Unlock the Magic in Your Story Now
Get the Free 20 questions to Ask Before Launching Your Idea workbook when you sign up for occasional updates.
Get the Free 20 questions to Ask Before Launching Your Idea workbook when you sign up for occasional updates.
The 20 Keys To A Brand Story
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
A brand story is more than a narrative. The story goes beyond the copy on a website, the text in a brochure, or the presentation used to pitch to investors. Your story isn’t just what you tell people. It’s what they believe about you based on the signals your brand sends. The story is a complete picture made up of facts, feelings, and interpretations, which means that part of your story isn’t even told by you.
Everything you do, from the colours and texture of your packaging to the staff you hire, is part of your brand story, and every element of it should reflect the truth about your brand back to your audience.
If you want to build a successful, sustainable business, a brand that will garner loyalty and, if you’re lucky, become loved, you have to start with your story.
THE 20 KEYS TO A BRAND STORY
1. The Truth
What business are you in?
Car companies don’t just manufacture boxes to get people from A to B.
2. Purpose
The reason you exist.
3. Vision
What impact do you see your business making in the world?
4. Values
Your values reinforce the vision for the business, shape its culture, and guide its behaviours.
5. Products and Services
Do they live up to the story you want to tell?
6. Your People
Leaders and employees, their values and posture.
7. Value you deliver
Think beyond features and benefits.
People don’t buy what you do; they buy how it makes them feel.
8. Name and Tagline
Your opening move.
9. Content and Copy
Your content and copy are the way you woo your customers. They are your voice and the way you communicate your brand’s personality.
10. Design
The visual shorthand that helps people to make decisions about your brand.
It also shapes the user’s experience of your products and makes them work better.
11. Your Actions
How you do everything, from greeting customers to answering the phone and requesting payment,
12. Customer Experience
Customer experience is everything that happens when people encounter your brand and how it makes your customers feel.
13. Price and Quality
The price you charge and the quality of what you sell or serve sends a signal to the right people.
14. Perception
Your position is your customers’ perception. It’s shaped by the way in which you touch their hearts, not by how you manipulate their thinking.
15. Distribution
How you get your products and services into the hands of customers sends them a signal about your brand. It can also provide a competitive advantage.
16. Location
Your location has to align with your business strategy.
17. Ubiquity or Scarcity
Do you want to have a product in every store, or will being selective about where your brand is stocked align with your story? Is your plan to have a presence on the tablet of every consumer with access to an Internet connection, or will you serve just a handful of consulting clients each year?
18. Community
Your audience. The people you want to reach out to, those your brand resonates with.
The people who feel like they belong and who want to share your story.
19. Reputation
The story your customers tell about you. How your idea and brand story is spread. What one person says to another to recommend your brand.
20. Reaction and Reach
How your customers behave towards your brand. Lines at the Apple store.
You’ll find more about how to tell a great brand story using the 20 keys in my new book
The Fortune Cookie Principle now available on Amazon.
The story you tell is a choice. What story are you telling?
Share this article
Why Starbucks Wins
You could have made a cup of instant coffee at home for a few cents this morning. Or you could even have splashed out on a flavoured Nespresso, brewed in your kitchen at 60 cents a shot.
So why did you go to Starbucks and pay eight times that price for a commodity?
A marketer would say that what you paid extra for was ‘the experience’.
The simple truth is you did it because it felt good.
That’s the reason your customers do what they do too.
Everything that Starbucks does, from naming their drinks to the music they play in the cafe is designed to make you feel good. It’s intentional, they do it on purpose.
That’s why it works.
What are you doing on purpose to make your customers feel good?
Image by Ronald Felton.
Share this article
Return On Relevance
Have you noticed how you react lately to unsolicited email or a cold call? Our interruption tolerance threshold is decreasing at a rapid rate and businesses and advertisers know it.
In Australia we even have a do not knock register. Are people demanding one where you live?
The people you want to speak to decide what’s relevant to them. Of course it’s been obvious for a long time that the Internet, remote controls and mobile devices have caused an attention shift. But what’s happening now goes beyond finding new and different ways to capture attention. People will no longer stand for being targeted. It’s no good saying print more fliers or put out another ad campaign, because you might as well be whistling into the wind without meaning or context.
