Find your brand's story in another story

What is it that draws us to a song? And how do we measure what it draws out of us? What moves us to tears, or makes our hearts soar? It isn't just the lyrics or the melody, but something that speaks at a deeper level, a story set to music that taps into a higher frequency.

BBC Radio 4's Soul Music podcast invites us to sit with the songs that affect us this way, and with the personal stories behind them. Each half-hour episode, across a series that now spans close to fifteen years, unlocks the lives a single piece of music has touched. Beethoven to U2, Purple Rain to Fauré's Requiem. In one, a song sustains someone through grief. In another, it unlocks hope, or echoes a longing. Each program is woven through with the voice of the musician, the songwriter, or a historian who can place the less familiar pieces in context.

In a world that bombards us with music, it is easy to forget the power of a truly well-crafted story set to sound. With so much entertainment at our fingertips, on our phones and in our feeds, we rarely sit down and really listen. Soul Music reminds us what a good story can be, and how music can carry us back to a moment in time or call up an emotion we thought we had set down.

A few of the storylines worth digging into: a weather researcher describing the rare, real phenomenon of purple rain. A beloved Christmas carol traced back to an ocean voyage and a book of poems bought in a Halifax bookstore. A quiet, below-the-radar song that helped a city unite against a divisive football merger, and helped a mother through her son's battle with leukemia. A number from a Broadway musical that moved a grieving mom to start a leprosy charity in her daughter's memory.

These are the kinds of stories Soul Music gathers. Stories that remind us of what is good, and beautiful, even when we hum the melody through tears.

Whether you are a music lover or not, we all need stories to help us understand our own. The same is true for brands and organizations.

Three takeaways for your own brand story

Dig into the heart of your brand's story. What is actually at the center of it? Make space, on a regular basis, to explore and recover your origins, your mission, and the journey you have been on as an organization. Keep a record of what you find, and invite your teams to build storytelling around it. Let it work its way into onboarding, marketing, board books, and the content you put into the world.

Get curious about the impact your brand is having. What tools and habits do you have for measuring how your story lands, beyond social comments and customer-service tickets? The effect a brand has on people is often felt long before it shows up on a dashboard.

Listen to your own teams first. How well do you hear your own people, your employees, your donors, your partners? Most organizations are built to look from the outside in, toward revenue, growth, and market. Fewer make the time to look from the inside out, toward mission, practice, identity, and what their own people already know.

Soul Music is a window into how music moves us. Maybe it leaves you thinking differently about a favorite song, or curious enough to go find one of your own. In the same way, it can lead you to reconsider how your brand lands out in the world, and to notice new ways to draw others into it.

You can find BBC's Soul Music on BBC Sounds, Spotify, or wherever you listen. The 'Purple Rain' episode is a good place to start.