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Four Stories Every Business Needs
filed in Marketing, Storytelling
Every marketer knows he needs to tell his customers a story about what he’s creating—one he hopes will help them buy into his idea or buy his product.
The second story is that of his existing customer and her relationship with his product or service. The best business leaders reflect on how using their product impacts customers’ lives and look for opportunities to engage, improve and build loyalty.
The third story it’s important to understand is that of the next customer he hopes to serve—her challenges, hopes, dreams and worldviews.
The fourth, and most overlooked is the story of the customer he shouldn’t serve. The potential customer who falls into his target demographic, but who doesn’t share his company’s values or is unlikely to be the kind of client who will enable him to do his best work.
Many businesses devote a disproportionate amount of time trying to woo and please people who will never become their ideal customers. It stands to reason that it’s better to devote the bulk of your resources to those you really want to matter to. And yet, we often fall into the trap of structuring our businesses to placate the naysayers instead of doubling down on delighting the believers. It pays to know which is which.
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The Power Of A Shared Brand Narrative
filed in Storytelling, Strategy
The doors of the department store are barely open and Chris is setting up for a busy day ahead at Mecca. Most of the sales assistants at the other beauty counters don’t glance up as a customer walks through. They’re expecting tyre kickers this early in the day. Chris is different. He’s aware and attentive, without being pushy. I discover he’s been with the company for ten years—moving from Saturday boy to manager and fragrance specialist. He clearly loves what he does. When I ask Chris the secret to the brand’s success, he doesn’t miss a beat before responding. It’s the founder’s consistent vision which hasn’t changed from day one. She always aspired to become Australasia’s number one beauty destination, delivering a bespoke, high touch customer experience.
How many of us, (or those who work with us) could so clearly articulate what it is that differentiates our brand with such conviction and without hesitation? This is the power of having a shared narrative—of knowing the reason your brand exists and what change you aspire to make in the world, then living that in everything your brand does. It’s not easy to plot the impact of having a clear purpose and vision on a spreadsheet—which is why deliberately designing a business around them is often overlooked. And yet, when we dig deeper, we find that beloved brands that are successful by every measure do exactly that.
Chris is empowered to deliver the best service because he, like everyone else who works for the company knows where they’re headed and how they will get there. Your brand’s story has the power to be a map, mirror and magnet—keeping you on track and attracting like-minded people who want to create the future with you.
Where are you headed and how exactly are you planning to get there?
Image by Heather Katsoulis.
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Why We Need To Redefine Greatness
filed in Success
By most conventional measures of success Uber is a great company. From a standing start in 2009 to a valuation of $70 billion early in 2017, the ride-hailing app has become the most valuable private technology company in the world. Uber has achieved the kind of growth many companies dream of and yet the recent string of scandals tell the story of a company culture that’s broken. We frequently witness similar missteps like the Volkswagen emissions scandal and United Airlines passenger abuse in companies that are striving for our current narrow definition of greatness.
In our Western world of abundance and privilege greatness is a game of comparison that drives us to achieve more. Bigger wins, more sales, rising revenue, increased market share, growth, scale, power and influence. Permanently higher highs that inevitably end in compromise. We have created a culture where we’re not winning unless someone else is less than or losing. It’s time for a change.
While it seems like a daunting task, it’s possible for us as individuals to redefine greatness by changing how we measure success—by replacing our winner-takes-all worldview with one that requires us to question if we’re doing work we’re proud of. We each get to choose what it means to be great again. Moment-to-moment and day-by-day we can deliberately decide only to do the things we’ll be proud to have done and to create the future we want to see.
What did you measure today?
Image by Pablo Ricco.
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Mean It Like You Say It
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
The Sunday ice-cream scooper at the gelato place on Spring Street makes new customers sample every flavour before they buy anything. She knows her gelato inside and out. Her enthusiasm is infectious. She reels off the most popular flavours and tells stories about how pistachio lovers always return to pistachio having tried everything else because it’s that good. Sunday scooper believes in her product. She may only work one day a week in the lowliest position in the company but training her to love the gelato is the best investment the boss has ever made.
Far too often we fail to think deeply about and celebrate what differentiates us from others, and so we flounder when it comes to articulating our value. If we’re telling a story we believe in, it shows. There is no better marketing strategy.
When you say it, do you mean it?
Imange by Alpha.
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The Incremental Advantage
filed in Marketing, News, Storytelling, Strategy
Despite what we know about how distracted our customers can be and how endless their choices are, when it comes to our messaging and marketing, we often overestimate our ability to cut through. You only have to spend five minutes watching someone scrolling through a feed on their smartphone (try it), or see how the guy reading a newspaper at your local cafe bypasses most of the content to get to the parts that interest him, for the reality we’re facing to sink in.
Instead of framing this as a challenge see it as an opportunity. Great innovators, committed business owners and unselfish marketers can thrive by planning to engage more deeply with their audience over time. The promise of the digital marketing era was that it would be faster and cheaper to reach more people. That promise didn’t guarantee deeper engagement, loyalty and more sales.
Now more than ever, even in a fast-paced digital world there is no time for marketing emergencies. We still make progress in increments.
Image by Jeroen Looyé.
