"Corporate Storytelling" - Why a Company Narrative is Important for Your Employer Brand

1. What is Corporate Storytelling?
2. How does Corporate Storytelling work?
3. What effect does Corporate Storytelling have?
4. Why and for whom is Corporate Storytelling important?
5. What makes good stories for Corporate Storytelling?
6. What channels can Corporate Storytelling be implemented on?
7. What are best practices of successful Corporate Storytelling?
8. Five tips for successful Corporate Storytelling:
9. What tools can be used to implement Corporate Storytelling?
10. Conclusion

If you have a job to offer, you usually want the most reliable, capable and socially competent employees in the market to apply for this job. Have you ever asked yourself why exactly these talents should start with you? Quite honestly and apart from JobRad, flexitime and a "great team"?

If you find this difficult, or you think, "Isn't that enough?", you will receive a methodology of personnel marketing from us with corporate storytelling, which really takes you further and distinguishes you from other employers. In this article you will learn how you can pimp up your employer brand with corporate storytelling and give it a tangible identity with concrete values and visions.

With the goal: Genuine, honest and credible differentiation in the War of Talents. A good story regularly arouses interest, is better remembered and leads to more economical results in the end than a mere firework of facts.

But how do we turn you into a seasoned corporate storyteller? Let's start from the beginning. With the answer to the question:

What is Corporate Storytelling?

Basically, corporate storytelling, as part of Employer Branding, means the strategic and methodically clean telling of stories based on corporate content, which in the end together form an attractive overall picture of an organisation. In the process, the employer image is usually only implicitly conveyed. Implicit here means: You don't bang people's heads with your mission and vision factually, but you convey these values through stories from your organisation credible and tangible. Reference points for this can be, for example, milestones in the company's history, the founder's story, certain employee stories or even successfully completed projects. The most important thing is that when you watch and listen, a emotional connection with the recipients arises. Speak not with the head, but with the heart of your recipients.

How does Corporate Storytelling work?

People are usually curious and love to listen to stories. If you convey information in this way, it is remembered much better and also consumed much longer. But how do you best tell a story from your organisation? There are different storytelling methodologies for this. The most common and arguably best-known narrative concept is the hero's journey. The identification potential here is very high, because every human being is on a hero's journey in some form or other. At the end of the day, we are all looking for happiness, support and insight. This usually happens through a change from a known world or situation to an unknown one. A change, which is often evoked by an apparently inevitable and therefore reaction-dependent obstacle, and which more or less voluntarily sends the hero on his or her adventurous journey. Over the course of the story, a change takes place, which, however, ultimately brings the hero to his or her destination. Your company should also recognise itself here. It should either be the hero itself or at least the reliable companion who bravely and loyally moves forward, mastering the challenges facing him or her and growing through them. This allows your company to be charged emotionally and in the end to be linked with values and views that go far beyond your actual products.

Do you need an example?

In this video, a saleswoman of a recruiting company tells her story of how she left her teaching job and found happiness in sales:

What effect does Corporate Storytelling have?

The effect of corporate storytelling is manifold. First and foremost, it strengthens the image and credibility of an employer brand. Furthermore, the internal team spirit in the ranks of your own employees can also be enhanced. In all likelihood, the job for the people in your organisation will feel more meaningful after an appropriate corporate storytelling measure. We often see that after the completion of customer projects, the employees involved return to work with a far greater sense of self-esteem. You see, at the end of the day, corporate storytelling is always about positively influencing a person's perception and evaluation psychologically, without promising something that doesn't exist. Very simply put, when using corporate storytelling in recruiting, it is about conveying very effectively: We're on the same wavelength here.. Following on from such mental evaluation structures, further actions will then follow, such as a genuine application or the conveyance of a positive reputation of an employer in one's own network. In short: If we as a company tell good stories, we are more likely to be remembered, which leads to an increased probability of the desired message and action (application, talking positively about an organisation, et al.) being carried out.

Why and for whom is Corporate Storytelling important?

The War of Talents is in full swing. And at the same time, many organisations are still working with interchangeable messages when they want to convey to talents why they should find their professional home here and not there. And with that, the question is largely answered: Corporate Storytelling is important for all those companies and organizations who feel exposed to great competition in the search for employees. A good story, which puts the real benefits of a company culture in the foreground, can in many cases even convince talents to accept wage cuts, because the so-called cultural match is higher. But you have to prove this credibly. Because people process information in stories much better, you massively increase the effectiveness of your communication. If your message sticks better, is easier for the target group to retrieve and thus more effective, the return of your personnel marketing measures is significantly higher.

A mistake that many companies, especially in Germany, make is that they spend a lot of time on the channels and the visuality of a message, but hardly invest in a really good story itself. Good corporate storytelling makes your marketing, your corporate communication and your recruiting more efficient. People are generally interested in the people and values behind a company - it just depends on the right framework and the right information transfer. This is particularly relevant in the context of Employer Branding, in order to be able to convey an impression as quickly as possible that says "I like this corporate culture so much that I would also love to work for this company".

What makes good stories for Corporate Storytelling?

A story that is good for corporate storytelling should above all be credible and worth telling. You cut your own flesh with nothing more than a story that is untrue, boring or contrived. In addition to authenticity, the story must also be relevant, i.e. worth telling in the first place.

How to generate relevance?

