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Articles filed in: Storytelling
Your One And Only Shot
filed in Storytelling, Strategy
Dave volunteered to fill in for another gym instructor at the last minute. He arrived late for class and was greeted by a full house of enthusiastic morning gym goers, weights at their feet, water bottles at the ready. He hit his first obstacle within minutes. The gym didn’t supply the workout music and there was no CD player. Dave only ever used CDs and had no backup music.
He chased around the gym for ten minutes looking for alternative options, until one of the attendees handed him her iPhone loaded with a variation of the workout music on Spotify. Fifteen minutes in, his confidence shattered and rhythm broken Dave was undone. The unfamiliar variations of the tracks threw him. Everything began to unravel. In his attempt not to look stupid Dave had stopped thinking about the audience long ago and was now focused entirely on himself. He’d not only lost it, he’d lost them. It was the worst class he’d ever taught. The complaints from the attendees to the management flooded in.
You can probably empathise with Dave. When we are preoccupied with our emergencies, expenses, staffing issues, delivery delays and on and on, we can lose sight of the end goal. There is no bigger emergency than having no customers. Without customers there is no story to tell. Above all else we need to keep the customer top of mind. Just showing up isn’t enough. You need to tell your story like it’s your one and only shot to do it, each and every time. Act as if you won’t get a chance to tell it tomorrow.
Image by Daniel Diaz Vera.
Hedging Your Bets Vs A Stake In The Ground
filed in Marketing, Storytelling
When we’re having problems articulating our story or making ideas resonate it’s often because we’re afraid of putting a stake in the ground. It seems safer to hedge our bets and easier to be more things to more people, than to commit to choosing who to matter to.
When you narrow your focus and stake your claim to a category or an idea, you must decide who you want to serve and how to matter to only those people. This in turn, helps you to get better at telling your story.
If you make a list of beloved brands you’ll find that they don’t hedge their bets. Spreading ideas isn’t simply a case of telling a better story, it starts with deciding exactly which story to tell.
Image by George Laoutaris.
Brand Storytelling And The Rule Of One
filed in Marketing, Storytelling
Have you ever wondered why movies like Toy Story are so compelling and successful? The best writers in the world speak to universal human themes—the things that drive every one of us no matter what our worldview is.
Compelling storylines work because we see ourselves reflected in the characters. Their story is our story. A great script looks us right in the eye and says, “I see you”. Contrast that feeling with the one you get when you’re speaking to someone at a party, who is looking over his shoulder for the next most interesting person to enter the room. That’s exactly how you don’t want your customers and clients to feel.
Great storytellers make us feel like they’re speaking directly to us. And so it goes for great brand storytelling. The best brand stories make you feel like the company understands and is speaking just to you. The goal is to be more like Pixar and nothing like that guy at the party.
You achieve that by remembering ‘the rule of one’.
Speak to one person at a time. Make that person feel like she’s being looked in the eye.
That’s the foundation of a winning brand story.
Image by Luis Miguel Justino.
Because We Can
filed in Storytelling, Strategy
It’s a brisk Autumn Monday. The city’s lunchtime trams are busy. As we turn into Collins Street the tram driver begins an unscripted dialogue.
He tells us that we’re at “the Paris end” of Collins street in the world’s most liveable city, reminding us that this is “no flash in the pan” because Melbourne has been awarded the accolade five times. At each stop he mentions landmarks and points of interest. He draws our attention to the “blue sky, fluffy white clouds, birds singing and trams dinging”.
“It doesn’t get much better than this ladies and gentlemen.” he says.
“If only Essendon had won on the weekend.”
And the day is brightened for tens of people in that ordinary moment.
Here is a guy without a script, a rulebook, or permission of any kind doing meaningful work.
Not because it’s in his job description, his boss is watching, or for a financial incentive—but because he can.
It’s an oppotunity most of us are lucky to have. We should take it.
Image by Stephen Beaumont.
The Powerful Sales Question We Forget To Ask
filed in Marketing, Storytelling
It was a busy Saturday morning in the department store. Lucy, the kitchen appliance sales assistant didn’t have a lot of time on her hands. She needed to work as efficiently as possible while ensuring that customers felt seen and heard. Lucy’s first customer was shopping for an electric blender. Like many customers, she felt so overwhelmed by the array of choices she was unlikely to buy anything—until Lucy expertly helped her to narrow them down with one simple question.
“What do you want to do with it?”
The ability to understand what a customer wants to do next has spawned countless successful business ideas from Facebook to the Dyson vacuum cleaner. When you are aware of the context shaping the story the customer tells herself, you put yourself in the best possible position to serve her and grow your business.
