Attention Businesses: “Don’t promise us a story and not deliver”
Thanks to Gregg Morris’s storytelling scoop.it page, I came across a fun, and provocative article by Daniel McInerny, aka The Comic Muse:
It’s not only a cautionary tale for the marketing department in businesses to get clear on what is a story and what isn’t.
It’s also relevant to an issue on my mind for the last few years:
Employers who THINK they are engaging in Employer Branding when they post videos of employees saying nice things about them.
There’s a problem with this:
These “Employer Branding” videos are essentially meaningless…
They are essentially meaningless, because what they say is basically no different from what all the other employee video testimonials are saying–e.g. “It’s a fun place to work” “We get to do great work”, “We have great values that we live by.”
Etc, etc. etc.
If you want to truly want to communicate what makes you different, have your employees tell stories.
(Here’s an earlier post on using Employee Stories in Employer Branding.)
OK…enough of my rant, let’s listen to Daniel tell his story and think of how you can apply it to your business, whether marketing your product or service or…as an employer…marketing your Employer Brand.
Here’s Daniel’s story:
“Every great coffee has a story.”
That’s what caught my attention this morning from the back of the Caribou Coffee bag.
So okay. You got me. Tell me a story.
“After summiting a mountain in Alaska, our founders realized life is too big to dream small. So they started a company that would go to any length to create a rich coffee experience that…”
Blah blah blah.
Not okay. You lost me.
You told me you wanted to tell me a story. You began by telling me about unnamed “founders” climbing a mountain in Alaska at the top of which they found a motivational thought. Which somehow inspired them to start a coffee company. The rest of the “story” is marketing bromides: “…That’s why we search the world, meet the growers, choose the finest beans from the best harvests, and roast them to perfection.”
Is there any major coffee company in the world that doesn’t say these things?
for the rest of the story and more of Daniel’s excellent work..
