What Is a Brand Story? | The 5-Step Framework in Action

If you’ve been following along since episode 33, then you know what a story is. But what exactly is a brand story?

While I introduced you to my 5-step brand story framework (get your free copy here), I failed to put it in context and show you what a brand story looks like in action.

That's exactly what I'll be doing in this episode.

Because a common misconception regarding brand stories is that companies believe it's "their" story. This assumption isn’t entirely accurate.

Then we listen to a clip from a workshop led by Larry McEnerney, the former head of the University of Chicago's Writing program, as he brilliantly delivers the program's brand story, and I show you how it lines up with my 5-step framework.

You’ll Learn:

• What a brand story is

• Why your brand’s story isn’t YOUR story

• The two parts of your brand story

• Which part you need to tell first

• What a brand story looks like in action

Key Terms:

• Brand story
  The narrative positioning of your organization. Rather than communicating what your brand does through a series of statements, brand stories communicate your brand’s identity through stories so they stick in the mind and heart of your target audience. The brand story is a strategic story foundation that aligns the organization, and its audience, around what the brand does, who it serves, how it serves them, why it does it, and the ultimate vision it’s striving to bring about.

• Marketplace story
  This is your brand’s outside-in story. It’s what your customer says about your brand and defines your organization’s reputation. This is the story of the value you create in the marketplace, and the controlling idea of this story is your value proposition. The story covers who you help, the problem you solve, how you solve it, and the transformation you help them achieve. Content pieces that tell this story are customer testimonials and case studies.

• Authentic purpose story
  This is your brand’s inside-out story. It’s your personal narrative and what you and your employees say about yourself. At the core of this story is your why, purpose, mission, and vision. The story covers why you do what you do, for what purpose, to what end. Content pieces that tell this story are culture videos, origin stories, etc.

Transcript

What's going on? Brand Storyteller All right. So in this episode we are talking about what is a brand story. It's almost like we've been doing by default. I wish I had planned this in my head, but I'm just naturally just following the logical progression of these episodes.

As we jump started back up, we start with first principles. We started with episode 32 talking about marketing as a love story that's basically helping you understand that the whole point of what we're doing is to form a genuine relationship with our audience. So that way the relationship formation process that is often taken care of throughout this sales journey, throughout the sales process is being supported through our marketing materials.

That way we pull our marketing out of just a just at the bottom of the funnel where they're there to just give, give information and try to make make your offer look great, that the whole purpose is to use them to do the relational building work. So that way you're actually building that relationship at scale. So that's why we're talking about helping to remind that the purpose of what we're doing here is to actually build relationships.

Then in episodes 33 and 34, we laid the groundwork of what is a story and then just gave you the five step brand story framework. However, what I failed to do was to then contextualize that for you, to help you understand like, Well, how do we apply this framework? Let's see this framework in action so that way we get more of an understanding of what the how this applies to us telling our brand's story.

So that's what we're getting into in this episode.

When I'm often working with clients, I feel like the biggest misconception is they come to me because they want to tell their story. Okay, Now, I'm not saying that is a bad thing, that they want to tell their story. The driver, however, behind we want to tell our story. That's almost the question suddenly starts to cause the confusion because there is this this sense of assumed ownership of what point of view this story is coming from.

All right. So we covered in the past couple of episodes that I think even specifically episode 34, that the audience that your target customer is always your audience because they're always your audience in a sense, they might not be the hero of every single story that you're telling, but the story has to be told from their point of view or to resonate with their point of view.

You need to be able to to clearly communicate in a way that they are expecting to receive this message. So that way the message is received. So that way it does resonate with them because you're you're framing it so that way. It connects with their point of view and that causes a little bit of it requires a little bit more added effort to step out of our perspective, our silo, and start speaking our customer's language and starts framing things in a way that that is meaningful to them, that resonates with them.

You have to understand that there's a there's a difference of perspective here because we are often inside of either the marketing department and and from that perspective, we're often shut off from the customer. And so all we know is our own organization's culture, and we don't really have much customer insight to really bring us into their world. Or if we are a a business leader and a business owner, even just like an entrepreneur or a small business owner, we're so focused on the thing we do and the thing we make and and the being a practitioner that we're so, so much of an expert at what we do, but that also silos us and isolates

us from having a very clear understanding of how this thing that we do fits into our customer's world. So there's this perspective gap. Okay, the brand story helps us close that perspective gap. The purpose of the brand story is to communicate the value that we provide to our ideal customers in a way that is meaningful to them, that immediately resonates with them, that helps them understand in a very obvious way what we do, for what purpose and what problem we solve for them.

