The Power of Brand Storytelling in Visual Merchandising

Selling a product or products requires creating a cohesive marketing strategy. Some of the most crucial parts of this strategy include visual merchandising and crafting a compelling brand experience as part of your overall marketing technique. How you choose to advertise your product reflects your brand’s values and identity. This is where visual storytelling comes in.

When your brand can tell a story that connects with your target audience and addresses their needs, you go beyond the competition. Instead of simply displaying your product on a shelf, visual storytelling enables you to take a more personal approach and build bonds with your customers. In this article, we’ll discuss why your brand should use visual storytelling and how it boosts customer loyalty.

What Is Brand Storytelling and Why Is it Important?

As a business or product owner, you might be familiar with the concept of brand storytelling — or at least heard of it. Brand storytelling is a strategy that businesses use to create an emotional connection with their target audience. Think about it like this: when we tell a story, often, our purpose is to do one of the following:

• Entertain
• Educate
• Persuade
• Connect

As a brand, you can use this same tactic to entice your customers to see your brand as trustworthy and leave a positive impression.

Businesses use brand storytelling for the simple fact that it’s more engaging and memorable than simply listing facts about your product. Brand storytelling enables you to combine these facts with creativity to help shape your brand’s narrative. Now more than ever, customers have higher expectations and often do their own research before purchasing a new product.

Visual storytelling is a powerful tool you can use to prompt a customer to explore your brand and products. Boosting this marketing strategy using custom details makes it easier to communicate your purpose as a brand, build visual awareness and enrich the shopping experience.

Additionally, visual storytelling helps set you apart from competitors. If a store employee displays your product next to a competitor’s with the same type of branding and language, it will be more difficult to feel confident that a customer will choose yours. However, if you’re using storytelling tactics combined with compelling visuals, unique brand logos and a custom display, customers will understand that you care about your product and you see the value in going the extra mile.

Key Elements of Brand Storytelling

When starting your brand storytelling journey, you should be asking yourself, “What do I want to make my customers feel when they see my product?” Many customers make purchases based on emotional triggers or spontaneous needs. Here are the top elements of brand storytelling you can use to create something truly meaningful and unique for your audience:

• Showing value and uniqueness: Calling attention to your brand’s value in a way that helps you stand out from competing brands is one of the most important steps to storytelling. What makes customers engage with your brand or products? How do you enhance your customers’ lives? Are you saving them time or money? These are things you can play up in your storytelling.
• Evoking emotion: Make your customer feel like the hero in their journey — and your  product helps them get to their destination. When telling your brand’s story, position yourself as the resolution to their conflict. Why did you create the product in the first place? What words do you associate with your product that can appeal to their emotions?
• Connecting with customers: To form a bond with your customers, display your product as the answer to their question, the solution to their pain points. Consider what it is about your product that provides value to customers and their goals.
• Displaying authenticity: Customers appreciate honesty. Instead of trying to mimic the same tone and branding of your competitors, consider telling the story of your business’s beginnings or inspiration for creating the product in the first place. 
• Having consistent branding: Maintaining a consistent message across your entire brand shows customers that you’re not just playing into trends. Having consistent imagery, wording and value throughout your product marketing allows customers to remember your brand and recall it later. Know how to describe your brand’s core values and tell a story around them!

How Brands Can Use Storytelling in Visual Merchandising

What other benefits are there to crafting meaningful messages with a brand storytelling strategy? Let’s examine how you can use this tactic to improve sales and customer relationships:

• Highlight unique selling points: What better way to showcase your product’s USPs than through visual storytelling? For instance, if you’re selling a lip product, you can highlight features your target audience cares about on your retail signage, such as having SPF or clean ingredients.
• Create data-driven storytelling: Visual merchandising helps you maximize your storytelling by allowing you to display your data insights with visual aids, including graphics, lists, maps, charts and any other creative ideas you can come up with. This enables you to establish credibility with your customers to show your company’s facts and figures in a more digestible way.
• Customize branding: Your product and brand are truly unique, and your packaging and advertising should reflect that. Visual merchandising options, like custom corrugated cardboard displays, let you have complete control over how customers perceive your product.
• Build experiences: Have you ever seen a billboard or magazine ad that stuck with you long after you saw it? Storytelling through visual merchandising aims to create memorable, meaningful experiences for your audience and helps your brand stick out in their minds.

Popular Brands With Memorable Storytelling

You could probably name at least four or five brands off the top of your head whose logos, slogans and storytelling you instantly recognize. Memorable storytelling, when combined with visual merchandising solutions, creates this same memorability. Here are some visual storytelling examples from popular brands:

• IKEA: From its affordable, DIY furniture to its beautiful, in-store designed spaces, IKEA has created a consistent, enjoyable shopping experience for its customers that tells the story of transforming your home. Their Swedish brand storytelling comes through in their advertisements, food court offerings and social media marketing posts.
• Patagonia: If your target audience values the environment and sustainability, you want to use storytelling that reflects this. Patagonia does it best by producing sustainable clothes that have sentimental value, which creates an emotional bond with customers. Patagonia uses its brand’s values of ethics and protecting the environment to create a compelling story.
• Apple: Most people who own an iPhone or Apple product are familiar with Steve Jobs and his vision for the company. Being innovative, thinking outside the box and trading busy, flashy ads for simplistic visuals and slogans are just some of the ways Apple has become a household name.

Other examples of great brand storytelling include Disney, Coca-Cola, Old Spice and Amazon. Just by mentioning the brand name, you likely already have an image in your mind of what their storytelling encompasses.

Design Custom Retail Displays and Tell Your Brand’s Story

Visual storytelling performs an essential role in your advertising and marketing strategies. When customers see the effort and unique touches you put into your product, they’ll think twice before choosing a competitor. At Creative Displays Now, we know how important it is to build a connection with your audience through visual means. Our custom displays allow you to get as creative or simple as you want.

For over 60 years, we’ve been developing solutions for businesses like yours while gaining a thorough understanding of display and packaging requirements for retailers. Our displays help promote your product in stores to suit your seasonal promotions, campaigns and story. Request an estimate online today to start telling your brand’s story.