Storytelling is at the very heart of what we do at SHOW, a creative agency in Shoreditch that specialises in editorial, design, art direction and strategy for luxury brands. And it’s at the heart of what I do as the digital director here.
Our three founders all come from a storytelling background. Our CEO Peter Howarth was editor of Esquire and Arena, our editorial director Joanne Glasbey worked for The Economist and Time Out, and was deputy editor of Esquire, and our creative director Ian Pendleton was art director of Esquire and is a member of the Royal College of Art. They have built a team of editorially led creatives who with each project try to bring out the stories around a brand that will resonate with their audience. My role since joining SHOW 11 years ago has been to work on the best way to do this in the digital world. Our work still stretches over print and digital – the tangible beauty of a print product is still hard to resist for brands and consumers alike. And we’ve found that digital and print can work hand in hand to create a compelling brand universe that people can’t wait to explore.
But why do luxury brands need to tell stories? Isn’t the quality of the goods or service enough to drive sales and create a loyal customer base?
First, luxury brands have the advantage of having compelling stories to tell. Many have long, fascinating histories stretching back decades or centuries that involve a cast of exciting characters – innovators, influential figures and celebrities. In working with heritage brands, we have found that they might be almost too familiar with the key stories, products and figures in their company history and forget how appealing they are to consumers. Part of our work is to remind them that we need to tell the story over and over again in new and exciting ways.
And luxury brands that don’t have a long heritage will always have something interesting to say – that’s part of what makes them luxury. It just might be a surprising founders’ story, unexpected collaborations, innovative products or new ideas that they want to talk about.
Using storytelling to market luxury brands is essential for getting to new audiences and retaining existing ones.
Its purpose is to create relevant visual and written media to engage audiences with a brand and to entertain them at the same time. Essential to the success of content marketing is strategy, authenticity, quality and relevance.
Authenticity when it comes to content marketing luxury brands is particularly important. Being spoken about in the correct way and by the correct person is absolutely key. For a consumer it means so much more when a brand story or article on a brand’s website comes from a named journalist whose byline also appears in the likes of the FT, Condé Nast Traveller, The New York Times or Le Monde than from the brand themselves. Plus, journalists are adept at creating copy consumers actually want to consume – quite literally stories consumers are willing to pay for. The right person could also be an academic, celebrity, photographer, designer, architect or artist – anyone whose voice can resonate outside of a sales message.
The quality and uniqueness of a luxurious retail environment is hard to create online.
Gone and thankfully forgotten are the days of overcomplicated Flash sites that attempted to make an online experience feel sumptuous. The best way of creating a luxurious experience online is to offer customers exclusive insights, beautiful visuals and a brand universe they want to dive into.
Consumers are fed up with in-your-face advertising and sales tactics – people are seeing more ads than before (around 5,000 a day, up from 2,000 a day in 1984) and ad blockers are more popular than ever, so it’s vital to find another way to get your message to potential audiences. This is the reason why brands are investing more in inbound marketing and less in outbound marketing. Outbound marketing is the promotion of messages that talk about how great a brand or product is – they are pushed to a consumer whether they want to see them or not. Digital banner ads, for example, can expect an average click-through rate of just 0.35 per cent. Consumers, it seems, respond better to inbound marketing, which attracts and engages them via valuable content, information and experiences.
At SHOW we have seen it in practice many times – good content means more conversions and increased customer loyalty. When we created the Bally Journal – an editorial platform for the Swiss luxury shoe company that lived across print and digital, and was full of thrilling stories from the brand’s past and present day – it was one of the best returns on investment the brand had experienced.
Useful and entertaining content builds brand loyalty.
Stats show that 47 per cent of customers view three to five pieces of content before making a purchase. Content marketing rakes in conversion rates six times higher than outbound marketing and we know from our work with Rolls-Royce, Belstaff and Globe-Trotter that if a customer lands on one of our pieces of content they are 10 times more likely to buy product than if they land on the homepage or an e-commerce page.
Storytelling also helps to engage customers at every stage of their lifecycle with a brand – from first becoming aware of them, to reengaging lapsed customers and, hopefully, creating new advocates for a brand. That is why content and editorial should live across different platforms and in different formats. From social media posts, to podcasts, events, printed collateral and web content, each has the potential to reach a customer at a different point in their journey with a brand. When it comes to luxury, goods are meant to last – it can become difficult to keep a conversation going after someone has bought a leather jacket that will last them 20 years. Great stories are one way to do this.
Storytelling will always appeal to humans; it is in our nature. And the ability to tell a story has always been a treasured skill. So making storytelling part of building a luxury brand makes instinctive and material sense. Plus, filling the world with great stories is always a positive thing.
Written by: Jane Fulcher
Editor, brand strategist and digital director at SHOW; show.london
