The Authority Guide to Creating Brand Stories that Sell

Smart and simple strategies to make your business irresistible

Jim O'Connor

• Publisher: The Authority Guides
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781912300013
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Meetings & Presentations
• Index: Business

The business with the best brand story wins. Find out how to write yours.; Connect with your customers and make your business impossible to resist using this sharp, practical Authority Guide that will save you time, money and frustration. Combine psychology, creativity, logic and emotion expertly into a brand story that will make your business stand out from the crowd. And using Jim O'Connor's hard-won knowledge and vast experience give your business the focus, affinity, distinction and competitive advantage it needs to succeed and thrive.

1. Key insights before we start the process

Let’s begin by getting in the right frame of mind. In this chapter I share a few ideas and principles that will prove helpful.

What is a brand?

Everyone is familiar with the brand word but I think it means very different things to different people.

Personally, I like this definition, proposed by Robert Jones, teacher at the University of East Anglia, and strategist at leading brand consultancy Wolff Olins. I’ll paraphrase it here: A brand is a set of ideas a company or product stands for in people’s minds. These ideas are shaped by the actions of that company or those products. But they are also given recognisable shape and form through the words and visual style the company and product uses to express itself.

If you buy into this definition you accept that a brand is not a single fixed entity. It is multifarious, intangible and ever-changing – it exists in the mind as a collection of impressions, perceptions and feelings. These are partly created by what the company or product says about itself, the story it chooses to tell people and the marketing messages it decides to communicate.

The key question, for you and your brand, is what story you propose telling. What should you include, what should you leave out and what is the best way to shape it?

Why isn’t my marketing working?

If you’re confused by marketing in general, and frustrated by your own efforts in particular, then you are not alone. Marketing has never been simple or easy – and now is even less so. Like so much else, it has been turned upside down by the digital revolution. New technology promised to make things easier and the process more cost-effective. In many ways it has had the opposite effect.

• New media and clever targeting tools mean customers have become punch-drunk with information. To retain their sanity they’ve turned off, tuned out and retreated behind personal firewalls, both digital and mental. In theory people may be easier to reach but in practice they’re harder to engage.
• Life is so fast paced and full on that people simply don’t have the time or brain space to get excited about whatever it is you are promoting.
• Most people have virtually everything they need – car, smartphone and dishwasher. Every market, from professional services to potato products, is jam-packed with virtually indistinguishable offerings desperately vying for attention from people who are spoilt for choice and suffering from decision fatigue.
• Marketing has become more complicated and fragmented. There’s such a profusion of new channels, tools and techniques that it’s impossible to keep up – if you are struggling, then you are in good company!

To overcome these challenges a brand needs a very simple story which immediately strikes the target audience as relevant, meaningful, engaging, motivating and memorable. Creating such a story is a very demanding task, one that requires time and effort.

Despite this obvious truth, and the fact that ‘brand story telling’ is a term that has become very popular, a lot of business owners, managers and marketers are focused elsewhere – the message is the very last thing on their minds. Their attention is directed almost exclusively towards three other areas:

• Media – look at all these new ways to reach people! Let’s try AdWords, pay-per-click, a website refresh, videos, retargeting ads, content marketing, an email campaign, our own app, Google+, LinkedIn, affiliate marketing…
• Mechanics – how do we get the best out of all these new tools and techniques? Let’s learn more about search engine optimisation (SEO), getting likes and shares, MailChimp, proximity marketing, Vimeo, automation, QR codes, purpose-driven marketing, WordPress, user experience (UX), infographics, whiteboard animation…
• Metrics – if we measured more we could improve our effective­ness. Let’s get busy monitoring views, like and shares, click rates, bounce rates, customer retention rates, lead quality scores, subscriber numbers, retention statistics, customer lifetime value…

These three things are getting lots of attention, because they are new and exciting. And they are important. But at the same time you cannot afford to ignore the fourth ‘M’ – message. What you say is at least as important as how you deliver it, how you amplify it and how you measure it. Doing a great job of broadcasting, augmenting and evaluating a rubbish message is a very expensive waste of time and effort.

Yet this is exactly what’s happening. The words, the message, the story, are now dismissively described as ‘content’. Why? Because with so many marketing projects it’s only at the very end, when everything else has been put in place, that someone notices that the template is empty. The ‘Where’s the content?’ question is very much an afterthought – at which point a copywriter like myself is invited to ‘fill it up’.

Am I exaggerating? No – many businesses, and the marketing professionals they hire, see nothing wrong with this approach. I’m repeatedly shocked at the number of times I’ve asked ‘What do you want to say and what information can you give me?’ only to receive a blank look or a reply that suggests I’m being difficult. A few years ago I was writing a major report for an international non-governmental organisation (NGO) based in Geneva. When I requested more information the reply was ‘Your business is called “Stories that sell”, can’t you just make something up to fill the gaps?’ They weren’t joking, and were unamused when I replied that ‘I only do non-fiction.’

---

Words are cheap

I recently wrote a simple website for a financial services start-up. When the client involved an SEO consultancy they quoted £5,000 a month and insisted on a 12-month contract. Their monthly fee was almost ten times my one-off cost. The client eventually accepted another quote of £300 a week, £1,200 a month – still twice my fee, and not payable once, but 12 times a year. This shows you how little value, relatively speaking, is placed on the message itself.

---

So, concerned that your marketing isn’t working as well as you’d like? Ask yourself whether you have become so absorbed by media, mechanics and metrics that you’ve dropped the message ball. And, if you suspect this is the case, how can you begin to put things right?

It’s about people – duh!

How have marketers got themselves into this pickle? It’s because the industry is obsessed with novelty. The latest generation of practitioners believes that in today’s brave new digital world the old ways of doing things are entirely redundant.

This attitude is foolish. Sir Isaac Newton remarked ‘If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.’ And he got that line from Bernard of Chartres, writing in the 12th century. The point being that, even if times have changed, there might still be something to be learnt from those who have gone before. And that if you are ignorant of the past you’ll probably waste a lot of time and energy, while feeling pretty pleased with yourself, reinventing the wheel!

The attitude is also misguided. The world has moved on but the job itself is still essentially the same. Marketing, as Stephen Leacock remarked almost a century ago, is the process ‘of arresting human intelligence long enough to get money from it’. This is as true now as it was then. What’s more...