We are fortunate to be able to share with you an exclusive upfront excerpt of brand strategist Fabian Geyrhalter’s upcoming book BIGGER THAN THIS - how to turn any venture into an admired brand. Fabian is one of our Global 100 Mentors.
Further, Fabian was gracious enough to give away 5 copies of his book to our readers. All you have to do to enter is share below tweet with your followers to be the lucky winner of one of five copies of the gorgeous paperback version of the book. The winner will be selected on 1/26/18 and you have to follow @founding in order to be eligible to win:
I just read about BIGGER THAN THIS - how to turn any venture into an admired brand - the new book by #branding strategist @FINIENInsights. Thank you for the excerpt @founding! http://ow.ly/elWj30hS34I #FIworldwide #entrepreneurship #biggerthanthis [Click to Tweet]
Here is the exclusive excerpt of Fabian’s book, the first of eight brand traits that your startup can use to gain more fans and turn into a brand:
Most of us buy brand stories all the time. These stories are often attached to a commodity product. You can find many examples in today’s biggest brands, from Dove owning genuine beauty to Starbucks coining a coffee lingo its customers actually use. As Revlon founder Charles Revson famously said about his cosmetics brand, “In the factory we make cosmetics; in the store we sell hope.”
Today’s startups continue this tradition in both their internal and external branding efforts. Airbnb hired an artist from famed animation studio Pixar to help align its team around its customer service goals and plans to expand its mobile presence, creating stories of the experiences of the host, guest and a hiring manager. The stories exemplified the brand in action and influenced the way the organization worked, as Fast Company detailed at the time.
Stories about a brand are also a powerful way to align consumers around its message. A recent study by the research firm Origin found that consumers are 5% more likely to pick a wine if it features written notes by the winemaker, and they are willing to pay 6% more for it. That is powerful storytelling with immediate return on investment. Another study by PR firm MWWPR found that more than a third of the U.S. population ages 18–80 belongs to a group of “brand activists” who think a company’s actions and reputation are just as important as the product it makes. “Brands and marketers that are thinking about product features and attributes and neglecting to tell their company story are leaving money and market share on the table. Give consumers a reason to believe in your company, and they will give you their loyalty and their activism,” states MWWPR chief strategy officer Careen Winters in Adweek.
Storytelling works just as well in the education sector, as Adam Grant, a professor at The Wharton School, illustrates in his book Give And Take. Grant tells the story of alumni working at a university call center and how they approached potential donors. Group A made the usual cold calls asking other alumni to donate to scholarship funds. These fundraisers saw few rewards for their calls, with most prospects expressing a lack of interest within the first seconds of the call. Another group started sharing stories on how scholarships changed past recipients’ lives. By simply reading these recipients’ letters, this group tripled donations. The letters were essentially stories and flipped the intangible into something tangible, the unrelatable into something emotional. As Grant shows, stories can change perspectives more than any data analysis ever could, and they can even transform a commodity product into a meaningful brand.
Luggage manufacturer Away launched successfully in 2015 by creating a beautiful hardcover book titled The Places We Return To that featured interviews with “really interesting people from the creative community – writers, artists and photographers.” The company printed 1,200 books. They came with a gift card for a piece of luggage, which was released four months later. Indeed, there was no luggage yet, solely a book about traveling. Every copy of the book sold out. The success of the book triggered stories mentioning the luggage brand throughout the media landscape, including content by the creative contributors, many considered social media influencers themselves. “You don’t push your product. You create things that are fun to talk about, to write about, to share,” co-founder Jen Rubio (both co-founders are Warby Parker alums) told Inc. Today, the book has become a full-fledged magazine titled Here “for travelers, by travelers,” as well as the Airplane Mode podcast “exploring the reasons we travel and places we find ourselves.” As Rubio added in Fast Company, “It’s insane to me how many luggage companies never talk about travel.” The unique factor did not stop there as Away took advantage of the popularity of customization. Allowing future luggage owners to personalize their product, the startup hired artists to hand-paint the customer’s initials onto the suitcase.
As Shonda Rhimes, creator of television series Grey’s Anatomy (among many others), stated in Forbes, “In a world of unlimited voices and choices, those who can bring people together and tell a good story have power.” Leading with story to make a brand stand out can be summed up as the art of story branding. Anyone who has taken a marketing class in college or received an MBA has probably learned about the “unique selling proposition,” or USP. Jim Signorelli, author of Storybranding, says the new USP is the “Unique Story Proposition.” Making your brand the hero of the story creates deep emotional connections, the same way as when you read about a hero in a book or as you binge-watch your favorite cable TV series. Through the assistance of social sharing and predominantly online product research and subsequent purchases, brand stories quickly turn into brand gold. They are now the “unique brand story proposition” that turns a brand story into a brand purchase.
Matthew Griffin, the founder of Combat Flip Flops, understands this well. While on duty in Afghanistan, Griffin, then a U.S. Army Ranger, stumbled upon an Afghan combat boot factory that also created flip flops for soldiers for when they were taking off their boots to pray. Feeling empathy for the people he met (“such honorable hosts; an amazing experience,” he told Inc. magazine), he immediately knew he wanted to bring those flip flop designs home with the goal of creating jobs and funding education in war-torn countries such as Afghanistan. Griffin took the saying “Borders frequented by merchants seldom need soldiers” and inspired his tribe to help that cause. The website now features lines such as “bad for combat, perfect for peacemaking” to describe the flip flops offered. There is no big product or service innovation in the case of Combat Flip Flops, but there is a story that is so much bigger than flip flops – a story that leads to sales. For consumers, the draw is, “If I can pick any flip flops, I might as well pick Combat because I want to be part of their story.”
Identifying your unique story can propel your commodity product into a brand. It is the absolute best way to launch a brand that is not based on innovation.
The Story Commandments
- Go back to the roots of your company or the way the founders met. More often than not, the sheer determination that fueled the launch has a unique story already hidden within it. All you have to do is voice it in a clear and accessible manner.
- Think of ways brands in other verticals are winning consumers’ hearts through unique stories; then see if there is room for similar stories in your niche. Coming up with such a story for your brand may involve daunting tasks such as changing operational processes, staffing, the way you source product or the location where you work or deliver what you sell. If the change supports or even builds a bigger brand story, your short-term loss will be rewarded in the long term.
- Make your unique story the backbone of your brand’s positioning, and keep talking the talk, followed by sincerely walking the walk.
- If you have a good story, weave it into everything you say and everything you do. It’s not an annoyance to your audience. It’s your brand glue that holds it all together. Let the world form an opinion based on your repeat actions supporting your honest story, and your audience will turn into brand adopters and advocates. This is different from shouting what you want them to buy into from a soapbox, which will turn them off and ultimately bore them.
This was a chapter on ‘storytelling,’ one of eight brand traits from Fabian Geyrhalter’s upcoming book, BIGGER THAN THIS - how to turn any venture into an admired brand. You can follow Fabian on Twitter, connect on LinkedIn, or purchase the book on Amazon. If you are launching in the Los Angeles, Orange County or San Diego chapter you will have Fabian as a mentor during your FI program.
