Consensus

10 Ways To Build A Winning Brand Story: Part 2 of 10

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By Jed Morley, CMO at Consensus

This 10-part article explains how to create a compelling brand story for your company, products and services. Great brands are great stories that are always in the process of being told, refreshed and continued. Great brand stories are easy to recognize and sometimes happen intuitively, but a clear framework can improve your chances of success.

If you missed it, click here to read 10 Ways To Build A Winning Brand Story: Part 1 of 10.

Part 2 of 10: The Brand Wheel

The Brand Wheel™ is a framework for developing a brand story or narrative that helps you attract and retain profitable lifetime customers, talented employees and strategic partners. Working through a story-building framework like this can help you think about each element of your story–and how they relate to one another–so you can articulate a clear, compelling, consistent brand story. A brand strategy and messaging firm called Applied Storytelling developed this model to help their clients develop effective brand stories in a predictable way. Applied Storytelling has successfully used The Brand Wheel to create winning brand stories for business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) brands from Lexus to LG Electronics.

The key elements of The Brand Wheel framework include the following:

Core: The essential truth of the brand.

Positioning: The defining point of difference of a brand.

Promise: The brand’s single-most important value proposition.

Personality: The way the brand feels.

Descriptor: A thumbnail summation of the brand.

Name: The name of the brand.

Tagline: A phrase that is less literal than a descriptor that creates a spark in customers’ minds through an evocative image or turn of phrase.

Messaging/Backstory: A synopsis of the overall brand story.

Logo: A visual symbol that represents the brand.

Visual System: All of the graphic elements that communicate the brand’s position, promise and personality visually.

Brand Voice Guidelines: The unique tone that expresses the brand personality in words.

Brand Visual Guidelines: The way the brand expresses itself visually.

Brand Communications Touch Points: The points of contact the brand has with customers.

This diagram shows how these elements go together to create a winning brand story, working from the center to the outer ring of the model. 

brand-wheel-brand-story-framework
This is The Brand Wheel framework by Applied Storytelling.

Consensus works with clients to deliver effective product brand stories by automating custom product demos.

Consensus is Software as a Service (SaaS) that automates custom product demos to accelerate sales. Our interactive demo platform personalizes video and documents so each prospect automatically learns about your solution in the most relevant way. This cuts sales cycles and increases close rates. Our Demolytics™ dashboard helps you discover and engage the entire buying committee by gathering analytics and tracking who’s involved, what’s important to them, what they watched, and who they shared it with. This drives consensus and gets to a purchase decision much faster than traditional sales methods. Clients have cut their sales cycles by 68% and jumped close rates by 27%.

Click here to see the Consensus Demo.

Sometimes, our clients need help refining their product brand stories before we can help them create effective product demo videos. This 10-part article distills the principles for developing an effective brand story into actionable steps. Parts 3 and 4 of this article go into more detail about what each of these elements communicates and how they relate to one another and to your overall brand story.

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