You’ve come up with an amazing idea for a product or service. You’ve gone as far as building a prototype, but now’s the time to get the word out there. You want customers, and you also want to let everyone know what you’re doing.
Having a few people paying for your services is a great start, but just having a few bucks trickling in doesn’t mean your business is really other there in the world.
What you need is a story.
Getting Deeper
You may be thinking storytelling has nothing to do with business, but it really does. If you properly convey a story, then your products won’t appeal to your target audience. Many of today’s business (small or large) write “fluff” but it needs to be deeper in order for it to be truly effective, otherwise, what’s the point? Most brand storying telling today is superficial and still to corporate-orientated, rather than being aimed for human needs. Your storytelling needs to be real and drop the perfect endings! Tidy resolutions make from crummy, boring stories.
Sometimes (believe it or not) stories are imperfect, like people, and that’s okay! A deeper emotional connection not only gives a story some oomph, but creates a bond between consumer and product, client and service provider.
Thinking Bigger
There’s more of a “social change” component to storytelling for the future. It must be bigger than the company.
It’s not exclusively about general change, but that is a key factor in generating interest outside of your niche audience. People want to do business with companies that care about causes bigger than themselves and most humans do. People make choices based on social issues so it’s bigger than companies giving excellent customer service their own clients but how you influence society, not just in an economic setting.
Getting Personal
The corporate wall is being broken down in favour of human connections. Part of the reason why many brand stories fail is because they fail to capture the imagination today. Why? Because they focus on the company being the protagonist. Companies are not protagonists. People don’t care about companies. They care about people, and you should too. You can’t hug or thank a company- though I’m sure we’ve all wanted to slap some companies. People can’t see themselves reflected in a story about a faceless organization.
