Discovering and Articulating Your Story -- The Most Vital Exercise in Building or Growing Your Business

Hard as it might be to believe, not every business owner or leader knows their company’s story. Many companies, in fact, have never familiarized themselves with their story, much less articulated it. They are busy selling products, taking orders, etc. — they’ve never put a stake into the ground about who they are, what they stand for or what makes them different. Savvy companies have written this down on paper. A brand story platform contains the following:

• A core story of several paragraphs or even pages
• Positioning language in various lengths and styles that might start with “We are the company that … ” or “We help this kind of customer achieve this kind of result”
• Suggested headlines and pull-quotes (bite-sized, powerful language that can be translated into elevator speeches or marketing messages)
• A vocabulary list of words and phrases you want to associate with your brand, and even a list of rules about words and phrases you and your team will never use when telling your story
• Guiding principles about the story you want to convey, the people and organizations you want to communicate with, the tone you want to strike, the personality you want to build, and the results you want to achieve
• Specific plans for how to share vital bits of your story — regularly and powerfully — on social media to spur sales, attract new customers and earn loyalty. Consider being proactively clear about whether your brand personality or voice on social media will be different from the voice you use elsewhere. Will it be more personal, casual, humorous, hip?

Story is strategy. Does your organization have a clear story that goes beyond what’s currently on your website, and is it written down somewhere in a business document? It has been my experience that the companies that have a solid brand story platform — including solo practitioners like speakers, consultants, private practice physicians and attorneys — are companies that are better equipped to pivot during times of change. They are better steeled against distractions that don’t align with their brand, they are more likely to attract and retain customers, and are more efficient in their operations. I’d argue that every organization ought to do the work of developing a brand platform document and that companies with lots of spokes-people (i.e., more than 10 employees) MUST have a brand platform document. It becomes a playbook and a compass.

Writing a brand story isn’t as easy as writing up a first draft in answer to the bulleted items above. Arriving at those words requires making major decisions (and tradeoffs) and can take days, weeks or months to achieve. But the work is worth it. Once a company clarifies its story, it has many options for the ways and places in which to share the story. Marketing tactics are “megaphones” for the story, and bits and pieces of it can be shared on websites and in videos, through your staff, your advertising, your social media and your public relations efforts.

So, how can you arrive at a solid and comprehensive brand story platform to guide you? It’s ultimately about deep, open-minded conversations. Work with a business storytelling expert (typically a brand marketer who is a great writer) or with a colleague on your team to talk through all the elements of the story. I recently had these conversations with Mimi Vold, the founder of Vold Inc., a premier advisory firm for growth-stage companies. Through our conversations, we discovered that while she thought she served one market at the time she’d partnered with me, she ended up being ideal for another. She had been using words and phrases to describe herself and her work that weren’t quite right, and that weren’t opening the right conversations or closing the big deals. It took hours and hours — of her own thinking and writing, of homework assignments, of us talking together and of me finally assembling these conversations and insights into a brand story platform — to get where she is today, which is in the right place with clear messages that appeal to a marketplace ready and willing to hire her. (Her unofficial but unequivocal tagline? “Scaling Experts, Valuation Accelerators.”)

Developing a brand story is a thinking exercise first, a decision-making exercise second, and writing exercise third.

A Tip for Clarifying Your Brand Story

Here’s another great exercise to try when clarifying your brand story. Make a list of items about your business in which every sentence starts with “We don’t” or “We won’t.” Perhaps you don’t charge retainers. Or you don’t hassle customers about product returns. Or you won’t take on business that hurts the environment. Do your customers, partners and key stakeholders know the details about what you don’t do and where you draw lines in the sand? If they’re unclear about these guidelines, consider what it might mean to your story if you were upfront and unapologetic about these points of difference.

Focus on your story -- knowing it, articulating it, making business decisions in service of the promises that your story makes and the meaningful difference it establishes for your products or services. Start with the story, and end up with better results.

For more tips ... on how to achieve better business results by communicating for connection and meaning, living and dying by your customer insights, marketing in a way that's strategy-religious and tactic-agnostic, creating cultures and processes that align with your brand, and doing everything in service of maintaining a virtuous cycle of creating value for the customer while capturing value for you, pick up a copy of Think Like a Marketer: How a Shift in Mindset Can Change Everything for Your Business, or contact me to learn more.