BRAND STORY: 07
Create a Love Relationship with Your Customers
How to Build a Brand Story Platform to Create a Consistent and Engaging Customer Experience
There is a hip new food truck roaming Los Angeles run by a multiracial, twenty-something trio called the WOKE! Truck.
More than dishing up food, the WOKE! crew wants to change the way people interact with their food — and with each other. WOKE! grew out of a community service restaurant that donated food to low-income families, and employed and trained employees with criminal, addiction, and teen pregnancy backgrounds. Newly sober and needing purpose, the founder, Max Daniel, turned the operation into a roaming foodie hotspot for cheap but eclectic fusion food.
When asked to give their brand pitch, the trio of Max Daniel, Kashmir Bianca Hughes, and Michael Douglas Powers replied to Vice.com:
“We are Irish, Black, and Asian. We sell fusion food and teach history at the same time. And we use our business to give back to the community. We hire employees fresh out of rehab, train teen mothers for the job, and we do stuff for the community, as well.”
Their tag line:
Feeding Your Body and Your Mind.™
Whether you call their pitch a brand story or a way of spreading a political message, the WOKE! crew has created a way to connect with their customers — a love relationship.
Connecting with customers is the whole point of your Brand Story:
Jen Rubio, co-founder of Away, the durable luggage brand, also got her start by connecting customers to L.A. food trucks. In her first gig, she used social media to create brand stories. As she explained to NewsCred.com:
“Before launching Away, I had built my career as a storyteller… In order to truly be successful, you have to understand who you’re trying to reach, and what they want to hear. I think more and more brands are starting to recognize and appreciate the importance of people-first marketing. It can’t just be about the consumer, but about the human who’s making the choice to interact and consume.
“We created a brand, Away, that was so synonymous with better travel that customers were calling us… asking for tips and recommendations ahead of their upcoming trips!”
This love relationship between the WOKE! Truck and its food fans, and Away and its travel fans is called brand affinity. Brand affinity describes a felt relationship from shared values. It’s different than brand loyalty (for example, loyalty to Tide detergent because your t-shirts come out whiter).
The people who love Jen Rubio’s brand have never been to her factory or met her in person — but they have strong emotional hooks to her brand story. Away promises more than a suitcase; the brand promises adventure. In their words: “Getting Away means getting more out of every trip to come.” Away is the only piece of luggage with a magazine written “for travelers, by travelers.” The magazine “tells compelling, thoughtful, and unique travel stories through the lens of local, creative, and influential people” — and in the process, creates fans for the brand.
If you’re wondering how you’re going to create a cult following for your gutter-cleaning business, consider this:
Cults identify with stories. Same with brands. Whether you plan to groom dogs or write wills, every business has a story. Even the driveway gypsies who knocked on my door falsely claiming they had leftover asphalt from a big job had a brand story. It was a great story — and I bought a truckload!
What I call a Brand Story is also called a “brand platform.” Whether you prefer a platform or a story, a Brand Story includes all the pieces and parts that form a brand. In the same way a movie has a storyline, setting, characters, costumes, and conflict, a Brand Story has its components.
A Brand Story starts with a positioning statement. It functions like a logline for a movie. Here’s the logline for The Godfather:
The aging patriarch of an organized crime dynasty transfers control of his clandestine empire to his reluctant son.
Here’s my made-up positioning statement for Away:
For travel warriors tired of broken bags and dying phones, only Away has designed the perfect and most durable suitcase to accompany a lifetime’s worth of travel adventures.
Away’s Brand Story has created a love relationship: “Since you love to travel, you should love your luggage. Away makes luggage lovable.”
Building Your Brand Story
I know what you’re thinking: Please, no more homework; I just want to sell my widgets!
I feel your pain, but building your Brand Story upfront avoids a streak of fumbles later on. When it comes time to build your website, write an ad, send out social media, create a brochure, exhibit at a trade show, speak at a lunch-and-learn, create a YouTube video, or pitch a big client — you won’t have to sweat it.
Your Brand Story will make it plug-and-play easy to maintain brand consistency and build a love relationship with your customers in the months and years ahead.
Ten Elements form your BRAND STORY
Here’s how each story element build’s a love relationship with your customer:
1. Brand Positioning Statement
A brand owns a position in the mind of the consumer. The brand positioning statement identifies your target customer’s need, and how you solve it through your unique approach or expertise.
Good news: If you’re following along, you crafted your brand position in Chapter 4.
2. Target Customer
You’ve also identified your target customer in Chapter 3 (the purchasers at the top of the bell curve). That’s two down.
Your target customer can grow into new markets. For example, King of Pops started selling ice pops from pushcarts for its target customer — hip pedestrians seeking a gourmet treat — but ultimately expanded into retail stores and catering.
