Brand Story for Startups: Bring what you know, be honest about what you don’t
For start ups who are formulating a brand identity from scratch, the pressure to be more than you are can be overwhelming. Resisting the urge to oversell or to be everything to everyone, can be difficult. After all, a start up wants to court the widest possible customer base to ensure their viability. But, this is the quickest way to alienate people from your brand.
Don’t overcomplicate it. Startups should know the following things.
What do you know?
What unique experience, service, product, are you bringing to market?
Why are you and your team uniquely qualified to offer it?
What can it do for your target audience?
What don’t you know?
For the market you’re serving, what are the things accepted as standard that you’re either unfamiliar with or question their purpose?
Do you want to learn and adopt or resist? Why?
Do you think your target audience is being well served by competitors?
Where is there room for your experience, service, product?
Answering these questions will force you to identify a cursory brand story, and it will also begin to help you formulate where you fit in a competitive landscape—Why you exist, Who you’re talking to and why. Do this work. It will provide clarity where startups often need it most. Sometimes it will point to holes in your business plan/service. Don’t ignore that. I promise it will save you work down the line if you address it early and adopt the solutions to those things into your business identity.
Need help weaving your findings into something actionable? Please get in touch.
Why Brand Stories Matter More for Small Businesses —Time
Brand Stories matter more for small businesses than for larger ones. Beyond having a service or thing of value to offer, a brand story may be the most important consideration for a small business because it simultaneously focuses operations while qualifying customers. The efficiency and clarity provided is a key to making the most of a small business’ scarcest resource—Time.
Small businesses are lean. Owners and employees must manage many competing demands on their time, and not all actions have the potential to return value in the same way. It’s imperative that a business knows the time they’re spending is impactful.
A properly defined brand story can do this in two ways. One, it clarifies action. It provides a clarity to your business purpose that allows you to focus time on the things that are most impactful to your operations and customers. Starting a consulting business? What’s your specialty? Knowing that you can provide the most value by focusing on the impact of CRM adoption gives you somewhere to carve a niche. Creating a story around your unique knowledge of CRM use can help you find your value proposition, which also leads to the second benefit of a properly defined brand story.
It defines your market. Extending this example, if you are uniquely qualified to discuss the ways a CRM can improve customer service, then your brand story is telling you who your market is. Looking for potential clients with service or product offerings where customer service is lacking helps you find leads. Properly communicating your brand story in promotional materials allows leads to qualify themselves as well. Companies looking for CRM expertise pertaining to sales, may automatically remove themselves from considering your services because your promotional materials (website, social, branding, etc.) specify an expertise in benefitting customer service. In such a way, you’re ensured you are spending time efficiently, offering your services where they can be most impactful, creating marketing materials that communicate that, and spending valuable time where the potential return is maximized for both you and the customer who has already been qualified to value the same thing.
Serving the right customer with the product or service you are best qualified to offer is ideal for all involved. Yet, it can be surprisingly difficult for small businesses to align purpose with operations. Defining a brand story is the necessary first step in that process. We can help.
What is the purpose of your business?
The “meaningful vision” is the backbone, foundational principals from which the company does not deviate in pursuit of profit. In putting that first, a company encodes the necessary conditions for its existence into its operations—defining it’s audience/stakeholders and building a relationship with them for longterm profitability.
A long held truism proposed that the purpose of a business is to maximize profits for shareholders/owners (sometimes with an added caveat that the business stay ethical, sometimes with this imperative missing). There are two issues with this definition and the notion that a business exists solely to make money.
First, the definition ignores sustainability/self preservation. A company can be profitable in the short term while hurting its long term prospects. This happens all the time, and one need not look further than the news to see examples of companies whose leaders leveraged the future of the company to maximize short term gains. Longterm viability is inherent to the purpose of a business, because profitability is maximized over time. In other words, profitability over decades is greater than profitability over months or years.
The second issue with this definition is a condition of the first. For longterm viability, a company must broaden its definition of “shareholders” beyond those invested monetarily to those invested as stakeholders: customers primarily, but also employees, and even the communities to which the business belongs. By broadening the benefactors, profits must necessarily come to mean more to meet the needs of the expanded audience— maximizing employee or customer “profits” might more readily translate to maximizing “returns” while still minding the bottom line. Returns in this case, a stand in for any version of satisfaction/fairness enabled by the business in question. I.E. the compensation exchanged for the business product or service is of value — the feeling of value is a return for the customer. In consideration of this expanded audience, a business builds customers and goodwill and ensures its longterm profitability.
