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Articles filed in: Marketing
The Three-Act Structure For Brand Stories
filed in Marketing, Storytelling
Every movie you’ve ever watched follows a three-act structure. The screenwriter sets the scene, introducing us to the hero and the main characters. We get a glimpse of his world, relationships and challenges. In the second act, we see the hero attempt to solve his problems or overcome obstacles.
In Toy Story, we’re introduced to Woody who has been Andy’s favourite toy forever. Buzz Lightyear comes along and turns Woody’s world upside down. The whole plot is about how Woody deals with the resulting conflicts while remaining loyal to Andy and true to his values.
We can use this three-act structure in our brand stories, remembering that the customer, not the brand is the hero.
The Three-Act Structure For Brand Stories
SETUP: The customer’s backstory unfolds
We explore his hopes, dreams, wants, needs, values, worldviews, and challenges.
CONFRONTATION: The struggle arises
The customer attempts to solve his problem or fulfil his need and often realises he needs help.
RESOLUTION: Challenges are overcome
The customer’s need is met. He manages to do the thing he wanted to do, but couldn’t.
He is changed, has a new sense of self and set of beliefs about what’s possible.
Analyse any great product or service story from the IKEA chair to Blue Apron meal kits, from Warby Parker to charity: water and you’ll see it follows this three-act structure.
How does your story stack up?
Do you want to tell a better brand story? The Story Strategy Course will show you how.
Image by David Werner.
Why Do They Come?
filed in Marketing, Storytelling
There was a twenty-minute wait for croissants at Lune long before the New York Times announced that the best croissants in the world might just be made in Melbourne. Now you can wait for thirty, but people still get up early and hang in there just to try one.
Why would they take a tram across town for a $5 pastry?
Why does someone buy a Maserati, not a Tesla?
Why don’t cinema goers save the $20 and stay at home with Netflix?
Why do your customers come to you?
It’s not possible to tell your story effectively without knowing the answer to this question.
How many of the reasons that you list are reflected in your marketing?
Inage by Lars Ploughmann.
Common Ground
One blustery Saturday morning last month our entire neighbourhood woke to a marketing blitz. Every single home in every street had been targeted. The instructions to the leaflet dropper had been clear. Don’t post the flyer in the letterbox (where people won’t be looking for mail at the weekend). Place each one on the doorstep or somewhere obvious right outside the door, so when the occupant wakes up hungry at the weekend our breakfast pizzas are top of mind.
The result was a flurry of pink (because pink will stand out) marketing spam, literally flying around the neighbourhood. Hours of resources—time, money, energy and trees wasted in an attempt to reach everyone.
We’d never dream of engaging someone in conversation without trying to understand their worldview. That’s why small talk exists, not to fill awkward silences, but so we can find common ground. And so it goes for marketing. It’s a two-way exchange, an alignment of value and values, of needs, understood and met—or at least at its best it should be.
Image by Kerry Lannert.
10 Questions To Ask Before You Do Any Marketing
It’s fun to think about getting our products and services in the hands of the people we want to serve. In our rush to increase brand awareness we often overestimate the importance and impact of short-term, tactical marketing decisions. It’s possible to put things in perspective by answering some questions about your objectives before you begin.
10 Questions To Ask Before You Do Any Marketing
1. Is the product good enough?
2. Why is this the best way to grow our business?
3. Does this type of marketing align with our brand values?
4. Is this the best way to delight customers?
5. Could we do more if we spent the money differently?
6. Are we proud to put our name to this?
7. Why are we doing it this way?
8. What’s the alternative?
9. How will we know if it worked?
10. What exactly is the return we want from this marketing initiative (campaign, sponsored post, leaflet drop, product giveaway, collaboration and on and on)?
If it’s the right thing to do you’ll know.
Image by Philip Bouchard
The Real Role Of Storytelling In Marketing
filed in Marketing, Storytelling
When we think about using storytelling as a marketing tactic we often get confused about the purpose of the story. Most marketing tries to tell the story of the product. We invite prospective customers to pay attention to our widget by describing what it does or why it’s better and think we’re telling a story.
Analyse any piece of marketing collateral that resonates with you and you’ll realise that the company doesn’t tell the story of the product at all. What they do instead is tell the story of the customer in the presence of the product. The customer, not the product is the hero of the story.
From Apple’s ‘Shot on iPhone’ billboards and IKEA’s ‘Start Something New’ folding chair, to Cook Republic’s Panna Cotta and Johanna Basford’s colouring books. The customer is the star of the show and the product is the supporting act.
Your job is to show your customer how your product makes him the hero of his story.
Image by Billie Grace Ward.
The Thing That’s Worth Measuring
Josh is a sales assistant at a sports store in the city. He proactively solves customer’s problems while they browse, taking the time to answer questions about the equipment they’re considering buying. If one of those interactions results in a sale Josh adds a new barcode containing his employee ID to the product. This is how Josh’s performance is tracked.
Every sales assistant then is only as good as the number of sales he can prove he’s facilitated. This is the performance metric the store manager pays attention to because it’s the thing she can easily measure. Josh can spend twenty minutes with a shopper exchanging valuable information about golf clubs. This might result in a sale next week or an online purchase at a later date. Josh’s efforts will likely go unnoticed and unacknowledged by management.
An uptick in a metric of any kind can feel like progress which of course is fun to measure, but much of what adds value to our businesses (lives, families, and cultures too) is intangible. When we limit ourselves to believing that hard data tells the whole story we’re missing opportunities to improve those things we can’t put a number on.
