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Articles filed in: Storytelling
What Are You Promising?
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
I loved Ryan’s corner shop when I was a little girl. The smells of freshly delivered bread mingled with newsprint from the Evening Herald. It was a relief that Mr Ryan knew exactly what kind of ham your mother would want, without you having to explain in detail the part about making sure it was sliced thinly and not ‘too fatty’.
And even when supermarkets began to pop up all around him, selling things in bulk, at prices he just couldn’t compete with (he didn’t even try), Mr Ryan kept going and stayed afloat because he was able to make a different promise to his customers. He knew them after all, in a way that even the data we can gather with repeated swipes of a store loyalty card today, never could.
Sometimes we’re so busy trying to catch up to the gold standard of the industry, or the market that we forget to set and articulate our own standards. If the hotel we compete with has five pillows on the pillow menu, we go one better and make a menu with six. We open longer hours and give people more of what they’re already getting, but we lose sight of what it is we are promising our customers and what it is they really want.
Are you going to be ethical, fair, true to your word? Are you the company that just won’t compromise on your values no matter what. Are you the consultant who will be honest, look clients in the eye and tell them, “this might not work”.
It’s never been more important to know what you stand for and what difference you create.
What are you promising your customers? What’s your story? What’s theirs?
Image by hugovk.
5 Better Ways To Tell The Story Of Your Products And Services
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
I once heard a tea taster who tasted 1,000 cups of tea a day, explain that the secret to the perfect cup of tea was the water. He said that “water is the mother of tea”. That one phrase was enough to hold me still for a second longer. That’s something we all need to learn how to do for our customers.
Let’s face it descriptions are hard. It’s tough to differentiate your products and services with facts alone. Coffee is coffee…right, even if it is aromatic, freshly ground or single origin? Instead of trying to describe what it is you’re selling, set out to change how people feel the moment they read your copy or visit your website.
How to create emotional points of difference with your product and service descriptions
1. Resist relying on the description of features and benefits.
Tell people what they can do with your product, not what the product does.
2. Let your current customers do the talking.
Build trust using proof with testimonials and customer stories.
3. Show how customers are using your product to make their lives better.
Use images, video, case studies and stories.
4. Think about how you want the people who use your products and services to feel.
Write descriptions and create content that helps them to experience those feelings before they ever use the product or service.
5. Behave like a lover, or at least a very dear friend.
Because if you’re going about your business the right way, that’s exactly what you are.
Now go write like one too.
Image by Marcos Ojeda.
Digital Empathy And The Secret To Writing Better Emails
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
We have a problem. One that the Internet and an ‘always on’ world has magnified. I call it ‘Iitis’. We’re all guilty of it, both online and offline. Spend some time today just listening to the exchanges that happen all around you. Conversations between friends at the café. An exchange between the bank teller and customer. Mostly we’re not even waiting to hear the answer to the questions we ask. We’re jumping in to share our own experience.
As humans we’re hard-wired to want to ‘be seen’, but it’s important to recognise that need in others too. That brings me to email.
Before you hit send on anything today check your email for ‘Iitis’. Your inbox might be overflowing and maybe you don’t need one more thing to think about, but when you practice ‘digital empathy’ you’ll be surprised by the results. How many times can you take ‘I’ out of your emails and replace it with ‘you’?
Better brand stories are not just told by the marketing department. They begin by changing how people feel in everything you say and do, email included.
Image by Ian Sanderson.
The Difference Between A Good Idea And A Great Idea Is Just One Thing
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
Actually, the difference between a good and a great anything, (business, movie, hotel, product, blog, book, packaging, design, app, talk, school, song, art…..keep going), is that the great stuff, the things we give a damn about have the heart left in them.
Heart the verb, not the hollow muscular organ that pumps blood around your body. The empathy and emotion. The feeling and yes, vulnerability. Yours, not the marketing department’s.
Good products work. Great products become part of our story.
A good speaker leaves us with food for thought. A great speaker leaves his heart on the podium.
Good marketing tells the story. Great marketing is the story.
We don’t notice or respond to greatness, most of the time we can’t even explain it.
We simply feel it. We just know.
And that’s what makes it matter.
Image by Tomasz Kulbowski.
Your Work Is A Gift. Talking With James Victore
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
Your work is a gift. Doesn’t this stop you in your tracks for a second? That’s what it did to me when I saw James’s Victore’s talk on the subject (well worth bookmarking to watch later).
