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By Dan Martin
Storytelling has become one of those ethereal “growth” concepts that has gained enough traction to be mentioned in a large number of discussions involving business growth and success, with most of these mentions offering very little substance on how it works or how to do it effectively. The tone I get from these conversations reminds me of Wi-Fi; we know it’s all around us and it’s clear when it’s not working, but when it is, we’re not really sure why.
As a result, storytelling-related projects can and often do get passed over in favor of projects that offer more immediate gratification: SEO content creation, social media advertising, Black Friday sales offers, desperation-fueled winback campaigns.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: the resonance and relevance of your foundational narrative and your core stories will make or break the effectiveness of all of these tactics, and every other initiative you’re considering for growth, like your newsletter, your blog, webinars and podcasts, event sponsorships and direct mail. Having strong stories, sticking to them and using them strategically is one of the non-negotiables in marketing and organizational success; more than almost anything, it separates the organizations who survive and thrive from everyone else.
To further dispel the mythical haze that has settled on storytelling, what makes these stories powerful and important isn’t creative mastery (although we could all use a little more of that). It’s getting to the stories that so perfectly show the connection between your organization and your potential customers, clients, donors or members that your audience has no choice but to pay attention. It’s about scaling back to the smallest number of stories possible and then it’s about repetition, consistency and discipline.
Simple? Absolutely. Easy? Not at all. Worth the effort? Every time.
What Stories Do I Need for My Organization?
One of the things we get wrong about stories is thinking we need hundreds or thousands of different messages. If we blanket and saturate the market on every topic that even remotely ties into our product or service, our prospects will have to see one of them, right?
Maybe, but if those messages are all different, you’re not showing people who you truly are. The right stories are less about brand awareness, which is often focused on making the most people possible aware that you exist, and more about brand applicability, showing the limited group of your ideal customers how your brand connects to their problems. Any person who is remotely interested in purchasing your product or service is going to do their research, and if they don’t see a cohesive, easy-to-understand story that tells them why they should care and how you will help them solve a problem that’s keeping them up at night, they’ll move on to the next provider.
What we truly need is a few great stories that we repeat in messages customized for each different mechanism; a long-form blog post will naturally have a different message than a 200-character social post, but the story can and should be the exact same. So, what are these core stories?
Bedrock Stories: The Ones You Know by Heart
Think of your bedrock stories as how you would answer the “Tell me about your organization” or some version of that in a side conversation or in a text message reply or when you’re on stage introducing your company at an event and you only have a minute.
These stories live at the very core of how you talk about your organization, and they generally focus more on your “why” than your “what.” Bedrock stories are the answers to, “Why do you exist and why should your customers, prospects and your stakeholders (other people who may not be buyers but who need to know who you are and what you do) care?”
If you’re the leader of your organization or the founder or owner of a business, nobody should be telling you what these stories are. You can certainly get help refining them and articulating them, and that can absolutely help bring these stories to life. But the raw material has to come from you. Your brand is your brand, and who you are is who you are. You can test different messages and tweak things as you go; if you can’t bring these to mind immediately, that’s a problem.
The central bedrock story for every organization is your strategic narrative. Andy Raskin, the godfather of the concept, defines a strategic narrative as “the category-defining story that guides our strategy—what we build, how we go to market, how we interact with our customers and investors.” A strong strategic narrative is one of the most critical ways to set and maintain the direction for your organization.
Your strategic narrative ties what you do into a bigger change in the world, so your product or service isn’t floating in the Sea of Sameness and also ties every communications and marketing and sales effort to the core purpose of your organization. If you do it well, your strategic narrative can double as your pitch deck or call script, easily customized for each potential customer or donor or client.
A more tactical definition of a strategic narrative is, “a single story that sets your vision for a desired future.” The elements of a strategic narrative are:
- The shift in the market or the world that creates urgency and has big stakes for the people you’re trying to reach. For Square, this was the fact that many small business owners still had to accept cash payments, limiting their growth; the product created huge opportunities for a market that previously had few.
