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Why Feature Stories are an essential element in Corporate Content Strategy


Brands need to find ways to constantly engage with their stakeholders; to sustain and grow their business. For this reason it is essential that corporates focus on building an emotional connection with their targeted audiences by tapping into new ways and means of communicating their brand story to those that matter to them – the consumers, potential investors and the employees.  As much as focusing on creating content about the products and services on offer, it is imperative that brands focus on generating content that differentiate them from their competitors.  That’s where showcasing the personality of your brand becomes vital.  

Telling the brand story is an art!

Giving the corporates a voice through compelling content that appeals to the emotions can be enormously challenging.

Crafting a corporate feature story that has an emotional appeal; one that gets picked up by the main stream media or one that goes viral on social media giving the exposure needed for the brand with a zero cost on your advertising budget, requires expertise. Tapping into that unique story idea hitherto not discovered is a way in which this challenge could be overcome. That’s where a Feature Writer becomes an expert creator of content for a brand…because a feature writer in a news room would be doing just that! Digging out the most unusual story angle in a given context and offering it to the readership in an interesting manner!

A feature writer could easily uncover the unique story angles that may have gone unnoticed during the day to day operations of your business; the ones with an emotional appeal to your consumers. As a feature writer with over a decade of experience in Sri Lanka’s mainstream media, I see huge potential in the powerful brand story of the TOMS shoes which has its One For One campaign of supporting the impoverished at the core of its operations, in terms of brand story telling. Such justification as to ‘why’ the company exists, by way of a brand feature would be convincing enough for a consumer to develop an emotional bond with the brand.  

Similar to the way people get intrigued and inspired through biographies of iconic leaders, a unique feature story showcasing the personality of the brand or the thought leadership behind it, would make the consumer feel enlightened and instructed leading to influence their daily decision making.

Scientific research has also indicated how human brain responds to the descriptive power of a story. An article carried in Harvard Business Review titled ‘Why Your Brain Loves Good Story Telling’  Paul J. Zak, the Founding Director of the Center for Neuroeconomics Studies/ a Professor of Economics, Psychology, and Management at Claremont Graduate University presents the exclusive facts he uncovered during a research on how story telling influences the brain’s naturally occurring hormone neurochemical oxytocin leading to ‘cooperative behaviors.’

An insightful feature, with a compelling start and powerful quotes, is all what it takes to spark a conversation in the industry and the world around you. To wrap up let me pick up the famous quote of the branding legend Walter Lander that “Products are made in the factory but brands are created in the mind.”

 

 

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