Beautiful girl; awful step-mom & 2sis. Royal ball? No dress. Fairy Godmother! The Prince<3 12 AM! Lost slipper. It fits! Happily ever after.
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| ARTHUR GERMAIN |
That’s a beautiful story, isn’t it? The triumph of love over evil. Lots of drama. Plus a little magic. What? You didn’t get all that? I guess the story of Cinderella takes a little more than 140 characters to tell properly.
In fact, most brand stories take a little more than 140 characters to tell. But we pitch media via Twitter. We practice elevator pitches that must be told in under 30 seconds. And we make sure that our entire message platform can fit on the back of a business card.
Then we wonder why our messages become confused with competitors, our products seem undifferentiated and our brand stories are often forgotten.
Maybe we need to start fresh, with a simple story.
BRAND STORIES: RELEVANT, REPEATABLE
A brand is much more than the colors in a logo, the tagline and the boilerplate at the bottom of a press release. Instead, a brand integrates of all the interactions, promises and perceptions that a prospect, customer, partner, employee or stakeholder has about a company, its products and people. I use a process called “Brandtelling” to develop and share the many stories that comprise a brand. I’ve worked with clients to think about their brand messages in terms of stories they can tell that provide more dimension than the typical elevator pitch.
Brandtelling uses a series of brand stories to make your brand relevant to your target market or audience. These can be stories about the company, its products and innovations or its people. Brandtelling is built on the foundation of connecting people through a story that is relevant, real and repeatable. Repeatability is key. Your story needs to be clear, understandable and something that can be easily repeated by your customers.
Think about the story of Cinderella as a brand story for a moment. She’s not just some beauty locked away in the attic; she’s smart, funny and kind. She doesn’t hate her stepmother and stepsisters; instead she pities them. I think it’s telling that the product she’s associated with—a glass slipper—is beautiful, fragile and one-of-a-kind, just like the girl who wears it.
So, what does this have to do with your brand or your client’s brand? Maybe quite a bit. Think about who they are, what they do, how it benefits their customers. You may not be able to capture this all in a 25-word sentence—it may take multiple stories.
MAP IT OUT
Imagine the “big story” about the company. Work with your clients or your company to create a story map for all the moving parts. Make sure that you develop headings that you can understand when you come back to fill in the details. You can do this in a document, a spreadsheet or on a big whiteboard—whatever can capture your map the best.
BREAK IT DOWN
Now begin to break your story map down into smaller sub-stories. Each story should be able to stand on its own. For example, you may have a story about how the company was created during a power outage that led the founders, an electrician and a chemist, to invent a new power supply that charges in the light and discharges in the dark.
You may have stories about how your customers use the product; how one customer was able to replace his diesel back-up generator that cost $35,000 a year to maintain with a rooftop-full of your company’s solar gear that would repay itself in just under three years, maybe faster with new energy credits.
DON’T FLY SOLO
Brandtelling is often a team sport, especially when it comes to developing the stories. The people with the best stories are your customers, of course. But your sales team, customer service department and product development people are often right on the front lines with customers and prospects, and they can offer terrific insights to add color to a story.
Color and details are important. Remember Cinderella? She wore glass slippers and arrived at the Royal Ball in an ivory carriage pulled by a team of four horses. These details stand out—clearly, our heroine does not buy prêt-à-porter.
TELL YOUR STORIES
Now it’s time to tell these brand stories using every method available, including press releases, presentations, case studies, podcasts—even videos. Tell them in ways they can be remembered and repeated. You’ll be rewarded when you see them understood, added to—and even retweeted —by others. PRN
CONTACT:
Arthur Germain is principal at Communication Strategy Group. He can be reached at [email protected] or @ArthurGermain on Twitter.