- Painting a picture of what the desired future looks like. This means moving beyond what you say is happening or will happen. Too many messages stop at whether something will be better or worse in the future, with many using scare tactics (“if you’re not preparing, you’re already behind!”). If you truly want to sell an ideal state to people, you have to know what it looks and feels and sounds like, and you have to be able to paint that picture. Why is the desired future state better than the old way/current way? What’s different? What’s the same?
- Showing what it means to thrive and what it means to struggle in the desired future. Now, bring that urgency and those high stakes home for people by creating a simple side-by-side picture of life in the old (current) world and life in the new world. While most people will innately want to be in the new world, they need to see what’s going to happen to the old world (and the people who choose to stay there). In most cases, your organization is competing less against your competition and more against inaction and the status quo. Your job here is to get that status quo to feel very uncomfortable.
- Sharing the tools people need to succeed in the new world. This is where your products and services fit in. I think of this portion of the narrative as part tying what you do to why you do it and part overcoming objections about your organization before they’re raised. It’s your chance to identify those things that are slowing down the people buying your products and services and showing why they are so important in the desired future state.
- Backing up your claims with data. Especially in an environment where it’s becoming ever more difficult to trust a lot of the data that’s thrown at us every day, the change you’re telling the world about and why and how your product/service fits into it must have the backing of data. These are the primary sources on which you’re basing your market need, the rock-solid data points your potential customers’ problems, and what you have to show as to how your product or service makes a quantifiable difference.
While every strategic narrative is a bedrock story, not all bedrock stories are strategic narratives. If you only have one bedrock story, though, make it your strategic narrative.
One of the more well-worn (pun intended) and also best examples of strong bedrock stories is Patagonia. As you likely know, Patagonia makes quality, expensive, long-lasting outerwear. Their brand is strong enough and has been around long enough to be known for those products, but that’s often not the first thing most people think when they think of Patagonia.
The organization has long been one of the most outspoken and vociferous supporters of the environment, and they also built a reputation for taking action with their Common Threads Pledge and other initiatives to reduce carbon footprint and build a more sustainable company. Then in 2022, the founder effectively gave away the company, donating all future profits to support the environment and making Earth Patagonia’s only shareholder. That’s a bedrock story – it’s not about what they do, it’s about why they do it and what they stand for outside of the goods or services they provide.
Product/Service Stories: Answering the “What Do You Do?” Question
These are the stories you tell to explain your products and services in your customer’s language and through the lens of the problems they’re trying to solve.
In my life as a corporate marketer, the biggest mistake I saw companies make was conflating product content with sales content. “Product marketing” meant creating product sheets, competitor comparisons, sales decks and other “enablement” tools for sales to use with prospects. These items can all be useful, but without the right underlying stories, creating them is a waste of time.
Your core product/service stories aren’t an exhaustive list of features or a menu of services. They tell your prospects and current customers, donors, members or other stakeholders very clearly what you’re offering, why they might need it, what they’ll get out of it, and other important details that they need to make a decision, like how you’ll be paid. They lay important groundwork for sales content, which should be treated as a way to distribute these stories through a channel or medium instead of an area to make up new messages and offers on the fly.
The other big mistake we make in talking about our products and services is failing to use the language of our customers. Too often, we think we know best because we created the product or service. So, we talk about the product or service how we want to talk about them, and if people aren’t responding, it’s because they aren’t seeing the message or we haven’t hammered them hard enough with cold outreach. The real problem is the message itself.
The only perspective that matters is how your customers are perceiving the product and service you are offering. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t tell the truth about the product or service; if what you’re saying isn’t the truth, you’ve already lost. It simply means that you need to shift the way you present your core offering and the features that surround it in a way that resonates with how prospects and customers are thinking about it.
