The role of storytelling in retail branding

Historically there hasn’t been a huge focus on branding in retail. The focus for retailers has been on marketing their products over brand marketing, and as an effect thereof the narrative in retail has been rather simplistic.

But over the past couple of years we’ve seen a very clear turn from product marketing in retail, which has resulted in retail brands putting a much larger effort into the storytelling side of their business.

But why is this important? What is the difference between branding in retail and branding for a brand such as Coca Cola or Niké?

What is retail branding?

Retail branding is the strategy employed to build a strong presence of your store in the minds of the consumer. While the retail branding process may differ between types of retailers, it is always a series of deliberate steps taken to evoke a positive feeling.

How does retail branding differ from a product brand?

Branding in retail differs from product brands in the sense that the product is wholly omitted from the brand story.

If you are a sneaker brand, for instance, your brand story could include people running, playing games or other references to an active lifestyle. Or if you are a soft drink brand, your brand story could include the music, young people sitting in the park, and the social aspect of meeting up with your friends.

In both cases the product is featured in the brand story, because the product is the brand. But that is not the case for a retail brand. Because retailers do not have a single product to tie into their brand story, they need to focus on the story of a lifestyle that can contain multiple products (all available within their specific store).

DIY-retailer switches their storytelling from product branding to lifestyle branding and their views skyrocket

Since the adoption of social media and video as marketing channels, views in the millions has been the dream scenario for a lot of marketing teams, but there’s always the question of how to achieve this. 

We’ve sat down to talk to Peter Grønbæk, who has been working with retailers for more than a decade, and one of the things we talked about is storytelling in retail and how a narrative change can help skyrocket your reach.


“There’s been a big shift in the way retailers market themselves. Retail branding used to focus on the product, but those days are over. Retail marketing is becoming more about creating a narrative surrounding the lifestyle of their customer, than it is about marketing the products themselves. It’s become more about telling a good story instead of showing off pretty products.” Peter says.

Peter recalled a case about a DIY retailer who had been investing in video for a couple of years. The videos were mainly about how to undertake do it yourself projects. The commonality in the videos were that the products the retailer wanted to sell were central to the videos and the storytelling was rather factual.

Fast forward to 2020 and the market was saturated with product offerings, and all the competitors were running the same playbook of putting out short form video too.

Shifting to a focus on the DIY-lifestyle, and on the customers who use the products, instead of focusing on the products themselves changed that. Instead of ending up with views in the thousands they started seeing views in the millions.

“Because it felt less like a product advertisement and more like something out of a lifestyle magazine.”

3 examples of lifestyle branding in retail

There are plenty of great examples of how lifestyle branding and storytelling has been used by retail brands to create something that is focused on the consumer and not on the product. 

Here we’ll take a look at three such examples.

1. IKEA

When Ingvar Kamprad founded IKEA in the 1940s the IKEA brand and the story that went with it was a simple one. Kamrad saw a need for affordable furniture of a high quality. This story shaped the IKEA brand into the flat-packed, self assembly furniture line that we all know.

But “affordable, high quality furniture” isn’t the center in IKEAs brand story anymore. Whether we’re talking videos ads, their cafeteria, in-store decorations or their  social media presence, their focus has shifted to telling warm, funny stories.

Their “Let’s Relax” campaign from 2016 is a shining example of this, where they transport the obsession with snapping pictures of the food we eat from today’s world and back through time to the 17th century. The message of the ad is that your home shouldn’t be subjected to public scrutiny, it should be a place you can relax.

2. Aldi

In the 2010’s a gin drinking grandmother became the central figure of the German retailer’s attempt to provide something new amidst the string of bland supermarket commercials that featured famous chefs like Jamie Oliver and attempted to create a ‘food porn’ movement.

And that’s exactly what Aldi’s campaign “Like Brands, Only Cheaper’ did. 

The ad was part of a series of witty ads that tried to convince a nation that big brands didn’t taste better. And while the series did feature Aldi products, the products were merely a prop to get to the punchline of a funny story.

3. Zalando

Zalando’s 2024 Autumn/Winter campaign titled “What Do I Wear” is another great example of less focus on the product, more focus on the lifestyle.

The commercial itself features people on a subway, all of them asking themselves the same question “what do I wear?” 

But instead of answering the question by simply presenting different pieces of clothes, the fashion retailer keeps changing the context of the question.

A guy asks himself, “what do I wear on a first date?”

A pregnant woman asks herself, “what do I wear to get a seat?” as she is forced to stand on the subway.

Brigitte Nielsen asks herself “what do I wear to get some of that?” as she spots two people making out.

A young woman applying lipstick asks herself “what do I wear to look iconic?”

The answer is, of course, Zalando, they are trying to increase sales after all. But the story they’re telling isn’t about the many different styles in their catalog. It’s about a life lived by people in a vibrant city and their different reasons for needing Zalando.