimisation

To begin personalisation at scale, the important thing is to start small – by testing smaller campaigns. With time, you’ll be able to master personalisation and scale bigger.

So, take a small step & kickstart your personalisation journey with creative automation today.

Originally posted on ClickInsights

We live in a content-saturated world today – an average person reportedly sees over 5,000 ads per day.¹ As brands are constantly vying for consumers’ attention at every swipe and scroll, consumers’ expectation for ads with relevant messages and compelling creatives continue to increase. This leads to consumers easily tuning out ads that they find irrelevant.

While brands understand the power of personalisation, when it comes to execution most brands find it challenging to translate a single idea into a variety of creatives and content that resonate with different audiences. Here are the top 3 challenges brands typically face:

1. Diversifying creatives can be time-consuming

A study by Adobe revealed that time is the top barrier for marketers in personalising content and creatives.² It also disclosed that it takes an average of 12 days to get a single piece of content to market.² For brands with varied services and offerings, sticking with traditional ad production processes may result in needlessly spending time on repetitive adaptation tasks. The creative team will also have less time to focus on the strategic and design aspect for quality ads.

2. Lack of resources/workforce to produce at scale

A high volume of creative iterations is crucial for effective personalisation. As budgets and timelines aren’t usually agile, brands may lack the dedicated resources needed to generate multiple ad variations. They may incur higher overhead costs if they decide on either expanding their workforce or investing in more resources to cope with the demand. Alternatively, if brands decide to continue serving generic ads at scale, they may experience higher cost-per-acquisition rates due to ad fatigue.

3. Slow technology adoption

Brands should embrace technology to help them achieve personalisation at scale. However, technology adoption is still slow among most brands. This is mainly because some brands lack awareness that such technology exists while others are uncertain on how to incorporate it into their traditional and manual creative process. Aside that, adopting new technology is costly and integration can be difficult – these may hinder some brands from committing to it as well.

Drive creative relevance with creative automation

Creative automation is a promising way for brands to tackle these challenges in achieving personalisation at scale. By automating the creative process, brands can produce large volumes of assets and cut the time-to-market in half. This helps brands save time and cost, which in turn, offers better ad experiences for consumers as the content matches their needs.

Get started with DCA

Our Digital Creative Automation (DCA) service helps in streamlining the creative process to produce quality and relevant creatives within a short time. With DCA, there will be no technology integration needed as the creative process remains the same. However, the adaptation process is sped up to produce higher volume of creative assets in various formats such as static images, interactive HTML5 banners, and even video animations. This drastically reduces the creative production time while allowing for adequate testing.

How DCA scaled creatives for a top Southeast Asian brand

A top Southeast Asian brand, with multiple product offerings, was keen on targeting a large pool of consumers across 6 nations. This meant that the brand needed digital ads in different languages with varied messaging and creatives to appeal to different audience sets.
With DCA, we helped the brand:

• Produce 7,000 units of localised creative assets in 2 weeks, which normally takes 2 months
• Achieve 80% reduction in required resources
• Save 80% in overall campaign cost

Looking to scale your digital ad campaign? We’d be happy to help you get started with DCA. Get in touch with us today.

This article is the second of our 2-part series on personalised marketing. Read part 1 where we outline the top 3 reasons why personalisation matters.

References:

1. PPC Protect: How Many Ads Do We See A Day in 2020?
2. Adobe State of Creative and Marketing Collaboration Survey

Digital advertising has been experiencing rapid growth over the years. Consumers are now constantly being bombarded by a variety of ads, particularly when scrolling through their social media newsfeeds. As the stay-home order was issued due to COVID-19, digital advertising exponentially spiked. This has led to more people naturally tuning out ads that aren’t personally relevant to them.

Consumers today are supporting brands that are listening to them and are attentive to their specific needs. This is why personalisation is important – especially as we embrace our new normal. In a time of uncertainty, consumers find comfort in personalised communication and value the convenience it brings.

For an edge over competitors, brands should invest in personalisation efforts to improve customer experiences and foster better relationships. If you’re still not convinced, here are top 3 reasons why you should incorporate personalisation into your digital marketing campaigns.

Consumers expect it

From Netflix to Spotify, consumers are frequently surrounded by extreme personalisation and are now expecting it as a vital part of their online experience. 72% of today’s consumers have even revealed that they only engage with marketing messages tailored to their interests.¹

Brands must meet these expectations if they intent on keeping consumers engaged and returning for more. A good example are fashion and beauty brands who follow consumers’ consumption patterns and showcase relevant products throughout different stages of the conversion funnel.

Build brand loyalty & influence preference

In an increasingly competitive marketplace, delivering personalised messages or offers are viable steps towards fostering brand loyalty. Some retail brands are already leading the way by serving data-driven dynamic ads to resonate with different sets of audiences.

Personalisation also helps influence brand preference among consumers.

In fact, 99% of marketers say personalisation advances the consumer-brand relationship.²

This means perfecting your personalisation strategies may increase your market share, with more consumers preferring your brand over competitors.

Increase your conversion rates

Research shows that 70% of consumers feel that understanding how they use products/services is important to winning their business.³ By tailoring content and creatives to different target audiences according to their online behaviours, your message will be much more persuasive. This enables more meaningful interaction with consumers and leads them through the process of conversion.