Another word for relevance is weightiness. What you tell must therefore have weight for the person who is consuming the story. For us humans, weighty topics are always those that have to do with challenges and self-experience. Because these are topics that occur very often in the workplace. Approaches for common plots based on this are: the search, the adventure, the pursuit, the rescue, the escape, the revenge, the enigma, the rivalry, the underdog, the temptation, the transformation, the maturing, the love, the forbidden love, the sacrifice, the discovery, the border experience, the rise and fall etc. (A. Berens & C. Bolk, Create Content, 1st edition 2021, p. 227 ff.). At this point you can take another look at your previous employer brand communication and consider: Have you already applied one of these narratives? Or none at all?

What channels can Corporate Storytelling be implemented on?

The other way around: On which of your channels can you do without memorable messages? It is more a question of how big or small you want to make your story. On TikTok, if the channel is relevant for you, you tell very compact stories. YouTube on the other hand, can be used to tell stories in corporate storytelling over several videos and make a mini-series out of it. On Instagram, you can use different content formats to illuminate different aspects of the story. In general, the question of format is not unimportant. Videos are always particularly attractive and can be emotionalised better than, for example, blog posts. A podcast can also be a very simple tool for corporate storytelling. It is always important to remember in corporate storytelling that we need not only a message, but also an audience. Therefore, always think about where you can play your story organically and with ads.

What are best practices of successful Corporate Storytelling?

Successful corporate storytelling requires above all authentic, consistent and not least constant communication along a coherent narrative structure. Give your employees or potential future talents a feel for life that provides good reasons why they would like to work for you or why they should start with your company. 

An example from our project practice: 

As a refugee, the facility manager came to Germany many years ago. He left his family behind and was initially unsure whether he was allowed to work in a Christian care facility as a Muslim at all. Then he learned that openness and humaneness are the most important things for his new employer. And that everyone is welcome as a resident and employee. Today, many years later, he is the manager of a facility, calls his team his family and says: "For no amount of money would I work anywhere else". From this story, we learn not only that the organisation really stands by its values, but also that there is honest and respectful leadership in this house. For many, a reason to take a closer look at this employer.

But the Bundeswehr, for example, also does a very good job. In various cross-media mini-series such as "Die Rekrutinnen" for example, we get an insight, adapted to the channel, into the personal stories of people on their journey through military service. It is particularly important with cross-media corporate storytelling that each channel must have its justification. You should definitely avoid playing out the same content everywhere. 

Further best practice examples

The wholesale food distributor Transgourmet actively uses corporate storytelling in the field of dual studies. With appropriate photo and video content, they tell a 360-degree story about the dual students (Photo: Transgourmet/MOVYNG MEDIA).

With authentic professional portraits, the New Work specialised company KAHL ensures that talents can get to know the extraordinary culture in digital contact. (Photo: KAHL/MOVYNG MEDIA)

Corporate storytelling also works in the trades: The electrical company Uwe Schmidt from Berlin uses an integrated content storytelling campaign for personnel recruitment. (Photo: Uwe Schmidt/MOVYNG MEDIA)

Here you will find more Corporate Storytelling Best Practice Examples.

Five tips for successful Corporate Storytelling:

• Audience knowledge: Know your audience or get to know them! There are different stories for different people, so remind yourself who you are dealing with on the recipient side.
• Authenticity: Be honest and authentic, without exaggerating or deceiving someone, this will come out anyway sooner or later and then revenge itself.
• Emotional Conditioning: Evoke positive emotions with your target group and condition them with them, creating a good vibe towards your brand.
• Consistency: Stick to your pace at least in its core and avoid inconsistent jumps in content. Otherwise, a clear message cannot set in the minds of your target audience. So avoid a "neither half nor wholly" approach and go in one direction determinedly and consistently.
• Format diversity: Experiment with multiple formats so you reach your target audience in its full diversity. For example, some people still read newspapers extensively, while others are only on the internet.
• Start small: If you now want to start with corporate storytelling, start in a manageable framework (like the blog on your website, for example). This will not attract large reach right away - but you also learn to dance in the dance school, not on the big stages.

What tools can be used to implement Corporate Storytelling?

The tools that can be used to implement Corporate Storytelling are diverse. Of course, anything that can be used to visually prepare these content in any way is relevant here, such as:

Canva Pro

With no other tool can you design or adapt social media assets to different channels faster and better.

DaVinci Resolve

Not quite easy to use, but an incredibly powerful video editing program. My opinion of the tool: It is running out on all competitors.

CapCut

The go-to mobile editing program for self-shot mobile videos. Already really strong even in the free version.

HubSpot CMS Hub

Even in the CMS version very powerful, in the Marketing Professional a real game changer for inbound marketing. Combined with good stories, Hubspot helps you make content leads to customers.

Slack

Like Teams, only cool and better to bind to third-party apps.

Miro

Mindmapping like it's 2024: Ideal for remote teams, for example when you want to collect exciting employee stories.

Asana

Is the main worksuite of our project management. Here it is very important not to be too detailed in setting up projects at the beginning. But once you have found the right balance, nothing should be lost or forgotten.

Conclusion

Corporate Storytelling is a very powerful method to stand out from other companies in the context of Employer Branding and to stick in the minds of potential employees. Especially at the beginning of the Candidate Journey, storytelling helps companies and organisations to communicate genuine benefits of the workplace. In addition, the content of corporate storytelling radiates onto the general brand identity and emotionalises the mental bonds in the minds of talents.