Before we get started, just a reminder: next Wednesday, I’ll be joining Matt Arnold of Spark Consulting Group to co-host a webinar about storytelling. I would love to have some newsletter subscribers there, so please sign up!
The event is free, but registration is required. Like this newsletter, I promise it will be fun and not boring. :)
Last week, I wrote about the fact that storytelling isn’t always the answer. And the idea that storytelling is sort of a magic marketing potion that can solve all your organization’s problems is one of the myths we’ll debunk during the webinar.
But I wanted to do more of a deep dive into this topic here first. Mainly, answer the question: when is marketing-focused storytelling not the right tool for an organization or brand?
“Tying Things Together”
Sometimes, individuals or teams come to me, asking in a very vague sense for the storytelling that will “tie things together.” And I get why they’re asking for this. That’s exactly what storytelling does, when it’s working well. It can make your brand more vivid in customers’ minds. It can help you convey how your product or service or organization is changing people’s lives. And it’s a great exercise for helping you make sure you have your message clear and know how to use that message across your marketing, PR, social, and other communications.
But there’s an important caveat. You can only “tie things together” when you know what those *things* are. And I find that organizations run into trouble when they want to start telling a story without first understanding who they are and what they’re offering. You can’t articulate your truth as an individual or a brand without first having a really solid grasp of that identity yourself.
This issue tends to manifest itself in one of two ways.
Problem One: Putting Story Before Strategy
In the first case, sometimes I’ll start working on a client project and quickly realize that we haven’t defined key elements of the project before getting started. This frequently happens when there’s no in-house marketing team or point person. Potentially, in the past, most of their growth has been due to factors outside marketing or a having a particularly coherent communications plan. Now the organization is looking to launch a campaign, maybe, or move into a new space, or court a different segment of donors. And they know a lot about their product or service from a facts and features perspective. But they haven’t necessarily done much thinking about their brand strategy.
Who, exactly, is the audience? What is that audience looking for? And how does this organization offer it, in a way that no one else does? Until we know the answers to *at least* these questions, it’s really difficult to know how to tell a story that will be meaningful. For example, I once worked with a food brand that wanted to begin using social media. Everyone’s doing social, they said, so we should too. But they weren’t able to settle on whether the audience for these channels would be buyers who worked for supermarkets; the company’s end customers; or industry aficionados and influencers. This made it really difficult to know how to position their product, what kind of language to use, and which aspects of their brand to highlight. In the end, the story wasn’t very focused or compelling. And all the promotion they tried to do on social felt a little like shouting into the void.
Something that can work very well at this “asking-ourselves-the-questions” stage is storytelling as an internal tool. When done right, customer personas are like little micro-stories that help you put yourself in the audience’s shoes and understand their pain points. Similarly, crafting an early draft of the narrative you hope to share externally can be a great way to identify what’s missing and which questions you still need to answer. So just to be clear––what I’m cautioning against here is launching into a big campaign or new communications endeavor without really understanding who you’re doing it for, and why.
Problem Two: A Lack of Authenticity
In the second case, the client has done a bit of branding work. But there’s a misalignment between the brand and the reality, and the way they’re communicating just doesn’t fit. They’re telling us who they are in theory, but it also...isn’t really who they are.
And it’s always very obvious.
Cool isn’t something you can craft. You either are or aren’t. And if you’re not, I promise it’s really okay.
I work with my clients on leaning into their brand’s strengths and the tone and voice that come naturally to them, whether it’s nerdy, or irreverent, or meticulous, or friendly, or enthusiastic, or trustworthy. It’s crucial not to skip this step of really thinking about who you are and what kind of communication comes to you most easily.
If you’re a Gen Z start-up using lots of jargon and words you got off of thesaurus.com in a misguided effort to seem more professional to investors in their sixties, you’re going to sound like this:
Likewise, if you’re a company that’s built its brand on being consistent and predictable for the last fifty years and you decide––with little strategy or analysis––that you want to start chasing TikTok trends, you’re going to come off something like this:
Maybe this sounds limiting. But there’s actually a real freedom here!
First, everything about your communications will get easier when you just start speaking like yourself. There’s something really appealing about knowing who you are and not being afraid of it. People are drawn to this. That allure will do wonders for your brand.
Second, if there continues to be a huge misalignment between how you want to tell your story and your organizational reality, that can be a sign something needs to change at the product or practices level.
A question I think about a lot is who do I need to be to tell the story I want to tell? If you want to frame your story around offering the best customer service, you need to train the representatives who answer the phones and contact forms before you even think about including that as a differentiator in your ad copy. If you want to frame your story around being a hyper-ethical brand, have a serious look at the way you do business and make sure that’s more than just lip service.
Being authentic will give you a much more compelling story to tell. And it will save you a lot of angry emails from customers. Trust me. :)
So maybe it’s not exactly a myth that storytelling isn’t always the answer. Maybe it’s more that storytelling is the answer, eventually––but only once you’ve done the work that gets you ready to tell the story that’s right for you.
Thanks for reading!
–Erin
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Erin Becker (she/her)
Writer | Communications Consultant | Storytelling Expert
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