What does your customer want to do next?
What must you do next to help her get to where she wants to go?
Image by Yassan.
The Three Steps To Articulating Value
filed in Marketing, Storytelling
It’s tempting to begin with product and service descriptions when you are communicating the value your business creates. Of course, it’s easier to start with what we know for sure. We list features, benefits and specifications—telling the customer as much as we can about ‘the what’.
And all the while we’re doing it backwards.
Intead of starting with our ‘what’ we need to begin with the customer’s ‘why’.
How To Articulate Value
1. Why does the customer need your product?
Reflect the customer’s challenges or desires back to him.
2. How will it work?
Describe the change the product will create.
3. What is it?
Finish with the facts.
Very few of our buying decisions are led by reason and logic, so why seek to persuade by starting there?
Image by Mike Melrose.
Your Story Drives Behaviour
filed in Storytelling, Strategy
Jackie is a gifted web designer. Her inbox is full of enquiries from people who want to work with her. She loves what she does, but she gets worn down by clients asking for a discount on her already reasonable rates. This behaviour not only affects Jackie’s bottom line and the number of clients she must take on to make a living, it also leaves her feeling demoralised.
When clients repeatedly ask for discounts.
When your boss emails every weekend.
When staff continually show up late for meetings.
When you don’t feel valued, it’s tempting to blame the people who don’t value you.
Start by looking at your actions and responses—the things that might be giving this behaviour oxygen. Think about what could be triggering the behaviour, then own the way you want people to respond. You have a responsibility to create the story that elicits the reactions and responses you want. How are you framing your scarcity?
Image by dawolf.
From Awareness To Loyalty
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
The purpose of your brand story and of every piece of marketing material is to move a prospective customer from awareness to loyalty.
When we imagine the customer decision journey as a timeline it’s clear that we need to treat customers differently according to where they are on that journey.
It jars when we get an overseas call offering web design services for a domain purchased a week ago out of the blue. That’s because the web design company failed to see the need to start at the beginning of the customer decision journey. They don’t take us any further along that journey because they’ve skipped the first three steps. Our loyalty is forever lost to them.
It turns out that marketing isn’t just about being seen and understood.
It’s about seeing in order to understand. That takes time and care and skill.
You have the opportunity to devote all of that.
How are you making sure you don’t skip any of the important steps?
Image by Jon Baglo.
Grow Your Business By Watching What People Do
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
I once walked the length for Bourke Street behind a young man in a hurry heading towards Southern Cross Station. His backpack was slung over one shoulder and a designer shopping bag in the other hand bumped his knee as he walked revealing the Christian Louboutin logo. When we both stopped at the lights I couldn’t resist asking him what he’d bought. The shoes, he told me were a gift for a girlfriend he was trying to “win back”. The gesture had to be unforgettable.
Christian Louboutin is one of the most successful shoe designers in the world, selling more than half a million pairs of shoes a year. A pair of Louboutin’s will set you back between $395 and $6,000, their distinctive red soles are a marketing coup.
The root of the designer’s success is twofold. Firstly he knows who his customer is, and importantly who she is not, he doesn’t make shoes for “women who play bridge in the afternoon”. Secondly, he watches what she does and understands the role of his product in shaping her perception of herself.
Louboutin once said, “When a woman buys a pair of shoes, she never looks at the shoe. She stands up and looks in the mirror, she looks at the breast, the ass, from the front, from the side, blah blah blah. If she likes herself, then she considers the shoe.”
The opportunity to go deeper and gain valuable insights into our customers behaviour is open to each and every business. Those insights we observe can transform innovation, service and marketing.
How much time are you devoting to understanding how your customer’s actions drive their buying decisions?
Image by Adrain Scottow
What Do Your Customers Really Want?
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
There’s an Italian Cafe in our neighbourhood serving good coffee and speciality cakes. It’s jam-packed every single evening—not because people are hungry for cake, but because they are hungry for the feeling of being connected. They seek out the place that makes them feel that way.
Howard Schultz recognised the power of people’s aspirations thirty years ago, when he transformed Starbucks from a coffee roaster into ‘the third place’ by grounding the brand’s value proposition in a story about ritual and community.
Just as a successful cafe isn’t ever just about the coffee, the products and services you sell create meaning for your customers beyond their utility. The truth is that as marketers, we often miss the opportunity to acknowledge and reflect that story back to them.
Does your story align with the story your customers really want to believe?
Image by Niall Kennedy.