Every business has a story to tell
Everyone likes a good story and why not? The stories are entertaining
informative, attractive and above all human; connect people with
people and companies to customers. Stories are about communication
and communication is the essence of marketing.
We have at our disposal the greatest communication tool the world has
never known, the Internet, and we are wasting it. The websites are used as if
they were corporate brochures. Techno-experts would even have us
remove its visual and kinetic elements, and turn it into an academic style
daily to please the SEO gurus. We have been there and we have made it.
Search engine optimization is great, but who will come to your
website if boring to look at and tedious to operate. Time to move.
A place of communication for the rest of us
The Web is a space for multimedia communication, and with a greater
bandwidth and high speed connections, we can use it effectively to
deliver our marketing messages. But communication is a funny thing
The fact that we speak, write and present information does not mean that
they are communicating.
Since I am advocating storytelling as a means of conveying your
marketing messages, I’ll illustrate my point, you guessed it, with a
story. In his book ‘Information Anxiety’, Richard Saul Wurman recounts the
following story attributed to U.S. Representative Pat Swindall of
Georgia.
“A woman seeking a divorce went to visit her lawyer. The first question
he asked her was, ‘Do you have motives?’
She replied, “Yes, about two acres.”
“Maybe I’m not expressing myself clearly,” he said, “Do you have any hard feelings?”
“No, but we have a garage,” he replied.
‘Let me try again. Does your husband hit you? He said impatiently.
“No, I usually get up before him,” she said.
At this point, the attorney decided to try a different tactic. ‘Madam, are you
Are you sure you really want a divorce?
I don’t want one at all, but my husband does. He says we have
difficulty communicating ‘”.
It’s a great story; offers everything a good story should communicate:
a supplement of vision, information, emotion and truth about the human being
condition. The only thing that would make this story more effective is if
was delivered by a human voice that could add character, emphasis,
and personality.
Marketing is nothing more than telling your story in an effective way that
embeds your identity in the minds of your audience, connecting and
communicate who you are, what you do and why your audience
I should be doing it with you Branding and positioning are the results, not
the process.
So tell me a story: everything is in the delivery
One of the great storytellers of the last forty years is a radio host.
and commentator Paul Harvey. In his hay day he had a whole
great storyteller needed to make a memorable impression: the voice, the
the cadence, the attitude, the writing and the ‘schtick’.
He presented his comments as if he were reading the newspaper,
even reading the page numbers when he returned from
commercial, “Page two”. He would elaborate his stories by presenting the
listener to a character in the most casual way, perhaps referring to
him or her by a tiny name. At the end of the story, he
tell you who this person really was and was invariably someone
famous, and the story he told revealed something unusual or hidden in
the background of this person. Each story had a strong point of view and
each comment ended with the phrase “… and now you know
the rest of the story. “Paul Harvey’s little radio commentaries are a
quintessential example of Sonic Personality ©
“Content is not communication”
Web experts always talk about ‘content’ and that ‘content is king’
on the Web, but as Curt Cloninger wrote in his article ‘A Case for Web
The “content of the narrative is not communication.”
The content stays there until it’s proactively delivered, and
Plain text content on your website is far from proactive.
Stories must be communicated effectively if you want to convey your
intended message. If left alone, your audience will scan, jump,
misunderstand and generally miss the point you are trying to get across.
The only effective way to make sure your audience doesn’t misinterpret
the message of his story is to convey it with a human voice: one with
character, cadence, accent, language, and an attitude that represents
who you are. A well-told story creates expectations and relevance; that
creates image and identity, and focuses on the business promise that
must comply.
Fakers don’t need to apply
No matter how good your storyteller is, you can’t beat a fake. Your
You must be honest with what you are and what you actually do. Every business
it has a character and an operational spirit. Trying to communicate a
message that conflicts with that corporate character is a recipe for
failure. Apple and Dell are good companies, but Apple Computer is
innovative; Dell is not. Walmart and The Gap are successful
companies, but The Gap is great and Walmart is Walmart. Does not matter how
a company tries it, it cannot be something that it is not, and it tries
it can only create false expectations, confusion, and failure.
A plan to create your brand story
Whether you write the story yourself or hire someone to write it
you must first gather the necessary materials. The easiest way to
collecting material is creating a series of questions that when answered
reveal the brand story. Think of the process as an interview.
The interview on the history of the brand
1. What was the original vision of the company?
2. Who were the founding fathers of the company?
3. How did the company start?
4. What was the guiding business philosophy?
5. Is there a creative genius or technical wizard behind your vision?
6. What is the big idea behind your product or service?
7. What does your product or service do for your target audience?
8. Is your vision based on the quality, cost, or uniqueness of your
to. Products
B. Services,
vs. Knowledge, or
D. Delivery system?
9. Has your approach changed since the company was founded?
10. What is your vision for the future?
Once the material is collected, it must be put into history form. you are
You are not writing a research paper, nor are you creating ad copy. you are
tell a story and as such it should be written as a story. Like
suggested you are delivering the story using audio, you need to write it down to
the spoken word and not for printing. There is a variety of multimedia
styles that can be used ranging from Paul’s radio comment style
Harvey-style PBS documentary by Ken Burns with
accompanying graphics and photographs.
It’s not just the story, it’s how you tell it
If you ever tried to tell a joke you heard from a professional comedian
And you screwed it up, you know how important it is to tell a story. It’s not
just the words; It’s the rhythm, the cadence, the accent, the intonation, the point of view,
and attitude that makes the story funny, memorable, interesting or
informative.
Our previous article entitled ‘The Sound of Business’ goes into detail on
how the Sonic Personality © concept conveys marketing and branding messages
Stories in a compelling, inventive, entertaining and memorable way. That
explains the power of the human voice and the need to integrate it
on their website.
The medium is the message
It is hard to believe that there are companies of any size or
sophistication that does not have a website, but is even more difficult
understand how so many companies with websites, have no idea what
the Web is.
The Web is typically described in technical terms, but in fact the Web is
simply a place designed for communication, a place where
conversations take place, where information is exchanged and where
transactions are made. If you can accept the idea that the Web
exists to further your communication efforts, then it stands to reason that
Delivering your story is the “raison d’être” of your website. And without him
sound of human voice, delivering emotional connective content,
and the transmission of intelligent, interesting, useful, entertaining and
compelling stories, the Web is a wasteland, a
random confusion environment.