Great brand stories tell themselves.
A few weeks ago I was working in a client’s office, when I suddenly realized I was hearing someone saying words I’d written. At first I thought perhaps I’d turned into Oscar Wilde without knowing it, but then I understood: It was an employee, on the phone, and they were talking about the company.
What was satisfying about what I was hearing wasn’t that the employee (a senior exec) was repeating something I’d created word for word – he wasn’t working from a script or cold-calling. A former colleague had called to find out what the guy was doing these days, and the employee was telling him about the company. But he wasn’t just talking about the products and services or even how many people he was managing now.
He was telling the brand story.
What’s a ‘brand story’?
Essentially, it’s a compelling explanation of who you are, why you’re different, and why someone should care, all in a nicely-wrapped little story that gives some indication of your history and culture. You can create brand stories for personal brands or big multinationals – the idea is that they’re easy to remember and retell.
The truth is that if you give people a list of facts, you’ll be lucky if they remember one or two of them. Put those facts into a story, on the other hand, and you stand a much better chance of the information sticking. It’s why it’s easier to figure out the answer to a physics problem that starts with “If the sailboat was drifting towards the cliff at 5km/hour…” than one which starts with “Calculate the vector for X…”
And stories do a better job of inspiring and motivating people than facts alone can do.
(Years ago, Seth Godin wrote a very nice piece about using stories to market ideas – you can read it here.)
They need to take on a life of their own
Brand stories don’t work if the only person telling them is the president at the annual meeting, or if they’re just stuck on a website somewhere. They have to be told and retold, internalized and shared, both within the organization and by stakeholders on the outside.
(One of the ways Google got so popular, even though they’re so big, is because their story, “Don’t be evil”, became widely known.)
So how does that happen?
By making sure that the story is:
- Real (you can’t talk about how your food products are based on ‘family recipes’ without showing your employees a framed copy of Grandma’s original cookie recipe, for example)
- Organic (think grassroots, not top-down)
- Consistent (‘friendly’ means being friendly to suppliers and employees, not just customers)
- Interesting (a “rags to riches” story will get you a reality show quicker than a “slow and cautious” growth story)
Possibly most important is making new employees feel like they’ve joined a special team or an exclusive club – an organization that they can feel proud of, and that they want to tell others about.
My client’s organization isn’t the hugest in their industry, but they do a great job of onboarding their employees: They make them feel important and special, they make sure new employees know the brand story from the very first day, and they go out of their way to make sure new employees feel like part of the brand story – that every employee has the power to change the company.
And maybe that’s the key to the whole thing: When employees feel like they’re part of the brand story, they start telling the story to others, because they feel a sense of ownership.
Are your employees telling your story?