Take the Time to Empower

Why Is It Important to Take the Time to Empower:

Your Employees? Your Customers? Your Ambassadors?

People are smart, and can generally figure things out for themselves right? When you work for a company, or use it’s products you generally have a good idea of why you do these things and what it means for your life.  No one is disputing or arguing that consumers are intelligent, or that your employees understand why their job is important.  No one can argue that ambassadors have an affiliation for the brand that they are promoting.  So why am I writing this post?

Dilution

Every person that engages with your brand, whether they are an employee, a customer or an ambassador, brings with them different experiences, different frames of references, even different vocabularies.  So it is natural that they would all describe their understanding of your brand, the reasons they like your brand and why others should do so as well in different ways.  While having someone describe your brand in their own unique way could be a good thing – it also causes dilution.  Your brand story becomes less powerful the more it’s told in different ways.

Take a moment to think about it…one person might describe your brand as something that is essential to their daily life and another might describe you as a passive service or product that they use everyday.  Both individuals like your brand and would recommend it, but they are going to talk about your brand in different ways.

How do you prevent Dilution?

Clear your schedule, pull your team together (even if it’s just yourself) and grab something to write with.  You’re going to create a strong brand story to give:

• to your employees when someone asks them what they do for a living or who form whom they work.
• to your customers so that they know exactly why they choose your brand over another and can clearly communicate that to the people whom they interact with everyday.
• to your brand ambassadors so that they can actively and accurately promote your brand to their followers.

Every brand story is going to be different, but they all should have the same qualities.

Your brand story should be:

1. Concise
2. Clear
3. Emotive
4. Sharable

Concise: A concise message, is easy to understand quickly.  Life isn’t a trade show where you can draw a person into your booth and take fifteen minutes to explain to them what it is you do and why that’s relevant to them.  You need to be able to effectively communicate just what your brand is, and why it is important to your customers in quickly and accurately.  Your customers are busy.  They’re running to work, they’re planning who is going to pick their child up from one activity and take them to the next.  That’s why being concise is so important. Just because it’s important doesn’t mean that it’s easy.

Clear: Its fun and easy to get flowery in the language that we use to describe our brands.  That’s why we want to be concise, but being concise doesn’t always mean that our message is clear.  You want to be able to clearly communicate the most important reasons a consumer should choose your brand.  This is to grab their attention and draw them in, let your employees and and your longer forms of marketing explain the other reasons and uses from which a consumer can benefit.

Emotive: Think about the last great story that you heard, long or short.  What made it great? Chances are, the speaker or storyteller was emotional – they conveyed one or more emotions that drew you into their story.  You want to do more than just tell a person that they need, you want to make them feel it.  An emotive brand story will draw the consumer in and make them want to know more.

Sharable: This might be the most difficult of the four qualities of a strong brand story.  It requires you to be cognizant of all of the different personas or types of customers that benefit from your product or service, and to be able to use language that is relevant and meaningful to all of them.  In a nutshell, to be sharable, you brand story must walk the fine line of being specific yet broad enough to reach your entire audience.

How to create a strong brand story:

• Brainstorm adjectives to describe your brand.
• Take those adjectives and turn them into reasons consumers might choose your brand.
  • For example if your adjective is simple – describe the task that it simplifies.
• Now narrow down those statements about brand to just a handful of the best.
• Here’s the tough part, take those couple of statements and turn them into a one to two sentence brand story.
• You’re not done yet!  It’s time let it marinate.  Walk away from that brand story and take a break for a few days.  Then come back and think critically about it again.  If it’s still relevant, easy to digest, emotive and sharable then congratulations, you’ve done it!

A brand story, just like your brand, is a living and breathing thing.  Your brand may change and develop over time so be sure to check back in with your brand story and evaluate whether it is still accurate and strong.  You may find that you need to tweak it every so many years.  This is a good exercise to go through every now and again whether you find that you want to make a change or not.  In doing so you are checking in on the the health and strength of your brand much like a trainer does for an athlete.