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Why Your Business Needs A Set Piece Plan
David Beckham scored 114 goals over the course of his 20-year football career. More than half of those goals were a result of what’s known as a ‘set piece’. A ‘set piece’ is a carefully orchestrated and practised move in a team game that returns the ball to play. Beckham became an outstanding player because of his dedication to rehearsing exactly what he would do when a particular situation arose in the game.
Having a ‘set piece’ plan can help us to excel in many areas of both business and life, but we rarely take advantage of it. Every day you experience average customer service that could be transformed with a ‘set piece’ plan. On Saturday when I was out to breakfast with my family we asked for a side of honey with our toast. The waiter said he would bring it right away. There was still no sign of the honey long after the toast was demolished. Of course, in the scheme of things the forgotten honey is a tiny thing, but those little things add up. They become the stuff of your brand story—the things customers remember (and share) about your business and the experience they had. The good news is it’s easy to create and implement a plan that fixes the problem so your service can be as consistent as David Beckham’s free kicks.
How To Create A Simple Set Piece Plan
1. Make a list of the most common customer service requests or interactions you’d like to improve.
2. Pinpoint the source of the disappointment.
3. Create a simple ‘if-then’ plan that details the ideal way to handle the situation.
- If a customer complains, first we do x, then we follow up with yz.
- If a customer knocks on the door five minutes before we open, then we…
- If we make a mistake with an order, then…
4. Assess how effective your ‘set piece’ plan is by measuring how empowered your team feels and also by monitoring customer satisfaction.
The brands that delight us anticipate and plan for what’s about to happen next long before it does.
Image by Ronnie MacDonald.
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The First Law Of Good Marketing
We can tie ourselves up in knots wondering and worrying about how to communicate our value to prospective customers. Which marketing tactics should we use? How can we improve our product descriptions? What’s the best strategy for converting leads to sales? How can we ‘get more eyeballs’ on our content? While these are all valid questions, the best marketing happens when we flip our ‘more eyeballs’ obsession on its head.
The first law of good marketing is to show people that you see them, instead of constantly trying to make them see you.
Women’s shapewear that reduces visible panty lines and unsightly bulges says. ‘I see you’.
Good quality razors at a fair price say, ‘I see you’.
The ‘skip intro’ button on your favourite show says, ‘I see you’.
One-click ordering says, ‘I see you’.
You become a more insightful innovator as well as a better marketer when you can show customers that seeing and hearing them is your number one priority. How are you letting your customers know that you see them?
Image by Ana Fuentes.
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Depth Over Reach
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
It’s pouring rain on the morning the free weekly lifestyle magazine is stuck through the railings of every home on every street in our neighbourhood. So the 20% of people who would normally flick through it over morning coffee won’t bother to open the magazine today. The soggy newsprint goes straight into the recycling bin. This is not the story the magazine’s ad sales team will tell prospective advertisers. Their data will talk up the power of building brand awareness and increasing reach as a reliable business growth strategy.
The recorded message outside the chiropractor’s office on Victoria Street interrupts every passer-by day or night. He can even reach those making their way home from a big night out at 2 am on Saturday at no additional cost. You just never know who might be walking past at any given moment. And there lies the problem—just like the lifestyle magazine, the chiropractor’s business growth strategy is focused on reach instead of depth. It prioritises the unknowns above the knowns. Both companies have decided that interrupting the most people is the safest marketing strategy. They are ignoring opportunities to deepen relationships with the people who are already interested or invested in their services because they mistakenly believe more is a shortcut to mattering.
How are you prioritising depth over reach in your business?
Image by Alfred Lui.
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What Are You In A Hurry To Do?
In our world of infinite information and seemingly endless opportunities there’s a temptation to fill every moment—to make every available second a productive one. So we multitask. We eat at our desks instead of taking a break. We always listen to podcasts on our commute, neglecting to pay attention to what’s going on around us. We defer to experts for opinions or advice before stopping to question our values first. We aim to optimize every second because we fear missing out, all the while forgetting what we were actually in such a hurry to do.
Sometimes the best course of action is to do nothing. To give yourself a moment to think and remember why you started. Sometimes, probably more often than you realise, you are your own best guide. And occasionally standing still is the best optimization strategy.
Image by Geraint Rowland.
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Don’t Be Afraid To Start Small
On a rainy Monday early in December 1955, 40,000 African-Americans boycotted the public bus services in the town of Montgomery to protest the arrest of 42-year-old Rosa Parks who refused to give up her seat to a white passenger. Their boycott lasted 381 days until the city repealed its law requiring segregation on public buses. Rosa Parks’ story is one of the most enduring examples we have of the power of one person to change everything.
We tend to forget that the ‘power of one’ rule also applies to revolutions in the commercial world. Philip Mills choreographed his first barbell workout in the remote city of Auckland, New Zealand in 1990. Today he is the CEO of Les Mills International—the hugely successful global fitness brand, with over 130,000 certified instructors delivering classes to more than 6 million people every week in more than 100 countries around the world. To put that into perspective, the population of New Zealand today stands at 4.5 million.
It’s natural to want to get your product into the hands of everyone who needs it. But thinking about how to influence the masses leads to missteps in understanding what’s driving the decisions of the few people you have the best chance of reaching and impacting right now. Like any revolution, success happens one user, one customer, one raving fan at a time. Never be afraid to start small.
Image by Jasperdo.