The consideration of a larger audience as a necessary component of ensuring viability and profitability, is where a company’s story comes in. It’s not only necessary to have a story but a business must tell it. It’s where a business spells out its reason for existing beyond making money. In his Forbes article titled “What is the Purpose of Your Business?”, leadership advisor Mark Nevins defines a business’ purpose in the following way, “In simple terms, the purpose of a company is to have a meaningful vision and then be profitable achieving it.” This is my favorite definition of the purpose of a business. The “meaningful vision” is the backbone, foundational principals from which the company does not deviate in pursuit of profit. In putting that first, a company encodes the necessary conditions for its existence into its operations—defining it’s audience/stakeholders and building a relationship with them for longterm profitability. In this definition, it’s the company’s story/”meaningful vision”—It’s reason for existing, which provides access to stakeholders and ensures longterm profitability.
Earnestness, Authenticity: On Being More
A business must know what it is for beyond making money. Why listening to your customer is not enough.
“The world will ask you who you are, and if you don’t know, the world will tell you.” — Carl Jung
Assessing your brand story is the world telling you what your business is. Very often, it is pointing you toward the things or places where your business is not well defined, so it is being defined for you. Bad reviews, poorly performing webpages, customer questions, service inquiries, complaints, product confusion are some of the negative ways this can manifest. These are all ways that the market is pointing at a disconnect in what you do and what you say you do. Or, in important cases, it’s also a place where your brand story is failing to reach and qualify the appropriate audience. Knowing the difference is important because the reaction to each should differ.
To know the difference, a business must first know what it is, its motivation for existence beyond making money. Yes, a business should exist for a purpose beyond making money. This is a hell of a thing to gloss over, but we’ll be tackling this in blogs for as long as we’re here. It’s the reason we exist. Here’s just one reason why it’s true:
A real life example of this would be as follows: Company A manufactures and sells a consumer good to wholesalers/retailers (their primary customer), but is ultimately used by individuals who purchase from the retailers. The company has a mission to make their products easy to use, reliable, and is committed to American Manufacturing. Retailers purchase the product to resale because there is significant demand and it makes business sense to do so. The end user who chooses to buy these products holds Company A’s values as core in their buying decisions. However, company A has been proposed a business opportunity to import a product and the ability to sell it under their own branding for an immediate, positive bottom line impact. It’s almost free money. The brand reputation is such that the retailers (company A’s customers) eagerly want the option to sell this item, because the margins on it can help their bottom line. However, the product does not meet the core values nor quality standards. Most problematic, the product will be counter the “American Made” marketing engine the company employs.
What should Company A do?
It’s probably easy in the hypothetical to say they should honor their brand story and refuse the opportunity. But, imagine a scenario where the company is not as aware of their brand story/value proposition, because their company infrastructure is aimed at their primary customer (the retailers in this scenario, not the end user). In this scenario, Company A is keyed into helping their primary customer with their business goals. They do not have a strong awareness or relationship with the end user, who never the less respects and values their American Made Products. With the only variable company A has being business to business demand, and no guard rails in place to protect their brand story, it’s much harder in this scenario to imagine a company saying no to the opportunity. Theoretically, their customer (retailers) wins; Company A wins by increasing sales. It feels like a no brainer to take the money and serve their customer. But, the long term potential for damage to the brand story is still the same in either scenario. The actual user of the product is not considered by Company A if they’re not actively listening to them. And, they don’t know they should be actively listening to someone outside of their primary customer if they don’t first know the reason they exist beyond bottom line considerations. A product that undermines the company’s stated purpose will devalue the brand.
This scenario is exactly why businesses need a strong core of values and interests (a strong story) to act as a guard rail on business decisions. It’s why you have to know what you are before the world tells you. It’s also why listening and assessing your brand on an ongoing basis is only part of the equation. There has to be something to prove against for it to make a real difference.
Assessing Your Brand Story
Applying the scientific method to business operations can give your business ears. Carefully applying conclusions will lead you to reenforce your brand story or identify where operations contradict it.
This isn’t where I tell you it’s too hard to assess how what your brand story is and you need Happy Chance to do it for you. I’ll give it away, because it’s not a secret. It’s hard, that’s absolutely true, but it’s worthwhile in a way that justifies the effort almost immediately. It’s also just a small piece of cultivating your brand story. There are 8 steps to assessing your brand story as it currently stands. These steps will undoubtedly improve your business, but to fully realize brand story potential and avoid the potential pitfalls of this process read more here:
Observation. Make an observation or write down an issue your business is facing.
Example: My business website is seeing an abnormally high bounce rate.
Research. Seek existing information or talk with business owners facing a similar situation.
Example: Research bounce rates and dig deep into what they’re actually measuring. Identify areas of your site where the bounce rate is better than average and areas where it is poorer than average. What do those tell you? What is different about the content, the imagery, the design?