James runs an independent design studio in Brooklyn, he is known for his original thinking and unforgettable work. James’ clients include Esquire Magazine, The New York Times, Moet Chandon and The City of New York. His work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
I’m thrilled to to able to bring you this video interview* with him today, as we talk about why telling your story and doing work that matters, starts with understanding the truth and being true to yourself. If you want to start thinking about designing your own future this might be a good place to begin.
(*Receiving this post by email? You may need to click on the headline link and view in your browser).
James Victore : Your Work Is A Gift from Bernadette Jiwa on Vimeo.
James’s links as promised. I’d love to hear how you are putting more of you into your work and telling your story in the comments.
Website.
Burning Questions.
Dinner Series.
Image by Filmatu.
Don’t Make Things That People Want
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
On a gorgeous hot summer day at the beach you might kill for a Mr Whippy ice cream cone.
But no matter how much you wanted an ice cream today, even if that ice cream was the best you’ve ever tasted, you probably won’t give Mr Whippy a second thought tomorrow. Why is that?
When you buy ice cream from a van by the beach, you don’t really want the ice cream at all. What you want, is to experience the feeling of eating ice cream by the beach in that moment. After all these years I finally understand that the tinkling music of the ice cream van that visited our neighbourhood forty years ago, (before many of the homes on our street had freezers), didn’t just tell us that the ice cream van was close by. It reminded us how it felt to reach up through the window in the side of the van on a long summer evening, and trade two coins for five minutes of joy, with a chocolate flake stuck in the top.
You might think that this is all very well if you are The Lemon Ice King of Corona, but the same rules apply to anything you can think to market. When Steve Jobs was working with his team of engineers to bring the iPhone to the world, the brief wasn’t to make a touch screen phone that could do xyz. Jobs simply charged his team with creating the first phone people would fall in love with.
The products and services we come back to over and over again are designed for feeling, not just function. They are not made to be used or consumed. They are made to matter.
It turns out that Mr Whippy, like Steve Jobs understood that marketing is a love story.
Image by saeru.
Creating Difference And Why It Matters
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
So, I’m sitting in a café writing my next book and thinking of you (this is a sneak peek at the cover, the subtitle isn’t even set in stone yet). I’ve found that thinking about (actually obsessing about) you, and what matters to you, is how I can make the most difference. But let me back up a bit. The reason I’m at this café and not tapping away in my lovely, whisper quiet home office at the moment is that Craig the builder is ripping out a bathroom and breaking up concrete in the process. Not much quiet in the office right now.
There are ten cafés within spitting distance of where I live on the coast, many have gorgeous ocean views, okay coffee and wifi. They are all ‘good enough’. And yet here I am in a little suburban branch of an international franchise with a view of the car park. The decor is the same as that of the four branches of this café that operate within 10 km of this one. The seating, cups, napkins, crockery, coffee, menu and uniforms, are all identical to every other Dome franchise, but as soon as you walk through the door here you experience difference.
It’s in the way that whoever is serving at the counter looks up the moment a customer walks in and says good morning. The way they make sure to say “see you again” when you leave. The posture of every single person who works here tells me they understand that they matter, and that they can make a difference to someone’s day. In fact the difference is hard to describe because it’s something you feel. Of course I want to know how they consistently pull this off and ask to see the manager. She arrives with a confident smile looking ready to solve any problem I could throw at her. When I ask how this manages to be the best Dome in Perth she laughs and without missing a beat she says, “I hire for personality.” Essentially what she’s telling me is that she hires for difference. And by golly does it show. She doesn’t rule people out because they have tattoos, funky hair, or wacky nail polish, she’s only concerned with how they will show up and bring their difference to work every day. And she wants them to have fun while they are doing it.
Difference doesn’t just mark you out as being a better choice than the competition.
It makes you the competition.
That’s what this next book is about. Showing you how to tap into your difference however big or tiny your entrepreneurial dreams are, whether you’re a one man band or the marketing manager of a Fortune 500. Because it turns out that the people and companies who organise for difference are the ones who tell the best stories and create ideas that matter.
If you’ve already bought Make Your Idea Matter or The Fortune Cookie Principle, thanks for being my reason to dodge the concrete drill this time around. Without you there would be no reason to write, and no excuse to have deep and meaningful conversations with random café managers .
