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Articles filed in: Strategy
Why ‘How To’ Is The Wrong Place To Start
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
I hardly ever write ‘how to’ posts, even though they are a great way to drive ‘traffic’ to your blog. If you want to do that, go write a great list post.
Focusing on the ‘how to’ stops you thinking about the why and the what first.
Most companies question, how they will get their product noticed, before thinking about why on earth it will matter to customers? In a world where we’re bombarded with messages that we can choose to ignore, more of the same in a brighter package or more colourful box isn’t what we’re searching for. It isn’t what we tell our friends about either.
If you haven’t seen The Greatest Movie Ever Sold watch this trailer, the toe curling moment comes at 1.00. You don’t ever want to be in the position of the poor Ban deodorant marketing executives.
When customers and investors (or maybe even you), don’t understand your story or how to communicate it, your ideas and your products blend in. Your brand fails to connect with your audience and they don’t have a reason to buy into what you do and why you do it.
When people really ‘get it’ your brand has the potential to attract investors, dominate a niche and reinvent a market. Communicating the essence of a big vision is what has always, and will continue to power successful brands.
When your brand story makes an emotional connection with your customers they’re more likely to spread the word about who you are and what you do. Your customers have a bond with your brand. They buy in.
Starbucks didn’t set out just to sell coffee at premium prices, their mission was to be ‘the third place’ and the Apple brand is built on so much more than the utility and specifications of their products. Your potential customer’s relationship with your brand will likely begin before they actually purchase your product. Just as the cover of the book frames the content before the first page is turned. Doesn’t matter whether you sell coffee, computers, a writing workshop, design services or even deodorant.
Brand leaders always ask ‘why this’ before they work on ‘how to’.
That’s why we believe in them.
Image by Walt Jabsco.
What If Post-it Told A Different Story?
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
Everyone knows what Post-its do. You know they come in every colour, all sorts of shapes and sizes, easy peel and super sticky. And yet Post-it keeps telling you that stuff in its marketing. They tell you the things you already know about features and benefits. Stories that don’t mean much, that any brand could tell. The what not the why.
What if Post-it told the story from the inside out? What if 3M tapped into the meaning being made with its products, by showing you how and why Post-its are part of your story too?
We don’t simply want to benefit from the products we use, we want to believe in them too.
*Bonus brand strategy for 3M and Post-it*
Sign up for an account on Instagram and check out the 5,000+ stories being told about how people believe in your products there.
Image By Lia C
How To Get Million Dollar Marketing For Just £3
The UK supermarket chain Sainsbury’s just scored millions of dollars worth of marketing for £3 and the price of a postage stamp, by simply employing someone who gave a damn.
This is a heart warming story of a customer service employee who used his initiative, didn’t behave like a cog and treated a three year old girl with empathy.
What’s most incredible about this story is not that Chris did such a great job of sending out a caring human response, or that Sainsbury’s changed the name of their bread following a letter from a toddler, it’s that we’re so completely blown away by this. That it’s something so rare and precious the whole world remarks on it.
The truth is we get the sense that most businesses don’t give a damn anymore. My internet provider is quite happy to offer me a tech appointment in two weeks at the end of a 56 minute call (my third). We now consider this kind of disservice business as usual.
Stories like the ‘Giraffe Bread’ one and people like Chris who answered Lily’s letter, are so rare that they stand out a mile. And there’s your opportunity. In this day and age it might be harder to earn attention but it’s not that hard to be the best thing since sliced bread.
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Image by Kit Logan.
Keeping Your Promises
Communicating inbox to inbox, no longer being eye to eye, makes it easier to say no. The flip side is it also makes it easier to say yes. Interacting online makes giving your word and then breaking it in just a few hundred characters a lot less complicated. Excuses trip more easily off the keyboard, than off the tongue.
Keeping promises is the one thing you can do to differentiate yourself, right now, this minute, for free. No marketing budget or strategic planning required. Simply act like the majority doesn’t.
Do what you say you’re going to do.
Don’t commit to something unless you know you can follow it through.
Show up. Start. Lead. Do.
Keep your promises. Not just to others but to yourself too.
Image by Marcin Ejsmont.
Only We
filed in Storytelling, Strategy
Starbucks has been the only coffee chain since the 90’s where you can legally buy a Frappuccino®. Try selling a whipped iced coffee with that name and you’ll be busted by the intellectual property police. You can’t call your customer service centre the Genius Bar® either, that doesn’t mean you can’t have one.
Even a few short years ago the opportunities to confidently say ‘only we’ abounded. Features and benefits, along with factories and platforms were difficult to duplicate. Today we have one man magazine publishing houses and very different opportunities to tell the ‘only we’ story to our clients and customers.
