The 3 Pillars of Corporate Storytelling
Your best story – the one that changes perception of your marketing from typical to trusted – is built on three pillars: Value. Passion. Connection.
Master these pillars and your narrative will stand up and stand out in your competitive marketplace.
A strong corporate story goes beyond the product or sale to create commonality and shared personal experience between the speaker and their listener.
VALUE
Contrary to traditional business models, value is rarely fiscal. While bottom line is always the ultimate indicator of performance, the path to a strong bottom line begins long before the sale itself.
Value starts with personal assessments of morality and alignment with individual belief systems. The parallels between what a brand has to offer and the way it represents the values of those who encounter that brand is crucial. Simply put, until an audience understands why they should give a damn about your #CorporateStorytelling, they won’t.
This is where so many brands fall flat. They offer nothing but pitch to their market, playing to sales, money, and contracts from the first word to the last. And money over meaning is no way to establish success or longevity. We create meaning when we elevate value to our audience over value of ourselves or our profits.
If your corporate story is full of self-aggrandizing statistics, success-driven data points, and technical deep dives, it’s value is to you. If your corporate story is loaded with payoffs for your listener, focused on their success, and designed to make them the hero, its value is to them.
Make my mantra your mantra: Don’t tell them what you want to tell them; tell them what they want to hear.
PASSION
Your passion inspires passion in others. If you don’t care deeply about your corporate story, your audience won’t care either. It’s clear to them you’re simply there to sell, facing an uphill marketing battle with listeners who feel undervalued and disrespected.
Winning communication demands genuine passion for solving your audience’s most pressing problems. Once they feel your passion, they’re ready for the data that gets the job done. Passion creates investment. Demonstrate your passion and they’ll reward it with passion of their own. Once they’re invested, you can hit them with “WHY” arguments.
If you fear the direction of your industry, share your fear. If you’re excited for a new discovery, share that excitement. Passion-driven marketing messages are honest, personal, and align your audience’s reality with yours, resulting in a stronger corporate story. And jettison the corporate speak; it only stifles your passion and turns clarity into confusion. Lose the jargon, acronyms, any unnecessarily complicated industry terms.
CONNECTION
People buy people before they buy products. Until we recognize ourselves in a brand and its story, we won’t connect with that story as our own. Connection occurs when we internalize the value of a product in relation to our own personal or professional lives. As soon as we connect with the corporate story, we become comfortable investing our attention and dollars in that corporation.
Unfortunately, most presentations are designed and delivered for generic, faceless buyers. Nothing changes based on the venue, audience, or circumstance; it’s simply money over meaning. Connection is human-to-human rather than corporation-to-buyer.
Avoid product-centric, information-heavy, hard-sell tactics. Seek connection with your audience by speaking their language and from their point of view instead of your own. Make them the hero of your story, and the focus of every data point or demonstration of product superiority you provide. Create the connection and you create the sale.
BOTTOM LINE
Value. Passion. Connection. Three pillars of a powerful corporate story that turns you from a marketing shill into a trusted, respected partner for success. Deploy these pillars in every message you offer to your audience – spoken or written, onstage or on screen – and you’ll instantly differentiate yourself in a market devoid of all three.
