Your customer, in front of the a screen, ready to buy. Brand story. Marketing storytelling! You have heard it all before! Blah blah blah!
Now, let me ask you something: where does the brand story live?
Huh? Yes, where does the story live?
If you are here and if you are thinking of buying from me, then this is it! I have done my job… You found about me and my services. You became interested in learning more.
Ah, there we are! The story! Brand story. Marketing storytelling! You have heard it all before! Blah blah blah!
Now, let me ask you something: where does the brand story live?
Huh? Yes, where does the story live?
Where is its physical location? Is in on your computer hard drives? Is it in the cloud? Is it in your brain? Or your creative agency collective, brainstormed brains?
Ah, the customer! Yes…so is the story in his mind? No, it is isn't because before you have reached him with any message he did not know about you. At all. Or care. In fact he could not care less about you. And he still doesn't. Even if he becomes a brand advocate he will not care about you. He will care about himself.
Is the product serving him well and some? Brilliant. He might even consider upsells. Do you have a dynamite brand story and values? He will wear them because it enforces his set of values. But, you see, having considered this, the story does not live in his mind/soul either.
The story lives in between. In between what you intended to communicate and what your customer understood from it.
Your system of thought and perception of the customer-buying persona- will determine the backbone of the story. But your customer's mind has his mind populated with other stories, too: commercial, political, social-family, friends-which compete, influence and alter yours.
He will not take your message at face value, based on experience and common beliefs- also known as collective mentality, and even whatever he takes on board it will be distorted by his own puzzle of pre-existing stories.
If this sounds complicated, let me simplify it: remember the last argument with a member of your family...almost invariably it is resolved by "oh, I thought you meant..."
And this is the first "aha" moment you will have about marketing storytelling.
The second one will come soon enough. Your brand story mustn't finish with the buying. If it does, you do not have a brand, you have a factory shop, and no-one will come back for another product or an upsell. Pretty soon, someone, somewhere will find a way to produce the cheaper version of you. They can afford to be a factory shop. You can't.
And here we come back to where your brand story lives. It lives in between your story and your customer story, it is an intersection of the two and a translation between two different mental languages. As with any translation, something gets lost during the process.
And here is the point where the missing pieces get put back together. As in the case of the marital fight, things get clarified through interaction, conversation, willingness to interact=engagement.
INTERACTION
CONVERSATION
ENGAGEMENT
The points of interaction are your customer service, your product design team, after sales -all are a point of contact between you and your customer. And the social. Social media is a god-given gift to brands. It is not easy, it definitely is not cheap, even if you think "it's free”! And you cannot just broadcast. You need to seek and invite engagement. If you use social media just for broadcasting you will get two results. A) you will be largely ignored, except complaints B) you would have had wasted an enormous amount of time and or money during the proceedings...
"Yes, but...." I hear coming now
"I am one and potential customers are in the hundreds, thousands, millions- surely we cannot engage with everyone? "
To put it this way, all you want from them is to engage with you, by taking their card out and buy.
Now stop thinking what you and your brand will tell him to do.
Freeze! Now get out of your skin and step into his. Would you get that card out? What is now more important? A soulless company that bombarded you with a million messages or you: the customer? I thought so. Has the company reached for you? Oh, it did! Felt nice and fuzzy, and, you know what, you now kinda care about them, because they care about you.
And here is, my dear friends where the brand story lives: in between two minds, two worlds and in the translation of different languages and at the closest point of engagement.
So, this is what you are going to buy from Purple Orca: your customer, in front of a screen, ready to buy from you.
No brain surgery strategies - no latest AI or virtual reality blah-blah - although we might use one or more of the latest technologies and social media tools that are at our disposal. Purple Orca is about killer marketing, nothing less and nothing more. It is about you, your company, your product or service, your company culture, your customer and most crucially, it is about the story.
Christina D'oro Hooley is
• The Sales enabler
• Offering Full stack marketing Solutions through Purple Orca Marketing
• A Sophisticated marketer using interdisciplinary approach between data, creative and emerging technologies.
"I work with businesses, personal brands and products that struggle to get their message across because they are unclear and scattered in their approach. I do this by offering full stack marketing solutions, a 360 degrees solution centred around strategy and I enable sales through sophisticated marketing based on applied semiotics