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Articles filed in: Storytelling
Don’t Make Me Click, Make Me Care
filed in Marketing, Storytelling
There’s no denying it calls to action are important and increasingly so in a world of infinite choices. We have less and less time to give people a reason to choose us.
Calls to action matter, not just because we want people to do what we want them to do when they visit our websites, but because people like to understand what they need to do next. Your readers and your customers appreciate it when you make life easy for them. But we all know how annoying it feels to experience the ‘hard sell’ even when the salesperson isn’t in the room with us. Popups that appear before we read a single word and BUY NOW button mania, only serve to make us do the opposite of what was intended.
So how on earth do you find a balance? How do you make people click?
You need to start by asking a better question. Your website shouldn’t be optimised just to make people click what you want them to click. Your website needs to make people feel like they belong. It turns out that when people feel like they belong they want to return and to become members, customers and advocates.
Helping people to feel like they belong is a better long-term strategy than finding ways to make them click and pay.
Don’t make people click. Find ways to make people care.
Image by Ben Terret.
How To Be The Best In The World
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
LEGO® bricks are the best in the world. Competitors have tried to copy them over the years, but nothing comes close to a real LEGO® brick. So what’s the secret?
To make a product that good you’ve got to continually obsess about design and production lines and quality control. But what makes LEGO® the best in the world is how and where they begin the process. LEGO® design doesn’t begin with the brick. It begins with the people who will use it.
The LEGO® designer doesn’t work hard to make the perfect brick or the best brick in the world. She obsesses about how it feels to put two bricks together and then to pull them apart, with five-year-old hands. She spends her days understanding how it feels to sit on the floor for hours making a model that won’t fall to pieces when you pick it up. Then she designs the product that makes it possible to experience those feelings.
If you want to be the best in the world don’t start by trying to create the best product or service. Start by working out how people want to feel.
Image by Bart.
The Question Your Competitors Forgot To Ask
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
The foundation of many businesses is a simple what.
What do we serve and sell, for how much, at what profit margin?
Getting stuck in ‘the what’ puts you squarely in the commodities business. If the value you create is purely tangible then you’re not giving people a reason to care about your brand, or ways to form a connection that makes them remain loyal to your business. Someone somewhere can produce shorts or bake a loaf of bread cheaper than you can. And the consultant across town can offer four coaching sessions for the price of your three.
If you want to build a brand that creates difference and one that people feel connected to, the better question to begin with is the one your competitors most likely forgot to ask.
How are we creating value for our customers?
Because when you begin by understanding the truth about what really matters to your customers and take action on that, you can’t help but become the competition.
If you need to be convinced that meaning scales this video from Patagonia should do the trick.
Image by Jorge Quinteros.
The Real Reason The Microsoft Store Is Empty
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
Clues about what matters to people and how their emotions drive their choices are all around us and there’s no better time to see evidence of this in action than during the festive season.
Slate recently posted two images that tell two very different brand stories. Both photos were taken on what should have been a busy Sunday afternoon during the peak-shopping season. One shows an empty Microsoft Store, the other a packed Apple Store.
No big surprise there you might say. Everyone knows that people use Microsoft products, but few are in love with the brand. Contrast that with how people feel about Apple products. We know that when Steve Jobs and his design team were working on the iPhone he charged them with designing the first phone people would fall in love with, but innovation and marketing at Apple goes one step beyond that. While Microsoft have been building utilitarian products for years, Apple has been creating products that people not only love, but the kind of products that help people to fall just a little bit more in love with themselves.
Businesses that have thrived in a Business 3.0 world have succeeded at some level in helping people to feel better about themselves.
The same opportunity is open to you…..and Microsoft.
Image by Joe Wilcox.
Price Is A Story We Tell Ourselves
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
I’m worth it. It might be gone tomorrow. You could make it at home for half that. This is a one off. People pay for intangible value all the time.
Consider Uber, “the app that connects you with a driver at the tap of a button” on your smartphone. If you simply need to get from point A to point B, why not just call or hail a taxi on the street? Well, apart from the fact that using Uber means you don’t have to wait in the rain, you don’t even need to have cash or credit cards to pay. The real value of the service is not simply in getting people where they need to go. The value of Uber though is in the perception of time saved and the elimination of uncertainty. The ability to know exactly where your driver is and to track him as he gets to you using GPS is something plenty of people reckon is worth paying for. People place a premium on their time. Uber doesn’t need to employ the drivers, or to own the fleet of cars to provide value (to the tune of a rumoured $1 Billion a year).
The sticker price may help us rationalise the decision to reach for our wallet, but often it’s the things we can’t see, and the emotional investment made where most value is created.
Price, and value are stories we tell ourselves. What story are your customers telling?
Image by Yang and Yung.
Ditch The Business Plan And Write A Letter To Your Future Customer
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
This might sound like a pointless and obvious exercise that’s easy to do…..so why would anyone bother? I guarantee you, that if more of the forgettable businesses you’ve visited and never been back to, had written this letter (or their own version of it), they’d be one step closer to remarkable.
Time to ditch the business plan for a second and begin…..
Dear ——————————,
It was great to hear from you today. I remember the day I saw you struggling to ————————, a hundred light bulbs went off when I realised at that moment that I could help you to ————————.
