Common Brand Storytelling Mistakes (and How to Avoid Them)
The mistakes that undermined brand storytelling efforts in 2012, from corporate polish that erased any real voice to treating one campaign as the strategy.
As brand storytelling gained attention through 2012, plenty of businesses tried to copy the feel of a viral success without understanding what made it work. These were the mistakes that showed up most often.
Polishing away the actual voice
Some businesses, worried a story sounded too casual, ran it through enough rounds of internal review that whatever personality it started with got smoothed into generic corporate language. What made the year’s standout examples work was a specific, consistent voice, not flawless polish.
The fix: protect the rough edges that make a story sound like it came from an actual person, and treat over-editing as a real risk, not just a quality check.
Treating it as one campaign instead of an ongoing practice
A single well-produced video or post could generate a spike of attention, but businesses that stopped there found the attention faded within weeks. Storytelling that compounds requires an ongoing body of consistent material, not a one-off.
The fix: plan storytelling as a recurring practice with a cadence, even a modest one, rather than a single project with a launch date and an end date.
Making the story about the company’s achievements
Award wins, funding announcements and internal milestones feel significant to the people inside a business. They rarely mean anything to a customer deciding whether to buy. A story centered on “look what we built” instead of “here’s a problem we understand” struggles to connect.
The fix: center every story on a specific customer problem or a moment of genuine difficulty in the business’s own process, not an accomplishment being announced.
Ignoring where the story would be seen
Some businesses wrote or filmed strong material and then published it only on their own blog, missing the growing audiences on Pinterest and the still-new visual formats spreading across social platforms in 2012.
The fix: think about the platform a story will live on before producing it. A story built for a blog post doesn’t always translate to a shareable image or a short clip, and vice versa.
Borrowing someone else’s tone
The businesses that tried to directly imitate a competitor’s humor or style, rather than developing their own, usually produced something that read as an imitation rather than an original voice.
The fix: identify what’s specific to your own business, the actual people, the actual process, the actual frustrations you solve, and build the story from there instead of from what worked for someone else.
The common thread
Every mistake here comes from treating storytelling as a production exercise rather than a communication one. The technical execution matters less than whether the story sounds like it came from a real, specific business rather than a marketing department imitating one.
