In order to main­tain com­pet­i­tive advan­tage, brands must cre­ate com­pelling expe­ri­ences at every sin­gle touch point. And sto­ries are a great way to do that. But how do brands cre­ate sto­ries with val­ue as opposed to sim­ply churn­ing out con­tent?

Con­sumers have increas­ing­ly high­er expec­ta­tions about what brand­ed dig­i­tal expe­ri­ences are, as well as for expe­ri­ences in gen­er­al.

“I’m not a fan of Uber as a com­pa­ny, but I can’t stop using it because it’s so con­ve­nient,” said Adam Klein­berg, CEO of inter­ac­tive agency Trac­tion at Ad Age’s recent dig­i­tal con­fer­ence. “The idea of not know­ing where my cab is dri­ves me nuts.”

In fact, the best brand­ed efforts blur the lines between prod­uct, mar­ket­ing and the cus­tomer expe­ri­ence, said Cindy Chas­tain, SVP of CX and Design at Mas­ter­Card. She uses the exam­ple of the Dis­ney Mag­icBand, a wrist­band that allows vis­i­tors to enter parks, unlock hotel rooms, and buy food and mer­chan­dise.

“What’s so phe­nom­e­nal is that it trans­forms the park expe­ri­ence. You get access to rooms, line priv­i­leges and you can pay for things,” Chas­tain said. “It trans­forms the val­ue of the park, but it could come from the mar­ket­ing team or the prod­uct team.”

This incred­i­bly com­plex effort took Dis­ney three years to roll out, but, she notes, “Being able to think through this kind of thing is becom­ing even more impor­tant.”

That, she said, is because “we moved from a world in which per­cep­tion of val­ue is based on an expe­ri­ence one has with the core prod­uct and the sto­ries we tell around the core prod­uct to a world where our per­cep­tion of val­ue is based on the sum of the inter­ac­tions with the brand across all touch points.”

“It’s not just about what we say, it’s about what we do, what we enable and the val­ue we bring to con­sumers,” Chas­tain added. “That’s the kind of thing they use to judge com­pa­nies.”

Bad Examples

While con­tent can cer­tain­ly be valu­able, many brands, like Sears and its Shop Your Way por­tal, are rush­ing to push out con­tent as a way to cre­ate val­ue and miss the boat, Klein­berg said, liken­ing Sears’ mis­guid­ed effort to a “Pin­ter­est ripoff.”

“This is not inno­v­a­tive. This is fea­ture bomb­ing,” he adds. “Bring val­ue or die. If you don’t bring val­ue, your cus­tomers will go some­where else and they won’t come back.”

Chas­tain said this also means los­ing a brand’s com­pet­i­tive advan­tage.

“Cre­at­ing great expe­ri­ences is absolute­ly essen­tial for today’s sur­vival,” she said. “Cus­tomer expe­ri­ence lead­ers have a 30 point stock price advan­tage over those falling behind, so that expe­ri­ence is also your best mar­ket­ing tool.”

The Tool: Stories

Sto­ries are a sys­tem for cre­at­ing brand mean­ing because they “help us under­stand how and where to cre­ate val­ue for peo­ple,” Chas­tain said. A tra­di­tion­al sto­ry arc that film­mak­ers use when mak­ing movies can also be applied to a brand’s mar­ket­ing efforts to fig­ure out what sto­ries to tell, as well as how and why.

“Sto­ry­telling has iron­i­cal­ly become a buzz­word because every­one in adver­tis­ing secret­ly wish­es they worked in Hol­ly­wood,” Klein­berg said.

To cre­ate mean­ing­ful expe­ri­ences and val­ue, brands must start by observ­ing their cus­tomers and then “using [that] obser­va­tion [along with] com­mon sense and creativity…[to] cre­ate mean­ing­ful solu­tions that…understand what that [cus­tomer] jour­ney [is] and map that out,” Klein­berg said.

Here are five ways sto­ries can help brands not only under­stand the cus­tomer jour­ney, but also enhance it:

1. Stories Help Show Brands Where To Focus

Chas­tain points to an R/GA cam­paign for Vol­vo in which the agency mapped out the cus­tomer jour­ney by think­ing about how con­sumers buy cars from the ini­tial con­tem­pla­tion stage to the actu­al own­er­ship expe­ri­ence. And in doing so, they real­ized most con­sumers already know what type of car body they want and so brand and agency were able to cater web con­tent accord­ing­ly to bet­ter suit cus­tomers’ nat­ur­al search ten­den­cies.

