Can you tell your story?
Your story is the most powerful thing you own. Unlike your products, services, or even your USP, nobody can copy it. If you can communicate your story in a compelling way, you’re going to come out ahead of the competition.
But before you can tell your own story, you have to know what it is. A surprising number of businesses don’t. I often encounter marketers who are coveting that simple one liner that they can use to explain, simply and clearly, what they do. For many, that seems an impossible task. Even in the PR and communications industry, I come across straplines that are full of indecipherable jargon.
Your executive pitch needs to pass the failsafe test: it should be simple enough to explain to your grandmother what you do.
You need a clear value statement that not only positions you in your respective field, but ultimately conveys the benefits to your target audience, as well as your own character. And this is where it gets a bit more tricky.
What is a brand?
The essence of any good brand is more than a logo, design or slogan. It’s want you stand for, what makes you special and how you define it. The trouble is, it is extremely hard to understand one’s own story as it is, by it’s very nature, subjective. A brand is ultimately representative of your identity and all of the values that you stand for. For it to be successful, it needs to be more than a colour palette or a logo that has been thrown together.
Think about the most powerful brands in the world: Nike, Apple, Mercedes, Uber. They have achieved brand nirvana in that they don’t even need to explain what they do. Their logos have become an insignia, instantly recognisable for what they evoke. Try it. All you need to do is look at the Apple logo. What feelings does this stir in you? You might have thought of some of these: innovation, creativity, design, utility. All of these qualities are imbued within the simple outline of an apple with a bite taken out of it.
Iconic status is, realistically, something that most us will aspire to. But why not aim for the stars and make your brand as sleek, simple and beautiful as possible, starting with how you talk about what you do?
Why can’t most businesses tell their own story?
Many business owners, are too busy working on the day-to-day to have the time or headspace to prioritise sitting down to examine their brand and messaging.
Businesses also often struggle to articulate their key idea because they get caught in the granularity of what they offer. Simon Sinek talks eloquently about this in his book Start With Why. He points out that most businesses go wrong by talking about what they do, not why they do it. He believes that the most successful brands are those who communicate their ‘why’ effectively. If you haven’t seen it already, this five minute YouTube video is well worth the visit.
For many, the biggest step is beginning on the journey to articulate your brand and what makes you stand out from the crowd. This requires making the commitment to give it a go, bringing together the key stakeholders around the decision making table and asking an expert to come in to challenge your thinking.
That’s where we come in.
We provide half day brand-messaging workshops to not just marketers, but CEOs, Founders, Co-Founders, and Entrepreneurs. By guiding you through a specially designed series of exercises, we help you develop and articulate a succinct message and, in most cases, bring clarity to your brand message on that day.
How do we deliver the brand message workshop?
We facilitate the session with you and your key stakeholders to interrogate your existing brand, or to help you if you are about to embark on launching a new one. The ‘brand’ could be your overall company identity, your product, a new service you are launching, or even your own brand as an individual.
Working together we take you through a series of exercises designed to engage the brain on a creative level. We will then walk through a series of marketing exercises to draw out what your brand means, starting with the tangible and moving up to the intangible. In short, we distill the message, sieve the flour, and bake the narrative. This is the best way to form the basis of any communications campaign. From the start, you will have a clear, consistent message that your whole team has collaborated to produce. This will be music to marketer’s ears – if the whole team has been responsible for and owning the creation of the message then they will be more likely to become consistent evangelists of the message.
Not only that, the day itself is a positive, uplifting and inspiring team bonding exercise. It’s ideal to use at points throughout the year, your annual away day, for instance – to get everyone together and on message.
take you and your team away from your office environment. and allow you to view your brand messages from the outside in a positive environment. This alone can have a powerful impact.
If you’d like to learn more about our brand messaging workshops then please, contact us!
Don’t just take our word for it
Here’s what a customer who saw tangible improvements in business engagement since said:
“We found the brand messaging workshop very useful, making us examine our use of negative language. As a result, we changed the copy on the website and in their e-marketing and online ads.
The sponsored content launched after our messaging session, echoing some of the more positive statements and being a bit more bold seems to be performing better than sponsored content we’ve tested before, from an engagement perspective.”
-Timo Hilhorst, Lead Product Owner, Dubl
