Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

It's Only Common Sense: It's All About the Story

Editor's Note: To listen to Dan's weekly column, as you've always done in the past, click here. For the written transcript, keep reading...You know your company’s story, don't you? You know why your company has a story, right? When I start talking to company leaders about their story, their eyes often glaze over. They look at me like I’m crazy to be talking about their story. I’ve even had some come out and tell me it doesn't matter whether or not their company has a story. Others ask me what a story has to do with selling products. Even in these times of social media marketing, branding, traditional marketing, and cyber marketing, there are still people out there who don't understand why they should bother with their company's story, or why they should bother making their company known for something, or why it should stand for something. Some managers don’t understand, or just don't want to take the time to understand, why they need marketing. For those folks, here we go again. Once more I will tell you why you need a story, and why you need marketing.

A company's story explains what it does, what it stands for, why it's different from other companies, why it's better than other companies, and why people should choose its products over its competitors.

To write your company’s story, you must look at your company critically; you must understand what makes you good, what makes you great, and what what makes you outstanding. You have to talk to your customers. You must know why customers like dealing with you and what they like about your products and services. You have to look at your competitors and compare yourself to them. In short, you must have a true picture of your company--what it does and what it stands for. From that information, you write your story. If you do it right, you'll write your story in such a compelling way that customers will want to do business with you.

Do you want examples of great stories? Look at Disney, L.L. Bean, or, even better, Apple. Without a doubt, Apple has the best story on the market today. Their story is so compelling that people line up for days to buy their new products. They often don’t have the best products. There were certainly better MP3 players available when the iPod first came out, but the minute Apple introduced their MP3 player, they completly wiped out the completion. Why? Because people wanted to buy into their story. We all want to be a part of the Apple story and that's why we buy their products.

If you look at products like perfume or even automobiles, we choose those products based on their story. We buy a certain car because of the way it makes us feel. We drink a certain scotch because we think that it says something about us. The same thing applies to beer and, back in the day, cigarettes.

The same thing can apply to our businesses. We have to find our story and make it so compelling that customers want to be a part of our story. They have to feel that if they buy our story and our products, it indicates that they are smart or informed, and better than the other guy because we are making them better.

Let’s say you want to be a leader in medical electronics PCBs, for example. The first thing you do is develop a story that will appeal to medical electronics companies. You will point out in your story that you go to great efforts to make sure your boards are reliable. You have to stress how reliable your boards are--you do this by showing customers your quality records. Show them charts that indicate the hundreds of thousands of boards you've built without field failures. Show them testimonials from other medical customers detailing how great a vendor you are. You can actually develop a special nine-step inspection process especially designed for your medical electronics customers that will give them something to talk about. Tell them you have developed an entire procedure for handling medical electronics boards to make sure that they are the most reliable PCBs on the market. Put all of that information in your story and make it part of your marketing. Done right, your story will be so compelling and appealing to medical customers that they will end up using it in their marketing story. The story might include a line that says, “We only choose vendors that are experts in the fabrication of printed circuit boards for our industry.” Now that’s buying into your story!

Everything starts with a story--your story. So get it written now and tell it to the world. It’s only common sense.