I know that you want to do/create/be/feel/have ———————— and I understand the challenges you face, like ———————— and ————————, because over the past five years I’ve been working on/helped ———————— to overcome similar problems. Understanding your experience is the reason I created ————————.
Here’s how it works.
Once you begin/finish/buy/use ———————— you will be able to ————————.
And that’s the reason I can’t wait to jump out of bed and get to work every morning.
You can try/start/buy it now [hyperlink]. If you have any questions you can contact me anytime at getitnow@whatyouvebeenwaitingforbutdidntknow.com
Best Wishes
Alex
CEO
whatyouvebeenwatingforbutdidntknow.com
Image by Rachel.
Why Is The Next Time Never Like The First Time?
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
Twelve years ago we took our boys on a family holiday to Tuscany. We spent a whole magical day just wandering the beautiful walled city of Lucca. It was there that we had our first taste of real Italian gelato. It turns out that Lucca is the perfect place for circling back on yourself, which is exactly what we did, not once, but twice that afternoon—to try just one more cup of gelato.
Of course we weren’t hungry for ice-cream, what we wanted was to replicate the feeling of the first time.
We often go to great lengths to create memorable experiences for our customers first time round.
It’s easy to set the bar and forget.
But if we are going to matter to our customers we need to think beyond the first time.
The challenge, and the opportunity is to make the next time, feel like the first time.
Image by Adam Bowie.
What Customers Believe Is Your Competitive Advantage
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
Ask any business owner about how they stand apart from the competition and they’ll probably begin with the tangible, the things they can easily explain. “We offer a more competitive interest rate.” “Our products have more features. “We have better distribution.”
In 2008 Windows accounted for 84% of personal computing devices shipped. Today that number is just 28%. It turns out that people weren’t buying monitors and motherboards.
Customers don’t often pay for the actual value the product delivers. If they did $4 cups of coffee wouldn’t exist. People pay for the intangible value, for what they experience and what they care about.
If you can’t finish this sentence, then like Microsoft, it might be time for a rethink.
“Our customers love how it feels when they ———————— our product or service, because ————————.”
Your competitive advantage is what your customers believe, not what you make in the factory.
Image by Bianca Nogrady.
How To Write A Mission Statement
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
By definition a mission statement is the official line on the aims and objectives of your organisation. Academic papers have been written about how mission statements must be cogent (possibly one of the ugliest words in the history of the English language in my opinion).
Your mission statement should describe your key market and your contribution. It should explain why your product or service is unique, setting out reasons why a prospective client would, or should choose you. No wonder most businesses find writing a mission statement hard.
If you’re stuck, you could try using the handy mission statement generator to help you come up with a mission statement like this one.
“We will work concertedly to efficiently monetize best practice methods of empowerment to stay pertinent in tomorrow’s world.”
Or try this for size.
“We are committed to globally engineer virtual sources while continuing to quickly leverage web 2.0 services.”
Don’t laugh! I’m sure you’ve read many a meaningless mission statement similar to these ones.
Your mission statement shouldn’t live in a dusty A4 file, or be buried on a long forgotten, never updated page on your website. And it shouldn’t just be something you say.
It should be something you live every day, on purpose.
What are you doing right now, today? Why does your business exist? Why does it matter?
Are you actually on a mission, or are you just saying that you are?
Image by Alex Watson.
Doing Work That Matters
filed in Storytelling, Strategy
My maternal grandfather died in his sleep, while my mother aged just four, lay breathing next to him. She was number ten of eleven children. Ten years later mum was sent to work at a biscuit factory. She hated it from day one. At the end of that first shift she told her mother that she was never going back. She worked there every day for the next four years, until she finally escaped aged eighteen.
My paternal grandmother died in childbirth aged just 36, while her husband who was a baker stayed at home looking after their other ten children. My dad’s first job was as a delivery boy for the local grocer. They gave him a bike and a few shillings at the end of the week, but not enough for shoes.
My parents met at the crisp factory, where they both worked long days frying potatoes in front of huge vats of hot oil. They had worked in other factories before that, packing biscuits or dipping caramels in icing, either pink or white. Work to them was the thing you tolerated because you had no choice. If you were lucky it bought you a couple of cinema tickets and a few hours escape on a Saturday evening.
I remember my dad going to work every day in the vast freezers at the HB factory to fill orders of Cornettos and load boxes of Birdseye ready meals, so that Captain Birdseye could put chunky flakes of sea fresh cod on more plates across the county.
He worked so that we could go to school with food in our bellies (a luxury he never had). So that he could buy a whole set of Encyclopedia Britannica by the week, in the hope of something better for us. So that we would have a nice yard of new green ribbon to wear in our hair on Sunday.
So that we would never want for a new pair of Clarke’s shoes.
My dad got joy from what the work enabled him to do when he wasn’t at work. From the hope of a better future that his ability to bring home a pay packet at the end of each week might bring his children. Work was a means to the promise of a better end. There was little joy or fulfilment in the work itself.
Every single person who is reading this has a choice that isn’t this. We get to care that our work has meaning, that our days are not just something we get through. Let’s not waste it for a second.
Image by Thomas Hawk.