Klein­berg also uses the exam­ple of paint brand Kel­ly-Moore Paints, which was see­ing increased region­al com­pe­ti­tion from larg­er rival Sher­win-Williams.

“They couldn’t com­pete dol­lar for dol­lar, so they had to focus their efforts on intro­duc­ing a new col­or sys­tem for design mavens [and offer] tools to indi­cate their lead­er­ship in col­or,” Klein­berg said.

The result­ing cam­paign, myCol­orStu­dio, allows con­sumers to design and save col­or palettes and tens of thou­sands of con­sumers have done so, Klein­berg said.

2. Stories Help Design Experiences With Real Value

Klein­berg said his agency was approached by Adobe to help mar­ket its Cre­ative Suite, so “we looked at how do peo­ple actu­al­ly use Adobe prod­ucts to come up with an idea,” which was essen­tial­ly the real­iza­tion that con­sumers like to play around with Pho­to­shop to cre­ate news par­o­dies, such as Pho­to­shop­ping Sarah Palin’s head on the body of a woman hold­ing a gun and wear­ing an Amer­i­can flag biki­ni.

As a result, the agency cre­at­ed a game, Real or Fake, which essen­tial­ly asks con­sumers to decide whether a giv­en image is real or fake and rewards cer­tain respons­es with tuto­ri­als.

And, per Chas­tain, Mas­ter­Card has launched a new con­tent mar­ket­ing plat­form, Price­less Cities, because the brand is think­ing about where the most valu­able con­sumers are and it is try­ing to pro­vide a hook to down­load its app by solv­ing real world prob­lems in the trav­el expe­ri­ence.

The site allows con­sumers to select their home coun­tries and then choose loca­tions to explore.

3. Stories Help Use Emotion As Triggers

Emo­tion dri­ves deci­sion mak­ing, Chas­tain said, point­ing to Apple, whose home­page for a month lead­ing up to the release of Apple Watch has sim­ply includ­ed beau­ti­ful images of the prod­uct itself.

“It’s not just about dri­ving con­ver­sions, it’s about sell­ing,” she said. “Apple under­stands this.”

So, too, does Nike, whose Nike+ prod­uct helped “[move] Nike away from a com­pa­ny that just pro­duced sports appar­el to a dig­i­tal com­pa­ny” and has “grown to become a tool to 32 mil­lion mem­bers.”

What’s more, Chas­tain notes the prod­uct takes a close look at how con­sumers run and what those jour­neys look like and has since inte­grat­ed fea­tures into the expe­ri­ence to keep them com­ing back like “the voice of an ath­lete cheer­ing you on dur­ing runs. It’s the emo­tion­al trig­gers, under­stand­ing where it’s valu­able.”

4. Stories Help The Brand Act And Communicate As One Entity

Klein­berg uses the exam­ple of a Droga5 cam­paign for Pru­den­tial, Bring your Chal­lenges, which out­lined retire­ment chal­lenges like map­ping out a cus­tomer jour­ney into a cre­ative exe­cu­tion. These chal­lenges include longevi­ty, pro­cras­ti­na­tion and risk, which the brand cre­at­ed con­tent around.

“It fits seam­less­ly. It’s all one cohe­sive sto­ry that works seam­less­ly,” he said.

5. Stories That Are Great Are Naturally Retold

Klein­berg also uses the exam­ple of the Yahoo Weath­er app.

“What a beau­ti­ful expe­ri­ence it is. The design is pris­tine,” he said. “Any time I open the weath­er, it’s like expe­ri­enc­ing a sto­ry.”

For her part, Chas­tain uses the exam­ple of MasterCard’s Price­less Sur­pris­es effort in which it has sur­prised card­hold­ers with expe­ri­ences such as Justin Tim­ber­lake show­ing up unan­nounced at a fan’s home.

Accord­ing to the Price­less Sur­pris­es web­site, the brand has sur­prised near­ly 78,000 card­hold­ers to date and Chas­tain said when the brand was look­ing into how to scale the pro­gram into new plat­forms to reach new peo­ple, they came up with the idea of help­ing mer­chants pro­vide price­less expe­ri­ences to their own cus­tomers.

Are you cre­at­ing sto­ries with val­ue to enhance the cus­tomer expe­ri­ence?