People tend to treat storytelling as something the marketing team does at the end. The strategy gets decided in a conference room, and then someone is asked to make it sound good.
I’ve come to believe the story comes first. If you can’t tell a clear story about your company, you probably don’t have a clear strategy yet.
What a festival taught me
In college I co-founded Wasatch Mountain Arts, which runs the Wasatch Mountain Film Festival. I’m still involved today as chairman of the board.
A film festival runs on stories twice over. The films are stories, of course. The festival needs one too. When you’re a student starting something that doesn’t exist yet, you have no track record to point to. You have to explain why it should exist and who it’s for. That explanation is what brings in filmmakers, volunteers, sponsors and an audience.
It was the first time I saw a story do real work. It decided who said yes.
What a rebrand taught me
Years later, as director of marketing at The Blogger Network, I led the rebrand that turned it into Monumetric. From the outside, a rebrand looks like a design project. New name, new logo, new website.
From the inside, it forces harder questions. What business are we actually in? Who are we for? What do we want to be known for in five years? You can’t settle on a name until you’ve answered those, and answering them is strategy work.
You can’t name a company until you’ve decided what it is.
Why a clear story is strategy
A good company story makes choices. It says who the customer is, which also says who isn’t. It names the problem you solve, which means you can stop chasing the ones you don’t. Once that story is settled, a lot of decisions get easier.
RELLO’s story is narrow. We work with technically complex B2B companies that have long sales cycles. That one sentence rules out a lot of work we could chase, and it helps the companies we’re built for recognize themselves when they find us.
Hiring gets easier, because candidates can tell whether they belong. Sales and marketing get easier too, because everyone is telling the same story instead of improvising a new one for every call and every campaign.
A simple test
Ask five people at your company to explain what you do and who it’s for. If you get five different answers, more ads won’t help. Leadership needs to decide what the company is, then say it the same way, over and over, until everyone else can too.
That’s slower than launching a campaign. It’s also the work that makes every campaign after it easier.
Stories compound
This is also why brand runs on a ten-year clock. A story told once is a campaign. Told consistently for years, by the company and by its customers, it becomes the thing people know you for.
That’s the top layer of compounding demand. It starts with being able to say clearly what you are.
