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THE FINAL WORD:
YOUR STORY IS A LENS
"Empathy is a tool for building people into groups, for allowing us to function as more than self-obsessed individuals."
- Neil Gaiman
By Robert Rose, Chief Strategy Officer
TCA
"why" can get muddles with the same "hows" and "what's the competitors offer.
Your story isn't a window into your brand, it's a lens that colors every feature, benefit, piece of content, and reason to believe.
There's a better than even chance that your business doesn't have better research, or the most feature-rich product, or smarter people.
What you do have is a great story that colors the way you use research, the importance of the features your product does have, and the kinds of people that you hire. T
That is differentiating.
Remember, the key to being different is to let people see more clearly who you really are.
We hope you enjoyed this issue. Until next quarter, remember....
It’s your story. Tell it well.
What story are you telling?
One of marketing’s most important functions is to differentiate our products and services from our competitors’ to make it more attractive to a particular segment of the market.
Over the past 50 years, the idea of brand differentiation has become an equal (if not greater) priority for marketers. A brand identity is the prime – if not only – source of differentiation in the marketplace in many cases. There are no significant differences among competing brands of facial tissue, air bubble packaging, mobile garbage bins, moving stairways, lip balm, or adhesive bandages, for example. But the product brands of Kleenex, Bubble Wrap, Dumpster, Escalator, ChapStick and Band-Aid have, quite literally, become the default name for these things.
A brand story provides another path to differentiation – one that’s especially important for challenger businesses looking to unseat bigger brands or overcome perceived or real product differences.
Simon Sinek’s book Start With Why, explains an idea that’s core to brand story differentiation: “People don’t buy what you do; they buy why you do it.”
All companies know what they do. Some try to differentiate with how they do it. If you start with the story of “why you do it,” Sinek says, you help people understand the difference between you and others.
So discovering your brand’s why is a key avenue to any brand story.
But, there’s a challenge.
When a business looks at its story in isolation or as a window into the heart of its brand, a great
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