And if you haven’t got either of the books yet, or you’d like to give them as a gift,
you can buy them today for just 99 cents on Amazon.
No Kindle required.
The Future Of Storytelling And The Currency Of That Future
filed in Storytelling, Strategy
So there we were gathered together on an island, (the best kind of place to feel that you’re truly gathered) to talk about the future of storytelling. Some of the best and brightest in the storytelling business from Burberry CEO (soon to be heading up the retail story at Apple), Angela Ahrendts, to Robert Wong from Google were there.
It seemed that almost every person I spoke to was wrestling, not with the future of storytelling, but with the future of their story. How do traditional businesses born in the industrial age, those that thrived in a Mad Menesque world, adapt and find new ways to be heard? How do digital businesses create intimacy, when what they probably want is scale? How does anyone stay relevant, in a world where expectations shift daily beneath our feet and fickle people change their behaviour?
The future we seem to be imagining is about tactics, and platforms, and technology that makes us feel somehow more able to connect and less relevant all at once. That paperless and scary place where our messages and stories seem to lose permanence. We’re running in ever decreasing circles to try to catch up with the future before it gets here, just so we can stay ahead of the game.
And the irony is that the answers we’re searching for lie in the past and the present, in looking each other in the eye, and ourselves in the mirror before we try to preempt the future.
Before paper, ink and white space we had only words. The words and stories we paid attention to had to mean something to us, otherwise they didn’t get passed on. We gathered around campfires to listen, and sat at tables talking and drinking tea, or got comfortable with a book on our mother’s lap, the medium didn’t matter, what mattered was the connection, the animal warmth and the trust. Now suddenly we feel a bit lost as to how to recreate that at scale in a digital world, so we focus on the tactics instead of the truth.
As our circles of intimacy contract, and our circles of influence expand, it’s getting harder and harder to look people in the eye, to let them know that they can trust us. And yet that’s what we have to find a way to do, not because our businesses won’t survive if we don’t, but because we won’t survive without that connection to both doing work that matters and to each other.
The currency of the future was also the currency of the past, it’s simply about intentionally creating deeper connections to each other. Before we imagine a world through Glass, or a future of wearables, digital storytelling and connection platforms of every kind, we need to acknowledge the truth about where we came from and why we’re here.
The future might not be as unpredictable or complicated as we think.
Image by Antoine Walter.
Value Is A Story We Tell Ourselves
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
Value is what we believe in the moment and not simply a measure of gain, relative to units of currency.
Value is a story we tell ourselves based on what we perceive and what we think is true. Our framing of the value story is the reason that passers by walked past original works of art by Banksy worth over $40,000 each, which were for sale on a stall in Central Park for just $60.
Value is how your customers feel, not what you convince them to think.
Image by Steve Rhodes.
The Trouble With Positioning
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
Do you remember when President Obama came to office first time round and negotiated with the secret service to keep his BlackBerry—Bush and Clinton didn’t even use email. In 2004, three years before the launch of the first iPhone, BlackBerry, who pioneered the smartphone had a market share of 47%. Four years ago Blackberry was the fastest growing company in the world.
Today it’s market share is just 2% and BlackBerry is facing obsolescence. The company had identified, occupied and dominated a product niche by developing a phone that could email. It was perfectly positioned to stay top of mind for years to come.
I think where BlackBerry came unstuck was in believing that their job as innovators was to change how people felt about their product, instead of wondering how smartphones might shape culture beyond accessing email on the go. In the end they didn’t lose out because of Apple and Google, they lost out by failing to understand how their brand would enable connection going forward.
The trouble with positioning is that it doesn’t take into account that business is symbiotic, that the relationship between brand and customer really is interdependent. That’s because positioning is less about considering what people value and more about telling people what to believe.
It’s not enough to be first to market or top of mind. The brands that we care about don’t just make innovative products, they shape our culture and make us feel like better versions of ourselves. They take account of what we believe, how we act and who we might want to become. Which is very different from riding the wave of first mover advantage.
Brands big and small connect people through a culture that’s bigger than themselves, provenance, adventure, sustainability, entrepreneurship, self expression, conscious consumption, sisterhood and real food to name a few.
So tell me, what beliefs are you connecting your customers to?
Image by Lindsay Turner.