In the decision to become a customer, it is becoming increasingly common for people to emphasize the company’s story even more than the product itself. These days, brands ARE their story. Brand owners are authors and their creations must be engaging and enjoyable to tell, hear, and become a part of. Like a good novel or movie, a good brand is likely to be recommended, shared, and talked about. Today, a brand is a story that the people tell and the strongest usually start with the people-up as opposed to the corporate-down.
Humans are naturally enraptured by a passionately well-told story. This is the best way to fortify your values into a deliverable form for ie: team, your employees, your customers, and to articulate for yourself. Your story informs your business strategy, your brand strategy, your marketing strategy and your potential in general. Let you and your company be the hero that everyone routes for. A brand's story that is a joy to tell establishes trust in your brand for everyone who engages with it.
This is not pushing your product. People don't want to be sold to. If you ask the average person, they would likely tell you they distrust salespeople. Our goal in brand building is to create things that are fun to talk about, to write about, and to share.
As the story's chief author. You are putting to words the brand's story on everyone's behalf. The questions you will be answering are:
Your unique story however filled with boring bits, challenges, setbacks, embarrassing moments, moments of weakness, success, failure etc. can be reframed and delivered to contribute to your brand's richness, authenticity, and honesty. This should be weaved into everything you say, do, and create. The authenticity and honesty expressed in your story will become a recurring theme in everything you do and so the world is invited to form an opinion about your brand based on these repeat actions. This is the heart of what establishes trust and builds your pool of brand advocates. What an incredible alternative to shouting at your audience what you want them to do! Rather than turning them them off or boring them, your audience will be invested, engaged and will be faced with their own desire to have the richness of your story a part of their lives.
Let yourself be creative, metaphorical, introspective, weird, whatever you need to be to make your story one that will be a joy to tell and absolute hell to let go unfinished. Avoid jargon and anything that gets in the way of an authentic connection with the story's characters and their challenges. Tell the story that your ideal audience will be dying to tell themselves.
