Get a better brand story before fishing for glory
If you watched Shark Tank in early August last year, youโd have seen two entrepreneurs hoping the ground would open up and swallow them when pitching their camping tent startup to a group of investors.
Youโd have cringed and squirmed (or perhaps reveled in schadenfreude), as the investors asked them some fairly basic questions about their business.
Who are you? What do you do? How is it different? Why do you do it? Why should people care?
Here are the investors faces as the entrepreneurs fail to deliver anything close to meaningful answers:
One of the founders says to the other โum, can you help me out Phoebes?โ Phoebes has got nothing.
Suffice to say, they donโt get their $200,000.
Itโs perfect reality TV โ awful and a little bit hilarious. And itโs a high-stakes example of a reality thatโs actually very common: When weโre put on the spot, it can be really hard to pitch our business in a compelling and convincing way.
Why telling your story is difficult
As business founders and owners, we have an innate and absolute sense of the value of what weโve created.
But putting it into words โ telling our story โ can be confusingly difficult.
Iโm often confronted with startup founders or small business owners who become skeptical when they hear words like โbrandโ and โstoryโ thrown around. They associate those words with marketing, with ad campaigns, with the nebulous grail of creating โan emotional connectionโ โ things that seem either irrelevant at their stage of business, someone elseโs job, or just plain snake oil peddled by marketing consultants and agencies.
Those entrepreneurs are engaged in the important work of creating and delivering a product that meets an actual market demand.
If they do that effectively, theyโve got a solid business. Maybe a โbrandโ or some โstorytellingโ would help sell a bit more of it. Maybe.
Itโs a blessing that we have people who are wired this way. No one wants another Theranos or Fyre Festival. None of us need another sketchy product that some all too marketing-led company is baselessly dazzling us with.
Story in the absence of product substance is a have. Letโs agree on that.
But letโs assume you do have the substance. Youโre delivering something of genuine value.
I donโt believe you need a big marketing campaign. Or a slogan. Or some fiction made up about your product that you spend money you donโt have on broadcasting to the world. That stuff isnโt what I mean when I say โbrand storyโ.
What I do believe is that all of us entrepreneurs need a way of pitching our business clearly and compellingly.
To our staff, to potential business partners, to the media, to the interested Dad at the barbecue. And yeah, to customers too.
Who are we? What do we do? How is it different? Why do we do it? Why should people care?
A great brand story makes everything easier
Successful businesses not only develop a product or service of value โ they also have a way of explaining it that makes others โget itโ and see as much value in it as they do.
They can tell others, quickly and in plain language, why they started their business, what problem they solve for their customers, how they solve it in a unique way, and what the ambition of their business is.
They can get people to understand what theyโre doing in a way that makes them want to be a part of it too. Thatโs what I mean when I say โbrand storyโ. Is that marketing? Maybe. Itโs definitely common sense. And itโs strangely difficult.
In New Zealand, weโve earned the reputation of being people who are brilliant at inventing things, and then pretty un-brilliant at telling people about them. Some draw lines to our cultural humility. Our tall poppy syndrome.
But in my experience, it doesnโt matter where an entrepreneur comes from โ they all have the same challenge of knowing so much about their business and product that choosing the right things to put in their elevator pitch (and the right things to leave out) has become an intractable undertaking.
(Yes, everyone is just like you.)
But when you crack it, it makes everything easier. Attracting the best staff. Creating the best partnerships. Convincing investors. Getting written about in the media. Winning customers.
And the cool thing is, your story is already there. Sure, itโs so surrounded by all kinds of mental clutter that itโs barely visible. But it is there.
Developing a brand story isnโt about making up a story. Itโs about clearing away all that mental clutter to reveal three really simple things:
- The problem and inspiration that led you to create your business in the first place.
- The product (or service, or experience) you created and how itโs different.
- Your ambition for how that product will make the world (or at least the world of your customers) a better place.
Weโre usually pretty good at the middle bit. Because itโs easy to see why explaining our product benefit is useful.
So why bother with the rest? Because great stories donโt just explain a product โ they contextualise a product in a way that makes people want it.
Emotion spurs motivation
When you tell people why you started your business in the first place, their reaction is โOh, this was created by someone who actually really cares about solving the problem.โ
When you tell people about your ambition, their reaction is โHey, by buying this product, or joining this company, I can help create a future thatโs more like the one I want to live in.โ
And yeah, thatโs emotional stuff. But itโs not fluffy, irrational emotional stuff. Itโs speaking to two very rational emotions โ trust and hope.
Trust in you that youโre genuinely motivated to make your product as good as it can be, and hope that with you they can be part of making their life and othersโ better.
Thereโs nobody who doesnโt want those things. And youโve got those things.
I created Storytech because every startup and small business has got those things. They just need a process for revealing exactly what they are, and articulating them simply and clearly. Thatโs what I mean when I say โbrand storyโ.
And why I believe we could all do with a great one.
