Is Your Business Telling the Wrong Brand Story? [Podcast]
What story does your business tell about itself? How much has that story changed since you went into business? Have the stories of employees and customers impacted your own?
According to this week’s guest on the Conex Show, too many brands aren’t honest with themselves about the answers to these questions. Rather than sharing their stories of confronting failure and embracing growth, they skip over them creating “story gaps.”
Brands that paint a static picture of their brand stories instead of treating them as an evolving process damage their ability to truly connect with their audiences. Your business is as complex and ever-changing as the people who run it—its storytelling should showcase that!
Kathy Klotz-Guest, CEO of Keeping it Human, joins the Content Experience Show podcast to discuss what businesses get wrong about building their brand story.
In This Episode:
It’s Okay if Your Brand Story Changes Over Time
Sometimes we forget that our brand story—the big company story—actually has many smaller stories layered within it. It’s a living, breathing organism that evolves, and just because we put it on paper doesn’t mean we’re not able to change it as it evolves.
“How do we create a culture that understands storytelling so that everybody is headed in the same direction?”
Businesses Should Share More Stories About Failure
Klotz-Guest affirms that we don’t tell stories of failure enough. By sharing them with our audiences, we’re able to provide insights on what we learned and how those challenges have equipped us to serve our market better.
“Are we telling stories of rebirth, or hey, maybe a product failure? Maybe we released a product, and it didn’t do well, and maybe we have to tell the story to the market of what we learned from that failure.” – @kathyklotzguest
How to Identify and Fix “Story Gaps”
Story gaps are something that businesses often overlook, Klotz-Guest says. She shares the example of a SaaS company she worked with that sold an Excel alternative to help finance and accounting teams speed up traditional month-end processes. They were selling the story of “Excel’s broken”—when in reality, it isn’t. Their solution really solved for a time and resourcing issue, empowering companies to be forward-thinking rather than always catching up on the previous month’s accounting.
“If you're selling a solution to a problem your customer doesn't have, you have a story gap.” – @kathyklotzguest