3. Brand Concept
When your customers think of your business, what single word or idea should instantly come to mind? Examples: Volvo = safety (or it did in the past). Southwest Airlines = No-Frills (at least when they started). Zappos = Great Customer Service. Chick-fil-A = No Beef (those cows on the billboards). The Brand Concept is discussed in Chapter 2.
And for Donnie, the big idea for his lawn business is No Carbon.
During the golden age of advertising, Avis car rental built their business around a big idea, We Try Harder, because they were number two after Hertz. Your brand concept is the core message that is always communicated by your brand. The brand concept should drive the headline in an ad, form the key statement on your website, get printed on a t-shirt or a button, or if you hire a skywriter, spell out the message in the sky.
4. Brand Promise
When you keep a promise to a child, you fulfill their expectations. Same with your customers. Your brand fulfills their expectations, meets their needs, and builds their trust so that they become customers for life. Your Brand Promise should be pretty straight-forward.
For your Brand Promise, tell your customers what they can expect from your brand with these three C’s:
- Compelling — The Brand Promise must be something your customer values, like a pediatrician who promises to return all calls within 2 hours (Hah! Making this up).
- Credible — It can’t be pie-in-the-sky jargon like Ford’s “Quality is job one.” A down-to-earth promise is better: “Every BMW goes through optical 3D coordinate measuring technology for quality assurance.”
- Consistent — The promise must be kept every time, and include a mechanism to fix the wrong if you mess up. For example, with Amazon’s A-to-Z Guarantee, Amazon will reimburse you even if it’s a third-party seller who screws up.
Here are other examples: Panera promises “100% clean food.” FedEx built its business by promising “when it absolutely, positively has to get there overnight.” And, Geico promises a simple metric: “15 minutes or less can save you 15% or more on car insurance.”
Some promises are less overt. McDonald’s makes an implicit promise to serve an inexpensive, familiar, and consistent meal quickly in a clean environment. Nutritious isn’t part of the promise.
Even Donnie promises to never to use a gas-powered blower on the job — only a rake. Firing up the blower would quickly undermine his brand promise.
5. Brand Vision
If your brand embraces ideals, goals, or aspirations, promoting your vision is a way to measure success. Brand visions form the core of medical research brands like the American Cancer Society (dedicated to eliminating cancer) as well as new brands launching on Kickstarter that hope to build a better mousetrap. Apple’s vision of making technology friendlier was a guiding force for the company. Each product (Mac, iPod, iPhone) marked a stepping stone toward that vision.
If your company exists for more than making money, by definition, you have a vision — a reason for being. For example, Patagonia: “We’re in business to save our home planet.”
My friend Cindi runs Side By Side, a day program for people with brain injuries, guided by the vision:
“To use community involvement, education, and research to guarantee the opportunity for all people with a brain injury to lead a quality life.”
Your vision does not need to be grandiose. A local home renovator in Atlanta states as his vision: “We believe old houses are worth saving…”
Even a hot dog guy like my neighborhood Doggy Dogg offers a vision:
“Elevating hot dogs into a gourmet experience recognized by serious foodies.”
6. Brand Drivers
A Brand Driver is a fancy word for feelings. What are the emotional benefits that make your brand relevant to your customers? Even though the benefits come from key features and competitive strengths, you sell with feelings.
For example:
- Volvo could cite their NTSB statistics of crash-worthiness, but instead, they sold soccer moms with the feeling of safety.
- Coca Cola offers no nutritional reason to drink their product. Their iconic brand is built on feelings — of shared humanity, lifestyle moments, and the joy of living.
- Kodak, back in the day, didn’t tout their technical superiority over Fuji Film — they sold the nostalgic warmth of capturing memories.
- Pharmaceutical companies love Brand Drivers. The Cialis bathtubs promise mid-life kinkiness, and Humira promises joint-flexible fun with your kids.
When you pull the trim off, car companies sell very similar products — so they use Brand Drivers for differentiation: BMW is a precision-driving machine, Lexus sells the ultimate luxury experience, Subaru offers confidence in challenging terrains, and Jeep promises adventure. And, for your inner outlaw, there’s always Harley Davidson.
Donnie quickly latched on to his Brand Driver:
Feel eco-good by reducing carbon emissions in your own backyard.
7. Brand Character
Brands have personalities that shape their look, feel, voice, and tone. When the Brand Character is spot on, it seems obvious. Consider Harley Davidson versus Vespa, both selling two-wheeled transportation:
The difference between the two is a no-brainer. But when it comes to your brand, it should be just as obvious: Are you friendly like a Vespa, badass like a Harley, happy like a Coke, playful like Skittles, helpful like Allstate, trustworthy like Charles Schwab, futuristic like Tesla, authoritative like Forbes, or stuffy like Grey Poupon?