Maximise performance with creative automation

However, personalisation takes time and dedicated resources for effective results. As this may not be feasible for most brands, creative automation is the way forward. Creative automation helps brands to simplify the creative process, making it easier and quicker to produce high volume of ad variations. This reduces human error and allows brands to conduct A/B testing to maximise campaign performance.

Ease your way into the automated world with our Digital Creative Automation (DCA) service. DCA allows brands to produce hundreds of digital ad variations within a short time period. This enables brands to run frequent, cost-efficient, and personalised digital ad campaigns for improved media performance.

With DCA, we have helped a top brand in Southeast Asia reduce 90% of their creative adaptation cost while saving 3 weeks of production time – allowing them to go to market earlier than expected.

Get in touch with us today to discuss how we can help your brand achieve personalisation at scale through creative automation.

References:

1. SmarterHQ: Privacy & Personalization
2. Evergage: 2020 Trend in Personalization Survey Report
3. Salesforce: Customer Expectations Hit All-Time Highs

Today, we live in a fast-paced and digitally-driven society. Merely a click of a button connects consumers instantaneously to their preferred brands and services. However, it’s undeniable that this shift in brand-consumer connection has drastically affected the human aspect of consumer interaction and led to the rise of people longing for authenticity.

Brands can no longer remain faceless – to survive in today’s world, brands need to not only connect with their consumers but tug at their heartstrings and interact with them on a deeper level than ever before. This is where brand storytelling comes into play.

Brand storytelling is a cohesive narrative that weaves facts and emotions focusing on brand values to build authentic connections with consumers. Studies have even shown that 92% of consumers want brands to make ads that feel like a story when consumed.¹

But, how exactly can brands dive into the world of storytelling in this content-heavy era?

Pictured: Edmund Lou, Head of Strategy,
Kingdom Digital

We caught up with our Head of Strategy, Edmund Lou, to discuss the essence of brand storytelling and all that it entails.

Could you define what brand storytelling means to you?

To me, brand storytelling is where brands harness their deep-rooted truths or beliefs as guidelines in creating content or actions that inspire and help people. Connecting to consumers in this manner is something all brands should aspire to achieve.

Why is a good brand narrative important?

There is simply no denying that the human brain is wired to respond to well-crafted stories. Neuroscience proves that good storytelling is the best way to capture people’s attention and help them retain the information long term.

In fact, stories are said to be 22 times more memorable than facts and figures alone.²

By using proper narratives that link what the brand represents with the shared values created with consumers, brands will be able to evoke trust and help consumers understand the brand deeper. This means, people will be more receptive to the brand and its loyalists’ numbers may increase as well. On top of that, a good brand narrative may also encourage people to talk about the brand which can increase brand affinity in the long run.

What are some elements of brand storytelling that every brand should incorporate?

It goes back to the brand’s truth. Brands must dive deeper into their mission and vision to study how well they understand their consumers and what can be done to improve it. Brands need to ask themselves: “What is the single-minded proposition that your story tells?” “Are we inspiring or are we providing a solution?”

How can brands build a true connection with consumers without coming across as superficial?

It’s important that brands don’t try too hard to push their branding and values unto consumers. It’s a fine line between authenticity and superficiality. Finding the common ground is vital and this should be pursued authentically.

Brands should evaluate how well do they understand people’s sentiments as well as ensuring that they observe shifts in culture and consumer behaviours to effectively navigate this conundrum. For example, while CSR efforts are good, it may come across as superficial especially when it is a one-off activity. To avoid this negative impression, brands need to tie their intention back to their brand values and what they stand for.

What are some tips you would give brands to help them beat the digital clutter?

To put it bluntly, there will be no clutter if the brand understands its consumers well. Bear in mind that brand storytelling is far more than simply a well-produced film. It could even be a social media challenge or a simple always-on display and social content.

The important thing here is to be consistent: stick by it, own it, and preach it.

Brands can look at other brilliant storytelling examples for inspirations; for instance, SK-II’s #ChangeDestiny campaign films ‘Marriage Market Takeover’, ‘The Expiry Date’, and ‘Timelines’. The brand told the story of the taboos in Chinese culture and took a stand for the people who were victims of it.

Another good example is Newcastle Brown Ale. As a British beer brand sold in America, they needed to be a little like ‘em Americans, especially during the Super Bowl fever. They spoke and acted like them but they maintained their British brute throughout their communications.

Do you think brands need to adopt a different storytelling approach during/post-pandemic? Or, it doesn’t matter as the principles will still be the same?

Yes, the principles remain the same despite the circumstances. In my opinion, brands can tell stories and instigate actions surrounding the pandemic if they can effectively find the link back to their brand truth. But, brands should also move away from the idea of merely doing it for PR’s sake as this can have adverse effects on the public’s perception of your brand.

Brand storytelling has evolved over the years and it is much more than just a trend in marketing strategy. It’s evident that brand storytelling is no longer a ‘nice to have’ – it is now a ‘need to have’ and what may maximise your brand’s visibility, impact, and profitability to ensure long-term growth. Just like your favourite movies, if you can craft a compelling brand story, your audience will resonate with you, remember you, and ultimately, care about you.

Still confused by the concept of brand storytelling? Get in touch and we’ll be happy to offer tailor-made guidance to take your brand storytelling to the next level.

References:

1. One Spot: The Science of Storytelling
2. Stanford University: Harnessing the Power of Stories