Okay, It's it's how we tell this tale of why we're relevant and necessary. That's the whole goal. So unfortunately, when people say we want to tell our story, if they haven't done that yet, first they haven't explained why they're relevant. The problem they solve very clearly. If they haven't done that yet first, then telling their story, which is often the we want to communicate our origin and why we built this company, it's getting a bit too, too ahead.

You get your jump in too many steps. You have to start with step one first, which is clearly communicating your actual brand story. And that story is the story of what you do, for what purpose, and therefore creating what value.

I came up with a couple of episodes very early on in the show.

What is brand storytelling and then the narrative positioning episode. I think those were in the bottom five episodes there. So if you want to get really into the weeds there, go back and listen to those episodes. I highly recommend narrative positioning, super underrated episode, but really gets into like the the formulas and frameworks and how to actually build these things.

but just to recap your brand story is the combination of two separate stories. You have to start first by realizing that your brand is the personality of your organization. When you understand first that we are forming a relationship between our target audience and our brand, that is an actual relationship called a parasocial relationship, that in order to really facilitate that relationship building, we have to materialize the identity of our organization in a brand.

And so you have to think about companies and organizations kind of like people. And so a person kind of has two parts of their identity. You have your reputation, which is what people say about you, and then you have your your own personal origin story, your own personal identity. And that's what you say about yourself, your own personal narrative.

So you kind of like have a public narrative and a personal narrative and so when we're thinking in terms of your brand story, a company has very similar to part narrative. They have what I call the marketplace story. That's your public narrative. That's what people say about you in the marketplace. And it is the story about the value that you create in the marketplace.

And then you have what I call your authentic purpose story. And so that is the your it's kind of like your origin story. It's your reason for being. It's it that story in its sense, communicates both your mission statement as well as your vision statement.

In terms of priority, which one do you tell first? You tell the marketplace story first. You have to tell the marketplace story first. People have to understand the value that you're actually creating in the market. They have to understand your value proposition first before they're ever going to care about the mission that you're hoping to accomplish and the and your future vision that you want to see in the world.

this is a story that's actually going to sell what you do.

Right? This is the story that's actually going to raise funds for you is the marketplace story. Once you've got money flowing in, your vision and mission story is kind of like your explanation of like, what are you going to do with this money? Okay, so step one, nailing the marketplace story, okay, figuring out what is your value proposition and then putting that value proposition inside of a narrative.

So that way it makes sense. It makes what you do make total sense to the person who is hearing it.

So that's what I mean when people start off and they're like, We want to tell our story, my first step is to evaluate, Are you properly communicating your marketplace story? Because if you're not communicating your marketplace story first, if you haven't fully communicated your reason for being actively doing business, conducting business in the marketplace, if you haven't been able to have been able to fully communicate who you're helping, what problem you're helping them solve, the the delight that you're going to bring to them by solving that problem and that ultimate transformation, you're going to

cause in that audience by solving that problem for them. If that's not clear, you can't tell your origin story because it doesn't matter.

So what does a brand story look like in action following that five step framework? What does that look like? Let's put this into context. So last week I found a really great example that I want to share with you.

It's a video clip about three or 4 minutes long. We're going to watch it together or you're going to listen to it with me together. If you're listening to the podcast, here it is a clip of Larry McInerney is, I think, how you say his name. This is the first time I've come into contact with this person. He's the former head of the University of Chicago's writing department for their business school, and he's explaining what they do.

And you'll notice that as we're watching this video, he's going to start off by first communicating very clearly like what their industry is, what their niche is, who they work with. And he kind of communicates their initial value proposition. But then he starts to dig in and make that make sense. All right, here we go.

Here's what we teach. We teach our our specialty at the University of Chicago is what we call expert writing. That is, we work with people who are experts in the way they think about the world. I work with biochemists, neurobiologists, anthropologists, historians, lawyers. Fill in the blank. They have one thing in common. They're experts in the way they think about the world.

They deal with very complicated information. Lots of subtlety, lots of nuance, lots of sophistication, lots of complexity. And they think at very high levels. They also write now, 99% of them write and think at the same time. That is, they use their writing process to help themselves to think. You do this while you're writing your stuff. You're still thinking of your ideas to help yourself do your thinking.

You have to do your writing. You have to do this because the stuff you're thinking about is too damn complicated to just do it in your head. Well, most almost everybody is like me. They think and write and write and thinking. Thinking. Right, right. And think. Thinking. Right, right thing. Okay. This is a very good thing. And you should make sure that nothing I do today interferes with this process.