For most start-ups, the Brand Character reflects the founders’ personalities. Our fast-food chicken wing client, Wing Zone, was started by two college frat guys at the University of Florida, and they created a brand personality to match.
Character drives the brand when it stretches beyond the genre, for example, auto insurance sold by a goofy girl (Flo) or cold medicine sold by a ball of green snot (Mr. Mucus).
What personality would help your customer connect to your brand? Write a sentence that describes your brand’s character. Even a couple of words — warm and friendly, refined and elegant, knowledgeable and authoritative — will help create a memorable brand that resonates with your customers.
8. Brand Look
The brand’s visual look separates mom-and-pops from national brands. Until now, you haven’t had to spend a dime of brand-building cash (unless you filed for a trademark). Brand Look is the fork in the road. To be credible, you need to look credible, and that means professional design for your logo, Web site, collateral, advertising, etc. My neighborhood yoga studio, Form Yoga, grew to become one of the city’s largest, in part, on the strength of its brand look. We will discuss Brand Look for shoe-stringers in Chapter 9.
9. Brand Rituals
“Welcome to Moe’s!” Whether you love or loathe it, the ubiquitous welcome injects the burrito chain with personality each time you walk in the door. If you’ve ever stayed in a DoubleTree Hotel, their warm gooey check-in cookie connects your tastebuds to the brand.
And, before the era of peanut allergies, Southwest Airlines’ bag of peanuts underscored their core concept: No-frills Southwest lets you fly for peanuts.
Brand rituals connect customers viscerally to the brand. Remarkably, while so many brands try to build affinity with tiresome social media posts, a cookie or a donut can do so much more.
Years ago, when I worked at CheckFree Corporation, Denise, the owner of a local copy shop, would visit our marketing department every morning and call out, “Hey guys, got anything for me today?”
What made Denise’s visit compelling was the ritual box of Krispy Kreme donuts she discretely placed on top of a cubicle. Denise owned a quick-print shop, so we started giving her little jobs — notepads, business cards, and forms. The donuts continued to appear every morning, and we got hooked on her in-person convenience: “Denise, can you print a sales sheet? How about this color brochure?”
Denise always answered in the affirmative. We guessed she had a printer friend somewhere, so we didn’t ask how she got the work done. One day, I was walking to the parking lot and spotted Denise’s secret. A stack of Krispy Kreme boxes sat in the back of her car. Denise had mastered the Brand Ritual.
10. Brand Messaging
Writing tight, persuasive copy is hard work — that’s why you only want to write it once. A Brand Messaging platform provides ready-to-go text that you can drop into proposals, web pages, collateral, digital ads, slide decks, and video scripts. A page or two will serve you well.
To create your Messaging Platform, write a phrase or short paragraph for each component of your business, including:
- Tagline — This is a punchier version of your positioning statement. The best tag lines are memorable and poetic, differentiate the brand, and communicate the key benefit. The tagline can be short, like “Got Milk?®” Or long, like MasterCard’s: “There are some things money can’t buy. For everything else, there’s MasterCard.®” Taglines can become iconic: “Melts in Your Mouth, Not in Your Hands.®”
- Slogans — Slogans are similar to the tagline. Think of the slogan as the trademarked flag that waves atop your brand: Intel Inside®, Just Do It®, Where’s the Beef?®, and Bring Out the Best™. Slogans often communicate your secret sauce or differentiator: Walmart — Save money. Live better.
- Descriptor — These generic words live under your logo and describe what you do, for example, Meineke “care care center.” Or CertaPro “Residential. Commercial. Interior. Exterior.” Major brands usually avoid descriptors because their customers already know what they do.
- Product messaging — Create an official description for each of your products or services. Here are some service descriptions I wrote for my friend, Eleanor’s bodywork business. She can pull from these as needed:
- Methods and processes — Describe your processes the same way in all your communications so that they become brands in themselves.
For example, Petco describes its pre-grooming pet screening as a 7-Point Pet Care Check.
- Boilerplate — This is the About Us page of your website. It explains who you are and what you do without hype or spin. The About Us page is often read by the purchasing department or the banker who wants to know what you do before approving a purchase or loan request. A shortened version lives on press releases.
- Bios — The appropriate style for a bio is different for each industry. Would your target customer rather know that you studied biochemistry at Duke or that you do yoga with a goat? Rather than telling too much, each element in your bio should build confidence in your capabilities or approach.
- Elevator Speech — I left the most important for last. This three-minute pitch pulls it all together. The Elevator Speech is so essential, it gets a whole chapter coming right up.
Like a toddler forming a personality, marvel at your brand taking shape. The roots you plant today will continue to grow in the years ahead into love relationships with your customers.
Next: Brand Story 08 | Develop Your Brand Superpower: The Elevator Pitch
