Brand storytelling is a critical part of branding

Brand storytelling can be highly effective. Robin Tooms gets specifics from Monica Silva, team lead of internal communications at Phillips 66 and Christine Warren, marketing director for the Houston Zoo.

Robin: Hello and welcome to this edition of Brandonomics, an inside look at top brands and their marketing strategies. I’m Robin Tooms, Vice President of Strategy at Savage. For this edition of Brandonomics we’re going to look back at two very important strategies around brand storytelling, and why you should leverage high impact communications for key messages.

First up is Monica Silva, team lead of internal communications at Phillips 66. Monica spoke to us about the importance of communicating critical messages in engaging ways that can really resonate. This example is of how they used a CEO video as a centerpiece for their new brand communications.

Monica: Our key centerpiece of our launch was a video where our CEO was kind of starring in and narrated the video that we were really proud of. It was a really emotional tie to our vision and values, and we knew employees were gonna love it. So, we did a few little teasers ahead of the launch day to drive kind of anticipation that something new was coming. Then we armed our key ambassadors ahead of time and let them know when launch day was, when launch time was so that they could be prepared. Then, on the day of launch, we sent an all-employee email from our CEO that kind of revealed the vision and values and linked employees to this kind of key centerpiece launch video, and it went off without a hitch thankfully.

Robin: And our next guest, Christine Warren, Marketing Director at the Houston Zoo, talked to us about the benefits of making your top initiatives visible on your website. This is a great example of why you should always be looking at your website to see what story it tells, and whether or not that is the right message you want to convey.

Christine: Yeah, we have a lot of aspects to what we do that people may not even realize. But we want to be able to tell those stories. Things like our conservation programs: we participate in more than two dozen programs across the world to save species. And that’s something that we want to be able to tell people about and want them to feel invested in as well. And those pages were a little bit buried in the old site – not quite as easily found. So we made them more visible with the new site and the results have been really phenomenal. We’ve actually, with our conservation pages, seen a 200% increase in the page views since we’ve re-launched. So we’re really pleased with that.

Robin: I hope that this advice from our Brandonomics’ guests helps you rethink your your company’s purpose, mission, vision and values and how you can embark on a successful program around that. Tune in next week for another edition of Brandonomics, an inside look at top brands and their marketing strategies.

Phillips 66, created through the repositioning of ConocoPhillips, is one of the world’s largest independent downstream companies. The company operates three segment-leading businesses: refining & marketing, midstream and chemicals. The team of more than 13,500 employees are providing energy and improving lives daily. https://www.phillips66.com/

The Houston Zoo provides housing, meals, medical care and education for more than 6,000 permanent resident animals. Its mission is to provide a fun, unique and inspirational experience fostering appreciation, knowledge and care for the natural world for each of their more than 1.84 million annual guests. https://www.houstonzoo.org/