Because this is how you do your best thinking by. But in the real world. Not in school. In the real world, when you're done with this, you have you will have created a text. You will send that text to your readers. And in the real world, not the world you're in now. The function of that text is to cause readers to change what they think about the world.

That's its job. It's to cause the readers to change what they think about the world and whether or not it's valuable depends on whether or not the readers perceive that you have valuably changed what they think or what they do, or how they decide. And I would be willing to bet that in your schooling years, you virtually never did that.

Why is it so hard for really smart people to write well? One of the reasons is they have 20 years of bad habits. The habit was they weren't writing the people who were doing this, what were they writing to? What are your teeth? What were your teachers doing when you sent them papers? Were they using your papers to change the way they saw the world?

What were they using your papers to do?

Very roughly put, you have learned to write in what Dickinson would call a form of life in which your readers were paid to care about you.

Your teachers read your stuff because they were paid to read it to find out about you. Oh, he's handed in this new thing. I'm going to read this. Why? Because somebody is paying me to assess him.

That's never going to happen again. Right.

All right. So as he opens up this talk, he begins by explaining, like, Here's our niche. We teach writing. But he also then communicates that we teach expert writing.

We help experts write. We teach experts to write so they can impact the world, so they can ultimately change the world. And that's what he's telling us. So that's a pretty powerful value proposition. But even as he says that, it still doesn't land that that hasn't changed my my appraisal of what they do, It hasn't got me interested yet.

It sounds powerful. And so I might make the if you were to, like, corner me and ask me, do I think they're necessary, I'll probably just like, lie to you and say, yeah, of course they're necessary, but I haven't felt it until He then goes in and begins to break down the problem. And you notice that he does this in such a brilliant way.

It's very clear that he's he's rehearsed this and probably has presented this this, this sort of metaphor and talked about this many, many times.

And you can tell that he has a very deep understanding of his target audience and you can also get a sense of the great respect he has for them. So ABC begins to talk about how they work with experts.

He he just rattles off the different experts that they work with. And then he says in the unifying, the thing that unifies them is that they're they're experts in what they do. They deal with very complex problems, very high level of thinking. Right. And so as he's communicating this, you get a sense of like, he really understands their world.

He really understands who they are, but not just that he has a deep respect for them. That's very important, is as we begin to unpack the problem that we solve for our customers, we're not like telling pointing a critical finger at them and telling them you are the problem. And we're here to fix you. No, no, no, no, no.

Okay. That's not going to go over well at all. He's leading with empathy. He's leading with understanding, but he's leading with a very deep respect. He is demonstrating that he cares about them, because when you do that,

your audience reciprocates that care. Right? That's just natural.

If you're trying to have like a difficult conversation with somebody, you don't just like come out of the game or Yammer on to them about why they're the problem. You open up in a in a way, almost like kind of like a safe way to let them know that, like you are not here to attack them. It's a very similar way of doing what he's doing.

He's he's demonstrating great respect

So he talks about the status quo and that the status quo is these people are experts about how they think about the world, very high level thinking, and they write to process their thoughts.

And then ultimately the result of that process is a text. Then he kind of talks about the desire because it would be the desire of that expert that the result of their thinking and the result of their expertise is that it would change the world. So the result being the text that that text would it would be read, and that by reading that text that would result in changing the world.

Then he explains the problem. But the problem, the problem being a result of being stuck in their status quo is that they've never been taught to write for an audience that hasn't been paid to read their stuff. That's a serious problem as you really start digging into it, because as you suddenly realize, as he explains, that you've never been taught to write persuasively in a way that is actually going to entertain and engage somebody to such an extent that you can fully transmit your ideas and your expertise to them to cause that transformation.

And and then he really starts to dig into the problem. And as I'm watching this guy dig into the problem, I notice that inside of me, I start having this emotional shift where I start realizing that there is a need for what they do. And I start feeling this desire inside of me to either learn what he's talking about or there's a desire inside of me that they have to be here, that they need to succeed so they can do their function and serve their purpose.

Now, unfortunately, this is a podcast. I can't see you right. I'm just talking to my camera here, so I can't really bounce that idea off of you. But I'm I'm pretty sure that same emotional response may have crept up in you, too. Did you feel that? And if you did feel that and you're watching this on YouTube, definitely let me know in the comments.

Okay. But that's what happened. And so that's what I mean by taking your value proposition and putting your value proposition inside of the story is suddenly the value proposition when he first introduces it at the beginning of the video lands flat. You kind of hear it as a okay because it hits your head as it being a fact and there's no meaning with that fact there.