There is no shortcut to creating things people want to talk about, or to building customer relationships that endure. No easy way to reach everyone. But there are better and more rewarding ways to engage with the people who want to hear from you.
Don’t just work out how to wave your arms at the masses. Build something just for the people who matter. Relevance is the new remarkable.
Image By Aaron Webb.
Share this article
Closing The Sale
It was a mid-week afternoon and the jewellery store was empty. Three assistants, and one customer shopping for a ring. A selection of diamonds was presented. The assistant talked about size and shape, colour and clarity, and a twelve week wait when she couldn’t find a ring to fit.
The customer made to leave.
She didn’t have twelve weeks of forward ‘ring buying’ planning up her sleeve.
“When do you need it for?” the assistant asked as the customer gathered her bags.
And then came the answer to the unasked question, that would have made all the difference had it been known.
“It’s our wedding anniversary in two weeks,” said the ring shopper as she walked out the door.
People can find everything they need online in couple of clicks, they no longer need to pay you for access to products. So forget about the emergency of the logistics for a second.
Instead work out what’s scarce. Stand in their shoes and try to understand what’s driving their decision in that moment.
A sale is never an exchange of goods. It’s a transfer of emotion.
Image by Martin Jarosinski.
Share this article
The Fortune Cookie Principle. The Keys To Telling Your Brand Story
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
I’ve been working to get my new book into your hands for the past nine months, so I’m thrilled to let you know that The Fortune Cookie Principle: The 20 Keys to a Great Brand Story and Why Your Business Needs One is now available on Amazon.
The Kindle edition is on sale at the introductory price of $3.99.
So today is great day to buy your copy and to give one to a friend who has a story to tell.
In the book I share the 20 keys that will help you to tell your brand story. For each key I provide examples of businesses big and small who have used that key to tell their story well. At the end of each section I’ve added questions for you to answer which will help you to tell your story better.
In business we talk a lot about marketing plans and content strategies and features and benefits, often forgetting the reason we needed to think about any of these in the first place.
The very first question that Apple asks before they design a thing is;
“What do we want people to feel?”
Apple became the most loved company in the world by telling a better story and you can do it too.
I wanted to give you a place to begin and that’s the reason I wrote this book.
Your brand story is more than a narrative and content. The story goes beyond the copy on your website, the text in your brochure, or the presentation you use to pitch to investors. Your story isn’t just what you tell people. It’s what they believe about you based on the signals your brand sends. The story is a complete picture made up of facts, feelings, and interpretations, which means that part of your story isn’t even told by you.
People don’t buy what you do, or why you do it.
They buy how it makes them feel.
Marketers spend most of their time selling the cookie, when what they should be doing is finding a better way to tell the story of the fortune. Bake a good cookie but spend your time working out to tell your story well.
Everything you do, from the colours and texture of your packaging to the staff you hire, is part of your brand story, and every part of it should reflect the truth about your brand back to your audience. If you want to build a successful, sustainable business, a brand that will garner loyalty and, if you’re lucky, become loved, you have to start with your story.
The most successful brands in the world don’t behave like commodities and neither should you.
A great brand story will make you stand out, increase brand awareness, create customer loyalty and power profits. Isn’t it time you gave your customers a story to tell?
The Fortune Cookie Principle will show you how.
Share this article
The Opportunity Of The Disconnection Economy
If there’s one thing I really hate it’s queuing. You too? And we’re not alone.
Innovators are spending their time working on projects to make frustrated one-click, 21st century humans worry less about the time they might be wasting, just waiting. There are red traffic lights with countdowns that encourage drivers to be more patient, real time transit information at stations to alleviate uncertainty and automated voices that tell us we are number three in the queue.
We’re designing efficiencies. Optimizing every moment.
This week my local gym installed two electronic self-service kiosks for members who want to book into classes. Swipe. Choose. Click. Then print your own ticket. No more waiting. No more going to a desk to look a person in the eye and pass the time of day.
We’ve never had a more connected society, but as a race we are unwittingly uncoupling ourselves from real intimacy. And what are we sacrificing for the sake of all this urgency? When we strip out every bit of humanity from our lives and our businesses with automation, where will the value lie then?
