[PRESS RELEASE] STORYTELLING IN BUSINESS ADVERTISING 101 | DIFUSSION #87

CfDS YouTube Channel, March 8th, 2023 – Advertising style and strategy helps winning the sympathy of potential customers and gaining brand awareness. In order to achieve profit and business continuity, marketing efforts through creative, empathetic, and highly relational advertising are needed. One of the efforts is through storytelling advertisements. Center for Digital Society, in collaboration with Briefer, explored this topic through Difussion #87 “Storytelling in Business Advertising 101”. Syafrizal, S.I.P., M.A. (Lecturer at the Department of Communication Science, Faculty of Social and Political Sciences, Universitas Gadjah Mada) and Adi S. Noegroho (Communication Practitioner, Chief Creative Officer at Narrada Communications) enriched the discussion with their insights. Difussion #87 was moderated by Riska Gabriella (Social Media Assistant at CfDS), and can be accessed again through https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kiE99uQSsqY.

Storytelling Advertising from an Academic Perspective: The Relationship between Story, Advertisement, and Consumer Engagement

Syafrizal, S.I.P., M.A. began the discussion by claiming that stories can be utilized to captivate customers, build a company’s reputation, and frame a company’s image. He believes that storytelling can be a good advertising strategy, because stories can ‘stick’ in the public’s hearts and minds. In the context of business, these stories are constructed not only to influence the emotions of potential customers, but also to create change and encourage potential customers to be interested in purchasing a product or service.

The most challenging aspect of storytelling advertising is how a company can transform purchasing behaviour into social value, which is by utilizing human emotions. 

Therefore, storytelling advertising is an effort to humanize a brand. To produce emotionally engaging storytelling advertisements, an ad must be entertaining, believable, educational, relatable, systematic, easy to remember, and follow trends.

By utilizing human emotions, a business can make potential customers feel ‘involved’ in the business’s vision and mission. Businesses can build emotional relationships between the company itself, their product/service, and their consumer through storytelling advertising. “To achieve this goal, it requires an understanding of consumer needs/ideas, empathetic stories, and mature media planning,” said Syafrizal to summarize his discussion.

Storytelling Advertising from a Practitioner’s Perspective: Brand Story as the Key to Introducing Brand Value

Continuing the discussion initiated by the previous speaker, Adi S. Noegroho provided his perspective as a communication practitioner in implementing advertising techniques. As the Chief Creative Officer at Narrada Communications, Adi supports the company’s vision, that Narrada Communications believes in the importance of merging communication style (in advertising) and brand story. These two elements are the key to producing advertisements by Narrada Communications.

Brand stories can be built on things that exist in our daily lives. This can help drive empathy in an advertisement, so that the public can feel even more related to a business’ brand story. Brand story is also important to maintain over time, in order to keep the value of a brand. From there, the brand story can ultimately maintain the continuity and innovation of a company’s advertising.

Adi concluded his discussion session with the message that “No matter what advertising media is used, as long as an advertisement has a strong and sustainable brand story, then the company can always be remembered by the public and attract customers.”

Author: Allysa Putri Rendry