That’s why brands need to tell stories
The reason why brands need to tell stories is that in a fully competitive market, the autonomy of the demand side is the dominant force. In the case of excess supply and homogenization, we need consumers not only to be able to make repeated purchases but also to be able to spread out as nodes of the sales network.
First of all, the brand itself must be scarce and independent of the brand in addition to its functions and satisfy the imagination and experience of consumers. Only then can the energy of marketing be superimposed. This kind of energy is not a pure driving force but attractiveness and recognition. We must fully believe in the independent consciousness and creative ability of consumers in a fully competitive market.
Consumers change from product function to relationship and establish a perspective of understanding from the consumer level in the relationship. When we respect the perspective of consumers, we must respect the choice of consumers. This choice may represent departure or indifference, but just like Nike, Volvo, and other brands have shown confidence and modesty, comfortable and flexible brand management value proposition. There will be more stories flowing into the first storyline, activating one oasis after another.
The contact between consumers and brands is a linear perspective, so there will be their own personality prototypes substituted, but these personalities are primitive and shaped by the original relationship, and mature people in development, personality can be based on the prototype. On a more detailed basis, it will not stay in the initial framework but will have individualized development and presentation, and gradually establish its stability based on the feedback in the relationship. This needs to be done with the help of objects, that is, external feedback.
Then the brand may act as an object resource, which has two very important dimensions: safety and personalization. The biggest dividend that industrialization has brought us is safety and certainty. But this is to make up for the depression in our value, and it has no ability to carry the rise. Stability is the basic requirement for development and the integration of self-order, but this order requires development. Stability brings numbness and boredom, unable to bear the expansion needs of self-personality. Therefore, all brands today are on the basis of satisfying stability and establishing the inheritance of personalization.
This requires a linear series of stories. Although we know that it is one-sided to understand the world through linearity, the complexity of the world cannot be simply explained through simple causal relationships and past experiences. But what we need is not full truth but experience controllability, fairness, and hope born from it.
The more detailed and block work brought about by the social division of labor today makes it impossible for us to understand the meaning of work, and this linear extension is also cut off. So if there is a story that can call out how miraculously every small behavior of yours has changed and formed an impact, it is called meaning. Therefore, the strong sense of meaning brought to us by the story is a scarce element of the brand.
Of course, any brand should never have the ambition to think that customers will always be stuck with themselves. This is a fragile idea and is incapable of expanding the imagination in the middle of the relationship when stability is not strong enough, so it can only be used. Deterministic things create a sense of security.
Therefore, any brand should have the mind to establish a second storyline, let the brand become an element, and let others tell us the story of their personality growth, to complete the internal meaning supplement. Then one day, it will echo our brand and evoke more gains than we can imagine.
So it’s a choice between brand stability and agility. Too much stability will lead to a lack of mining of details and realistic scenarios, and too much sensitivity and catering will cause a cognitive generation gap between new and old users. After all, the needs for stability and individuality are different, and it is difficult to be comprehensive. So on the other hand, we don’t need to take care of novelty or stability but establish a kind of scarcity because scarcity can produce the second storyline.
Therefore, the influence of the brand, expressed through stories, is like expressing complex evolution with simple principles, which is very attractive and marketable, but we must also know its limitations. Brand building is a channel to let others tell their stories. This is the way to brand success.