The opportunity of the future might just be, that we will be falling over each other to pay a premium for a simple, “good morning”.
Image by Jorge Quinteras.
Share this article
You Don’t Need A Marketing Plan
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
Every business has a plan.
Even if it’s written on the back of a Post-it note.
The plan talks about the idea. Who it’s for. How to bring it to market, at what cost and how to get the word out. That final piece of the puzzle is your marketing plan, and yes it’s usually tacked on at the end….when you’re done.
Marketing is seen as an activity. Something that lives on a to-do list. A marketing plan is a bunch of actions and tactics designed to get attention for products and services.
Attention guaranteed a decent level of conversion in the days of linear media and the TV Industrial Complex, but in a Googlized world attention doesn’t automatically scale.
What matters now is being believed not just noticed and a marketing plan that comes into play when you’re done building whatever you’re building isn’t going to get you there.
What every business needs now is story strategy.
You don’t need a plan to broadcast, you need a way to change how people feel in the presence of your brand. Don’t start by asking how can we get noticed. Build something worth noticing. There’s a subtle difference.
Image by Adam Fagen.
Share this article
What’s The Story They’ll Tell About You Tomorrow?
filed in Marketing, Storytelling
Don’t let anyone kid you. Telling your story, or the story of your business is hard and most people struggle with it on some level (how to write an about page is one of the most visited posts on my blog).
But there’s a trick to tapping into the heart of your story.
Start where the story ends.
Write down the words you want people to share about you tomorrow.
What did they love about your product?
What made them care about your service?
How did you blow them away?
What difference did you make?
And now that you’ve figured out what you want people to say, go and do all the things that will make them say it. You are not the only one who is telling your story.
Image by Jason Short.
Share this article
Why More Is The Wrong Place To Start
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
The end goal of all marketing is more.
More customers or subscribers. More sales and increased profits.
This is the reason business strategy questions and answers often begin, (and end) with the ‘how to’ of getting more.
But more is the wrong place to start for two reasons.
When you begin by asking, “How can we sell more?”
You’re bypassing the question that comes before it, which is—”Why will people want more?”
And, what makes a good business a great brand isn’t just more.
It’s more of the right customers who believe in the story.
Sure aim for more. But remember it’s meaning that scales.
Image by Katia Strieck.
Share this article
7 Marketing Strategies That Work Better Than Advertising
Marketing used to mean advertising. If you wanted to sell something awareness on a mass scale was the shortcut. Remarkability or transparency didn’t have to be baked into your product. But we’ve come a long way from the days of Mad Men and the blurred line between getting noticed and being believed.
Today anyone can….
1. Make a better product.
Josh uses just two ingredients in his handmade stoneground chocolate.
The Sydney Opera House brings in a billion dollars a year to the Australian economy.
2. Reward already loyal customers. Give them a story to share.
Jamie Oliver created a free pizza giveaway on Instagram by writing the details with a black marker on a plate and posting the photo.
My friend Mark the baker impacted a whole community with his bread giveaway. The side effect for both businesses was a positive brand-building vibe, even with people who didn’t have a chance to take part.
3. Change how people feel.
Warby Parker changed how people felt about how often they should shop for new glasses and how many pairs they should own.
charity: water built transparency and trust into their interface with the 100% model and GPS, showing donors where their money was making a difference.
4. Create content people want to come back for and share.
In the past you had to have access to a printing press to publish a food magazine that people drooled over, not anymore. The same strategy works for companies big and small, check out
My Starbucks Idea and Airbnb Popular Wishlists.
5. Connect your community.
Moleskine created a marketplace for custom designed notebooks connecting one set of fans to another.
One of our local cafes which backs onto the beach sponsored a surfing event last month.
6. Frame your scarcity.
There is no substitute for Christian Loboutin red soled shoes. Loboutin has managed to attach unique meaning to his shoes using colour and design.
7. Deliver value beyond an exchange of goods or a sales transaction.
Snakes & Lattes the board game cafe charges customers for coffee but what they really sell is connection.
What could you do with zero advertising and a better story?
Image by Geoff Jones.