Hypothesis. Formulate a larger theory about what could be causing your issues. Write it down.
Example: My bounce rate is highest on product pages with fewer images. I predict adding images will improve my bounce rate.
Experiment. Test a single variable against a control.
Example: Add more product imagery to a poorly performing product page. Do not add imagery to a similarly performing item. Observe and record bounce rate over time.
Analyze. Draw a logical conclusion from the results. Log or Share the results.
Example: My bounce rate improved on the product page after adding additional imagery. Therefore, adding additional product imagery is a logical method to decrease bounce rates on poorly performing site pages. Or, in the inverse, my bounce rate remained constant despite increased imagery, therefore, imagery is not the primary reason my bounce rate is high on product pages.
Iterate. Keep testing variables. Over time, you learn specific strategies to achieve desirable results, and you also learn about your market and what is important to them. By extension, you’re also learning about what’s important to your brand.
Example: Images helped/didn’t help bounce rate. Testing long form product descriptions to measure whether they increase or decrease bounce rate independent of and in conjunction with product images can further clarify needed areas of improvement while giving action items for near term business objectives.
Apply findings to what your marketing says you are or do.
Example: If your marketing claims incredible customer service, but your existing product pages make it difficult to ascertain product features, then you have identified a problem with your business strategy that needs reconciliation. Addressing the expectation vs. the reality is an opportunity to change or live up to your brand story.
Codify.
Make the customer centricity, stakeholder centricity, employee centricity, value centricity inherent to this process a key feature of your business. It’s just listening.
So, it’s the scientific method. Surprise! It’s no secret at all. The hard part comes when the things the data points to as problematic are operationally difficult to change. In those instances, business pain points are palpable, and making the change required involves a real sacrifice. But, if the brand is strong enough, the decision is already made. If the data is there, the financial incentive is compelling. Let the story change you.
It may be difficult to see how bounce rate and brand story are tied. And, in some instances they may not be. However, testing many variables over time will absolutely reveal the places where brand and operations contradict themselves. When they do, it likely won’t be surprising because the issues are likely to manifest in other places as well: siloed departments, customer service inquiries, poor reviews. Listen, and let the story change you.
This is a way to grow intelligently, but it’s not the full picture when it comes to growing with your brand story in mind. It’s a way for the market to define you, but that’s not always a good thing. Read more about that here.
Branding Has a Bad Name
Brand stories are not marketing, they are purpose.
Spend enough time on the internet and you’re bound to hear someone talking about formulating their “personal brand”. From Linkedin to reality tv shows, the idea that you have to embody a curated, linear version of yourself is pervasive. It also permeates business branding. And it’s wrong. Saying what you are is only part of the story.
In truth, a thoughtful brand story should not be akin to a chosen identity that is projected online. Rather, a brand story is the amalgamation of what a company claims to be, plus how they behave. When embraced properly, a brand story is like a living, breathing member of the business that holds the line for the collective actions of the business. Too often, branding is used as a PR agency to cover or explain poor company operations.
Do you claim to be a customer first organization, and then have a business infrastructure that prizes production over all else? In that case, your brand story may have an issue. And, in time, your business may have an issue too. It may also have opportunity, but to capitalize careful thought needs to be brought into how to marry the potentially competing values at the heart of the company.
Poor brand stories are repellant. Have you ever sat through a sales meeting where the rep has clearly skipped their research? Inevitably the pitch will mention something that portrays a lack of preparation, while claiming service or attention to detail. It’s off putting even if you’re sensitive to the volume pressures some sales reps face. A brand story that claims service but fails to deliver, or claims environmental concerns and packages with non-recyclable plastic, or claims uniqueness but can’t readily differentiate their product, all damage their brand story in the same way. Trust is lost. The need to have a properly conceived of, and followed brand story is not optional. It’s as essential as a business plan, or quality employees. As a matter of fact, a good brand story can make it easier to get both.
Therefore, it is essential that brands have an operational understanding of what they claim to be or do, what they actually do, and how that is perceived by stakeholders from employees to customers. The digital imperative of social media, websites, and ecommerce is that businesses must adopt their brand story as a strategic map that updates in realtime according to action. Assimilating digital listening strategies affords brands an opportunity to evolve their story and actions with data backed insights. But, they must also be careful to not waver from their core. Like a ship crossing the sea, the route may bob with tides but does not deviate from the chosen line.
A lower tech approach still serves. Simply finding values and then being uncompromising on them is a profitable business strategy, so long as brands effectively communicate it. The trick is to mean it.
The prize for a good brand story is a more readily identified (and communicated to) customer base that is more loyal than ephemeral. In addition, a good brand story is a guard rail on business strategy, keeping objectives within the logical framework of operations and customer needs.