big idea

How You Tell a Brand Story Matters

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Sometimes it’s easier to learn positioning and branding lessons when we look outside our field.

Let’s look at a lesson from the world of fast food. Then we’ll see how it applies to our brands as consultants and thought leaders.

A few days ago, I was eating at my local Quiznos sub shop, and a sign inside the store caught my attention.

The sign is hard to miss. It’s affixed to a barrier separating the food-preparing staff from customers. To place an order, customers more or less have to peer over the sign. Given such prominent placement, it must say something important, right?

Its headline: “The Quiznos Story.”

Now, that headline might not mean much to you, but I’ve got to admit — as a positioning and branding geek — when I first read it my curiosity was piqued. In my world, the word “story” carries weight.

Sometimes story refers to a business’s brand story, and how the business delivers value through a big differentiating idea or striking promise.

Other times story refers to a business’s backstory, which tells us why the business began in the first place, and how what it does is important in ways that go beyond merely making money.

Whatever kind of story being used, when you see the word in a marketing context, you know you’re likely going to find out about the brand’s core idea or competitive advantage.

What’s more, the brand will probably tell its story entertainingly, so you’ll share it with others.

I continued reading.

The sign’s first line taught me three facts about Quiznos: 1. It began, not as a franchise, but as a single store. 2. It started thirty years ago 3. It originated in Denver.

So far, so good. I could picture the company’s birth, because the scene was established with facts. Facts are concrete and fashion explicit images in the mind.

I was ready for the payoff: How is Quiznos different? What intriguing point would I share with my wife and friends? (“Stella, I was in Quiznos today. You want to hear something cool?”)

Here’s where the story sputtered.

The sign’s second line mentioned “BOLD IDEAS,” which threw me. I enjoy Quiznos’ food and atmosphere, but I never think about the experience as bold.

The third and fourth lines explained what Quiznos considered bold: “Great Tasting Food,” “HIGHEST QUALITY INGREDIENTS,” and “FRESHLY-SLICED MEATS, CHEESES & VEGETABLES.”

I felt duped.

Here I was excited to learn what separated a brand I enjoy from the rest of the pack, and what I was fed was a surface story that – excluding the part about thirty years ago in Denver – could have been trumpeted by any competitor.

For a sub shop to say it believes in great-tasting food, consisting of freshly-sliced quality ingredients, is like a automobile manufacturer saying it believes in building cars that drive forwards and backwards. Or, a computer maker bragging about how its machines can connect to the internet.

The story Quiznos told may be true, but it wasn’t told in a way that would make a dent in anyone’s consciousness. I’m guessing few customers have read that sign fully or remember what it said if they did.

What can we as consultants and thought leaders learn here?

How we tell a marketing story matters. If we tell people only what they know and expect, they’ll ignore us.

What our brand story or backstory needs is . . . a context . . . an insight . . . a promise . . . a substantiation . . . a frank detail . . . an unexpected bit of color . . . that forces our audience to look anew at what they thought they already knew.

For example, if you’re a consultant whose main message is about helping organizations “change” and “accelerate results,” you’re not giving your audience any reason to consider you over a competitor, because you sound like hundreds of thousands of other consultants.

Your language is too general. There’s nothing for us to picture. Your message needs a meaningful difference and specifics.

You need to tell us things you know, but we don’t. Doing so will make us sit up and take notice. We may also be intrigued enough to call you so we can find out more.

If you’d like to try your hand at creating a brand story that people will remember, consider the following three questions:

1. What do you know that (most of) your market doesn’t know about your subject?

2. What do you know that (most of) your market doesn’t know about your company?

3. In answering the first two questions, what ideas and stories did you discover that your market would find equally surprising and valuable?

Your answers can serve as the basis for a draft of a brand story that is fresh, exciting, and uniquely yours.

What's the Big Idea?

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Here’s a technique for clear communication that I teach writers. I first read about it in Edward Bailey’s “Plain English Approach to Business Writing.”

If you’re writing an email or an essay or whatever, and you have an opinion to express, a recommendation to make, or a request of the reader, put it right up front and use the rest of the piece to explain it. Why?

Readers want to know how a piece of writing relates to them. If you don’t tell them right away — in the first paragraph or two or three — they’ll scan what you’ve written to find it. Make sense?

If I sent you an email that began, “How are you? I was in Manhattan the other day, eating at a Mexican place in the theater district, and I saw a friend I hadn’t seen in twenty years. His name is Jake, and he’s a lawyer. So we started talking about old times, and something he said triggered a memory from when we were in high school . . .,” you’d probably grow antsy.

If I kept my narrative going, you’d start skipping and looking for how this story relates to you. When you found how it related to you, you’d relax (“Ah, Mark found a potential client for me, and wants to set up a meeting”).

Often, writers are scared to say what they need to say up front, because they think the reader will make an instant judgment, and then won’t read the justification that follows. Really, though, if the writer doesn’t tell the reader how a piece relates to them right off, the reader will skip the writer’s carefully forged prose anyway, until they found what’s being asked of them.

In my writing, I use this “put what you have to say up front” technique much of the time. Sometimes, though, I forget to start my draft with it and, instead, add it later. An example: when I wrote my “Fascination Factor” proposal for Change This.

I was reading over what I thought to be the finished proposal when I realized it wasn’t working. Too much build up. I hadn’t gotten to “the big idea” quickly enough. Readers would have to wade through 250 words before they knew what my manifesto would teach them. Rather than rewriting the whole thing, I added this paragraph to the beginning:

“My proposed manifesto, ‘The Fascination Factor,’ teaches businesspeople how to write books and other thought leadership pieces that are uniquely their own and of considerable value to readers.”

Boom! Once people understood what it was they were about to read and how it could help them, then they could settle down and see if the rest of the proposal substantiated or detracted from my claim.

Don’t think you need to begin all your communications with your main point. No need to be robotic.

But put yourself in your reader’s shoes. Look over your last piece of writing, and ask yourself, “Where do I make my main point? Where does the reader learn why he or she is reading what I wrote?” If you didn’t get to your big idea in the first few paragraphs, think about how the piece might change if you did.