Written by: Vickie Sullivan | June 18, 2015
How To Tell A Great Brand Story
For a while now, we have been obsessed with storytelling. And for good reason: stories are an engaging tool to make us look special. They allow us to show instead of tell.
Telling stories is a great first step. What’s next: the strategic choice of what stories we tell. Let’s stop and ask ourselves: how do buyers interpret a story everyone is telling? For example, if everyone is telling stories where they are the hero, do buyers believe that every vendor does a great job? And if so, does doing a great job differentiate us? Nope. Doing a great job quickly becomes a given. And a given is neutral at best. This is a common way brands get stuck.
Here’s an idea: instead of telling stories about us, let’s put ourselves in a story buyers tell themselves. A great example is one of my favorite B2B brands, Hubspot. The short version of their brand story is something like, “hey, we know you hate to market. Your gifts are in service to your clients. But we love to market. Let us take care of that for you. We’ll do a better job at it anyway.” By focusing on how buyers feel, Hubspot gives the impression that they understand the buyer’s world and challenges. All without saying the same old, “We have a lot of experience. We do good work.”
By injecting ourselves into the buyer’s story, folks experience what we know about them. This experience leads to stories buyers tell themselves about us. And isn’t that what branding is all about anyway?
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