There's no charge, no emotional charge to it, and therefore it is valueless. It says if the fact just hits our thinking brain and bounces off the windshield of her thinking brain, we hear it and we probably would have walked away. And then 10 minutes later, we would have completely forgotten all of that information. But structuring it in a story, even right now, you've probably forgotten the majority of the words that that person just said.

But the framework of the story is present in your mind. You can immediately think back and you can follow that track. They help experts, right? Because experts are used writing to think about the world, but they're stuck in this trap where they've been writing for people who have been paid to read their writings and they've not actually learned how to write in the way that is actually going to change the world in the way that they want to change the world.

And so that's kind of taken us through the first three steps of the framework we've got the status quo, we've got the problem, and we definitely have the crisis, the crisis being the realization that we're never going to change the world doing things the way that we've been taught to do it because we haven't been taught to actually write.

And so if we were to finish that story, we would present the solution, because the solution here is implied, the solution being. But Larry McInerney and I hope I'm saying his name right, right. Larry McInerney is going to teach us how to write. So that way we are able to write to an audience that isn't interested or isn't being paid to read what we are writing.

We are going to learn to write in such a way that what we are writing is interesting is is keeps that sustains their attention long enough so that way they actually learn, but they enjoy learning it. So they're going to finish the entire paper and an end writing in such a way that it persuades them to change their thinking or change their behavior.

And when we've succeeded in doing that, then we have actually made the impact on the world that we have set out to accomplish, and we are going to make the world a significantly better place because finally our ideas are actually being acted on. That is how you would finish that story. And so notice how I introduced the solution, elevated as above the solution, and then talked about the transformation.

So we gave you the information of what the company did inside of the framework to where you're easily able to make sense of what they do, for who to solve, what problem to provide, what solution. Wrapped in an emotionally charged message that helps you feel that value as well as remember it.

That's the power of the brand story, and that is what a brand story is. Now, how do you get to a point where you can communicate your brand story that effectively? Well, that requires mastery over the marketplace value. It requires a deep understanding over the value that you're creating in the marketplace, which requires a deep understanding of your customer, who your customer is.

The problem they're facing, the common goal they all share and the common problems they all share

and the value that you're going to provide to them. The promised transformation. You're going to give them this how the solution is going to help them and make them feel. It requires that deep level of customer insight. So for that reason, I believe that the foundational pillar and kind of like your step one to really starting out your brand storytelling journey and really gaining mastery over your marketplace story is to get really good at telling customer testimonials.

and the benefit of of telling customer testimonials is essentially twofold. Not only do they help train you and and it and bring you into your customers perspective and really help you truly understand their story and give you just such valuable customer insights.

They happen to be one of the most powerful marketing tools in your arsenal because they communicate your value, but they also provide that much needed social proof. So you're in luck. I am creating our first ever storyteller agent course that is going to teach you how to craft authentic customer testimonials. It's kind of like your your primer into brand storytelling.

And what I'll be teaching you is how to reach out to customers, how to get buy in from them to to be a part of it, how to get buy in from your entire team on how to get them joined into this effort to track down customer testimonials, how to plan for the interview, how to map out the story ahead of time so you know exactly what questions to ask, how to run the interview, which ways to record it.

And then we'll even give you a content strategy of how to get the most out of that interview. So that way it's doing it, you're getting as much value as you possibly can. You're kind of like juicing as much value as you possibly can out of that customer testimonial and then teaching you a process so that way you can do this consistently.

It is going to be an incredibly valuable course. So keep an eye out for that. And if you're interested in signing up early for it and making sure that you're on the waitlist, then you can visit Bryce McNabb Dotcom back slash course. That's Bryce McNabb dot com backslash course.

go to that page, you'll learn a bit more information about it, but then you'll be able to get on the waiting list for that course, which will be released in about four weeks.

All right, guys, I hope that was helpful. We're going to be transitioning in the next couple of episodes to a series specifically focused on customer testimonials as we ramp up to the release of our first course, crafting an authentic customer testimonial. You guys are in for a huge treat with a lot of really great applicable information.

and again you can receive regular updates about the course and its release date by going to Bryce McNab dot com backslash course and submitting your email through there.

If you've listened to this episode, you're pretty excited. You want to make sure that you're crafting your brand story properly too, so that way you can match what we just heard together and really create that desire in your audience. But you're still a little confused as to exactly how to do that. Reach out to me at Bryce McNab dot com.

I would love to work with you one on one so we can shape that together

and if you like to take your storytelling skills or your team's storytelling skills to the next level, I provide team training as well as one on one coaching. So again, reach out to me at Bryce McNab dot com and I will see you guys in the next one.

Take care.