Just because data is easy to collect doesn’t mean it’s the thing that’s worth measuring. It’s important to question exactly how the data we gather is helping us to achieve our goals before obsessing over what the numbers look like.
Image by Antoine Robiez.
Lessons From The Best In B2B Brand Storytelling
filed in Marketing, Storytelling
It’s easy to think of great examples of B2C (business-to-consumer) brand storytelling. The list of B2C companies that leverage storytelling to engage with their customers’ grows daily. The perception in many B2B (business-to-business) companies is that it’s easier to engage with customers through story when you’re selling running shoes with a dose of ‘Just Do It’ motivation. Then there is the concern in B2B about justifying the resources and measuring the return on investment (ROI) in brand storytelling to stakeholders.
These are some of the reasons I’m frequently asked for examples of B2B companies who use storytelling to build their brands. I believe the reason B2B storytelling examples are harder to find is that many B2B companies don’t understand how storytelling creates value for their customers and shareholders, or ultimately how it benefits the bottom line. The following examples not only show you great B2B brand storytelling at work, but they also demonstrate why it’s effective and how B2B companies are leveraging storytelling to impact their businesses in different ways.
5 Leading B2B Brand Storytellers
Maersk Line
It would be easy to lead with an example of a technology company, instead I want to show you how Maersk Line, the world’s largest shipping container company uses visual storytelling to build its brand. Maersk has multiple Instagram accounts that tell the compelling story of the company’s capability, impact and global reach. Maersk is also active on Facebook. The company’s page has over a million likes. Not only does Maersk use social media to build brand awareness, they have a panel of internal experts who create informative content for the company blog. Maersk also uses infographics and data journalism to commuicate the company’s innovative ideas.
Google
We sometimes forget the impact Google has on the business community. The company uses video content and brand storytelling to inform its small business customers about how to use products and services and to inspire business owners by making the business customer the hero of the story. Google also has a dedicated small business blog and Twitter account.
General Electric (GE)
The work GE does is technical and complex. In the Unimpossible Missions video series the company gives us a window into what they do and how they do, while cleverly communicating a sense of their tenacity, ingenuity, pride in their people and company values. My favourite is ‘Catching Lightning in a Bottle’. GE has also built a significant Instagram following. Storytelling can help you to do more than simply educate or sell to customers. It can also give them clues about the kind of company you are and get them excited about doing business with you.
PayPal
What better way to demonstrate the value your business creates than to celebrate the business owners who use your services. PayPal shares small business customer stories on ‘National Mom and Pop Business Owners Day’ on the company’s stories platform.
Microsoft
Microsoft demonstrated its understanding about the importance of brand storytelling by appointing a Chief Storyteller in 2010. He and his team are responsible for collecting and curating stories from all corners of the company. These are shared on the Microsoft Stories platform and social channels. My favourite is the long-form story 88 Acres and the must watch All Aboard the Brilliant Bus on the company’s YouTube channel. Storytelling isn’t simply a mechanism to inform, persuade, convince and convert. It can be used to bring people within the company together around their common purpose. There is an overlooked opportunity to use brand storytelling to shape company culture and increase employee engagement.
While the return on investment in brand storytelling may not always be easy for a B2B business to measure, I think we can agree that story in all its forms has the power to change our perception of a company for the better. How could your company leverage the power of storytelling?
Image by Maersk Line.
Why Are Your Customers Here?
The city centre bookstore manager complains to her colleague on the phone about people wandering in on their lunch break to browse because they have nothing else to do.
“They’re not coming in for anything in particular.” she sighs.
She’s right, for two hours every day hundreds of office workers with nothing else to do pass by her door. Contrast her story to that of Powell’s bookstore—a Portland institution. Powell’s is a destination, a treat for locals and visitors alike. The management at Powell’s understands that people don’t visit bookstores just because they’re short of something to read.
There isn’t a single beloved brand that relies on stacking the shelves and opening the door as its killer marketing strategy. That’s not how marketing works in the twenty-first-century.
Every store you visit, app you use or podcast you listen to, has given you a reason to come. The owners and creators know why you’re there and what you want deep down.
Why are your customers here?
Image by Florent Lamoureux.
Talk When Your Customers Are Listening
The Content Marketing Institute recently reported that Fortune 500 brands were missing an opportunity to increase engagement with Instagram followers because of the timing of their posts. It stands to reason that we have a better chance of being heard by our customers at times when they are listening—not when it’s most convenient for us to talk.
It’s not just what we say and how we say it that counts. We need to meet our customers and clients where they are when they’re present. Our best opportunities to communicate, engage and delight might be at times when we’ve failed to meet expectations. We always have the customer’s eyes and ears in a crisis.
When are your customers listening?
Image by Serge Seva.
True Advantages
filed in Marketing, Storytelling
If I asked you to list the advantages any global brand has over its competitors you’d likely think of things like access to capital, distribution networks, and other resources that the average business doesn’t have. But these brands are the outliers.
When it comes down to it, most businesses have access to similar resources, raw materials, and human capital. Every pizza is made with flour, cheese, and tomato. So why do queues form at this place and not that one? What drives the demand that’s responsible for success?
The one true advantage we all have at our fingertips is how we make people feel, and the story they leave with. Sometimes that story is a two-hour wait, a $5 price tag for a single slice, or a hand-made pizza crafted by a man who has been making them for 50 years.
Understanding how people will tell the story to others is an advantage every business can own.
Image by Lucas Richarz.