This might sound like bad news, but actually it’s the best news for tiny app developers, boutique designers and solo-entrepreneurs. The ‘only we’ of the industrial era has become the ‘only I’ and ‘only with us’ of the digitally connected era.
Your ordinary story has always been what makes you extraordinary. You just have more opportunities than ever to see that for yourself and share it with your audience now.
Image by Nathan Makan.
The Comparison Trap
At the gym I can’t take my eyes off the tall, svelte, Scandinavian goddess who is sweating elegantly, on the cross trainer just in front. When I’m attempting a less than elegant blossoming lotus, I long for the balance and flexibility of the raven-haired beauty on the yoga mat alongside. With regular practice I know my flexibility will improve. But having ‘legs up to your neck’ envy is really a hopeless waste of time, thoughts and positive energy.
My genetics, along with ancestry don’t permit it. They do permit a million other things though, that I can’t even begin to make room for if I allow myself to get stuck in the ‘comparison trap’.
While the Internet has given us amazing access, awareness and opportunities to be grateful for, it can be that place to get lost in comparing and contrasting.
Yes, it’s good to know what competitors and people in your field are doing. That’s market research. But there’s a fine line to be drawn between awareness and obsession. Awareness drives you to articulate your value and bring your ideas to the world in your unique way. Obsession results in unreasonable insecurity, doubt and paralysis.
When you allow yourself to get stuck in a state of constant comparison, you limit your ability to create a difference of your own.
The quota for ideas hasn’t been used up just yet.
The capacity for experiencing difference hasn’t been reached.
There is room in the world for people who can and can’t blossom a lotus.
A place for both them and you.
Have you ever got caught in the ‘comparison trap’?
Image by Joseph B.
It’s All Been Done Before
filed in Entrepreneurship, Strategy, Worldview
This is what I call ‘the pioneer’s lament’. It’s been my personal lament many a day.
It goes something like this…
You have a great idea. It could be for a product, service, a book, blog post, or a new kind of dog food. You start planning, taking notes, visualising the impact of said thing on the world, then the research kicks in and you discover it’s been done before.
Bubble popped.
The bad news is it’s all been done before. The good news is it doesn’t matter, because it hasn’t been done by you.
7,012 books (and counting) have been written about ‘startups’, that didn’t stop Eric Ries having a bestseller, also dubbed as the idea of 2011.
What makes anything you do unique is your voice. The story that only you can tell, from a perspective that nobody else can have. There is more than one way to say something important that needs to be said and a million ways to bring ideas that matter to the world. Or maybe just 350,000.
I’d love to know how you stop yourself from popping your bubble mid blow.
What do you do to stop research killing off your idea too early? Tools or tactics?
Image by Noukka Signe.
The Secret To Creating Products People Buy
The secret to the success of Facebook, Pampers, Innocent drinks, Instagram, Basecamp, Little Miss Match, Marie Forleo.com and on and on, comes down to one thing. The ability to stand in the customer’s shoes and see the world from where they are at.
Have you questioned what you client’s worldview is lately?
- What’s important to your customers right now?
- What are they excited about?
- What are they struggling with?
- What would they kill to know?
- What stops them achieving their dreams?
- What do they crave or covet?
- Why do they need you?
- What will they gladly pay for?
- How can you be part of their journey today?
- What might they need tomorrow?
Your business is built on the foundations of your story. Great products and services are created by understanding the essence of that story.
Image by Noukka Signe.
Even The Big Guys Are Guessing
A couple of days ago Cadbury did their first product launch on Google+. The launch was an experiment, their best guess and they went with it. Even they don’t know for sure what will work and what won’t. Yes, they pay people to help them with the process of being more sure, but they never really know until the idea is out there.
There are no guarantees, no way of knowing one hundred percent if you’ve got the right answer. Will that idea that’s rattling around your head work? There’s only one way to know and that’s to press play, to hit publish, to set up your stall, to take your first feedback and that’s the opportunity. You have the chance to try and to fail or to succeed, if not this time, the next one, or the one after that.
How will you ever know unless you work hardest of all on getting it out there? Unless your idea is a revolutionary new pacemaker, there’s room to make your very best guess and there’s still time to change things tomorrow, after you launch.
Image by Mike Small.
The Story You Tell Is A Choice
filed in Storytelling, Strategy
The story you tell is a choice.
Creating a series of lines in the sand.
Symbolic of values that you’re not willing to compromise on.
Your brand can’t be all things to everyone.
This and that.
The brands that stand out, that have soul, that win by being different, choose.
They choose to stand for something, then make that something the foundation of their story.
What’s your story? What lines in the sand have you chosen to draw?
Image by Martin Kalfatovic.