Storytelling for Brands Short Course

Storytelling is an age-old, powerful way to capture and immerse an audience’s attention, trigger emotions, and communicate meaning. In these days of ever-decreasing, short attention spans, brands more than ever need to harness the power of storytelling to capture their audiences’ attention and engage their audience.

For brands, the benefits of impactful brand storytelling are numerous: fostering stronger emotional connection, more engaging communication, increased brand awareness, better customer retention, enhanced brand value perception, internal brand management alignment, and brand longevity.

This 5-week evening course aims to provide students with theoretical as well as practical knowledge about the role storytelling plays in successful strategic branding and brand communication. The course considers theories behind successful brand storytelling and introduces students to practical storytelling techniques.

For professionals working with brands, this learning should enhance the efficacy and impact of brand/marketing communication, for short-form as well as long-form content creation, promotion, marketing campaigns, advertising, social media, etc. The course would also be beneficial for students in creative or marketing/business courses.

Course outcomes

By the end of the course students should:

• Have an informed overview of the role of brand storytelling in forging successful branding and brand communications

• Understand the importance and business advantage of creating strategic, on-brand storytelling to engage their target audience

• Have the necessary knowledge to leverage all the many benefits of impactful brand storytelling in brand communication projects

• Feel more confident in initiating ideas for on-brand storytelling and brand communication to create a competitive edge and more connective communication

• Be able to utilise brand storytelling theory and practical brand storytelling techniques from the course in branding and brand communication projects

Topics covered:

• Basic aspects and principles of brand storytelling

• Brand positioning script: aligning stories to target audience characteristics, brand purpose, brand core values and vision

• Brand archetypes

• Different types of brand stories: origin stories, conflict/challenge stories, ‘brand story’ vs ‘brand narrative’, digital storytelling, social media storytelling, UGC and influencer storytelling

• Challenger brands

• Archetypal story plots