UNFORGETTABLE

A marketing consultant shares her approach to crafting compelling business storytelling content in this business primer.

“A story is about capturing that moment when your product or service intersects with humanity and changes a life for the better,” writes Brammer, who’s created award-winning business story content for such Fortune100 companies as Microsoft and Schneider Electric. She notes that business content is either informational or inspirational; although both have roles in marketing strategy, one type can’t be transformed into the other. Case studies, she notes, are useful to influence purchase decisions, but they’re linear narratives of facts and figures, not full-fledged stories. Stories, she explains, follow an arc structure that includes a setup, a climax, and a conclusion—all of which aim to engage the emotions of the broadest possible audience. Brammer details how to do exploratory research, “digging for leads and qualifying potential winners” to “identify a human conflict,” your story’s “cast of characters,” and “key points” for the story to make. She provides tools including an “Impact Quadrant” to measure a narrative’s effectiveness, and templates to map out a story video and to manage development and approval processes. Brammer also stresses the importance of such things as word-choice specificity, and she provides concise end-of-section summaries called “Fingertip reminders.” Overall, Brammer’s book is chock-full of practical advice for any business marketer, particularly those who may be new to the responsibility of generating effective stories. She takes readers through several specific examples of narrative development and offers insights into the nitty-gritty of the process that only an experienced practitioner could provide. Her suggested phrasings to avoid endless feedback from stakeholders, for example, are particularly masterful, and among many tips worth adopting. Although Brammer’s discussion of working with agencies to create story videos may be out of reach for some, it valuably delineates what’s involved in the process.

A helpful, hands-on guide to creating memorable brand narratives.