Stories to Tell, Stories to Sell: A Call for Moroccan Brands

It is undeniable that storytelling plays an essential role in the brand management. By telling a story, by stimulating emotions, brands create a close link and build brand identification. Brand storytelling is about transforming communication into something valuable for the customer, and it provides a direct benefit of an entertaining, informative, and practical nature. Indeed, Moroccan brands afford differentiated products and services and have a great base to build a narrative that promotes products and brand culture.

Researchers highlight that brand stories build attachment, awareness, and emotional responses. They also enhance consumer empathy, recognition, and memorability. Moreover, the authenticity of the brand story enhances its persuasive power. To be meaningful, the brand must be responsive to consumer expectations, especially those with social media and cultural content. The story is valued for its entertaining or ludic power, use value, and interest. It tells real or imaginary facts, informs, and cultivates. 

This communication strategy can be used in different contexts, such as the realization of TV advertising, the sending of a newsletter, the sharing of a post on social media, the launch of a new product, a brand book, or E-learning, etc. Storytelling meets several objectives depending on the brand goal.

Stories include cues such as places, events, philosophies, issues, and feelings. It is also important not to focus the story on the brand and its products, to have a human presence, and to mark a temporal evolution of the characters’ situation, which elicits empathy in the audience by giving meaning and significance to the story. The more cues a story has, the more it can be remembered. Stories create or strengthen brand connections by delivering a subject to develop interactions between consumers and brands. It allows them to merge their stories and backgrounds with the brand story.

The Power of brand storytelling

Although in recent years, brand storytelling has become a crucial strategic tool in a brand’s communication. However, the brand has controlled story content, production, and distribution, thanks to the internet and social media proliferation as a medium to convey its stories. Consequently, the consumer can generate content for the brand through discussion forums, blogs, social platforms, and sites for sharing videos, photos, and news, which encourage the creation of networks, relationships, and interactions giving rise to the content co-creation.

The brand can stimulate consumer participation in social media by attracting conversation through drama, laughter, provocation, and engagement and creating a platform for conversations. 

Ultimately, consumers narrate stories about the brand to give senses that enable them to construct their essence around it. For this reason, as the power of storytelling through branding becomes increasingly known; researchers have emphasized the importance of understanding how companies understand the phenomenon. Building knowledge on how brands could share the stories that consumers have to relate to, hear, and share is crucial for company success. 

Social Media and brands

The rise of social media has undoubtedly changed how brands tell their stories in Morocco. With the widespread use of social media platforms, brands can now reach a wider audience than ever before and engage with them in new and creative ways.

There is one significant paradigm shift towards more authentic and sincere brand stories. Consumers in Morocco are increasingly looking for brands they can relate to on a personal level, and social media allows brands to showcase their personalities and values engagingly and transparently.

Another trend is using video content to tell brand stories with the popularity of platforms like TikTok and Instagram Reels, short-form videos. This content allows brands to tell stories in an immersive and interactive way, which can help build stronger connections with their audiences.

Consequently, telling and selling a story about the brand will create an intense relationship with customers, build positive emotions, positively impact purchasing behavior and increase favorable brand attitudes. 

A Call for Moroccan Brands 

In Morocco, we have a great civilization to tell our stories and cultural richness to value; brands can be inspired to build stories based on theoretical anchoring, childhood memories, customs and traditions, celebrations, and historical icons. Most brands develop their communications on transactional messages and the functional benefits of products and services. 

The dominant communication model has focused on the latest song trending songs that have become popular and adapting their lyrics to market the product without telling a story. This practice is becoming more and more commonplace. However, today’s customers are looking to give meaning to their consumption, to dive into a cultural universe, carrying values and symbols that stimulate them. The content of stories can be flexible in the form of content written or audiovisual films, games, events and others, thus open the brand up and allows it to become a unique place of expression with endless options.

Storytelling is an opportunity to recall the brand’s fundamental values, mainly if it communicates about an artisanal product, handcraft, cosmetics, or an old brand with a long history and leadership. Brands that demonstrate a commitment to social responsibility and sustainability through their storytelling will resonate more powerfully with their audiences. It is about a brand with a purpose!

It is a call for Some Moroccan brands that need to go beyond their transactional role posture and embody a purpose, a role that goes far beyond that of consumption: manifesting a universe charged with symbolic functions, proposing models for constructing and reinforcing individuals’ identities, and addressing generational concerns. Consumers seek to live a sensory experience, identify with a lifestyle, appropriate status, and represent values and dreams. At the same time, they are looking for meaning in what they buy.