Kleenex is a great example of adapting a product to how customers are viewing it. Kimberly-Clark’s original concept was a disposable towel to wipe off makeup, and that’s what they went to market with. The product was selling, but instead of wiping off makeup, people were using the darned things to blow their noses! The company pivoted, sales skyrocketed, and the rest is history.
Another of my favorite examples is Bic. The company ran this advertisement in 2024:
Bic doesn’t lead with a grandiose story about the great shift in the world and the market need for cheap pens. It’s not what’s most compelling about their product. Bic’s story is about stability and consistency and staying the course. And the story works, because it’s so uniquely Bic. Bic knows their target market and customer very well. It’s probably not executives making a million a year – those people are the target market for Mont Blanc. For Bic, it’s people who need to write a check for the contractor and they’re rummaging through the junk drawer looking for something that works.
Teaching Stories: Education With Business Intent
Your teaching stories are the stories you tell your prospects and customers to help them begin to solve their most important problems (with or without your help). Done well, these stories:
- Show your expertise without hard selling any part of your products or services
- Build credibility for your brand and solutions by placing you at the head of your specific category in the minds of your current and future target buyers
- Remind your audience that your first passion is in helping them be successful
I love Seth Godin’s definition of marketing primarily because it gets to the heart of why organizations must focus on doing this well: ““Marketing is the generous act of helping someone solve a problem. Their problem. Marketing helps others become who they seek to become.” Teaching stories are your way into a buyer’s mind and heart before you get around to pitching your product or service.
These stories must be helpful, they have to be created and delivered with no expectation of immediate return, and they have to be more specific than generic. Especially with the tidal wave of high-level, cookie-cutter “content” flooding every corner of the market, being “educational” is not enough. The difference between what I call teaching stories and educational content is that a core teaching story needs to teach the reader something they didn’t know, cause them to reframe existing knowledge or beliefs, or provide a fresh perspective on a common problem. Once again, easier said than done, but I promise that it’s worth the effort.
The biggest mistake I see with teaching stories is conflating the concept with creating a ton of how-to content. I’ve certainly been guilty of this in my career. Even with AI overviews and the changes to search engine optimization, how-to content can still be a useful part of your content strategy. If you create very good how-to content that satisfies the parameters listed above, they can also serve as valuable teaching stories. Starting with how-to content can cause you to create assets that are not tied well enough to your model and goals; it could be the best content in the world and generate a ton of engagement, but it’s unlikely to make an impact on your top- or bottom-line.
Your core teaching stories need to be closer to the prospect or customer need and pain point. Imagine you’re a small business selling spa tubs in Colorado. The temptation is to immediately start writing blog posts or creating videos about the top 5 reasons to own a hot tub. While you’ll still hear this approach extolled by certain pundits, I think it’s a tactic in search of a broader strategy. Here’s why:
First, think about how many other people can and are writing or filming on that same exact topic. You’re immediately competing in a crowded space and likely against people with a lot deeper pockets. Second, think about how far that content is from your end goal, which is generating a strong lead and then selling them your product. Playing out that strong, a person would have to be considering a hot tub in Colorado, they would have to land on your piece and site out of the hundreds out there, have to like what you wrote, start researching more deeply about your company, call to speak to a sales rep and buy a hot tub. We’d all love if things actually worked this way, but they don’t. Is that content piece worth having? If you can create a version that’s different enough from what’s already out there? Sure, but not by itself. How-to content should roll up under a true teaching story that gets closer to why people do and don’t buy hot tubs in Colorado (and more specifically, why they should buy them from you).
The core teaching stories for this company, if they’re located in Colorado, would likely be focused on turning around the objections to buying and owning a hot tub in Colorado. This could mean stories about the health benefits of hot tubs in a semi-arid desert climate, stories about how the annualized cost of owning a hot tub in Colorado is less than people think, stories about how a hot tub can add to the resale value of a house in Colorado or in the mountains, stories about the common pitfalls of hot tub ownership in Colorado and what hot tub buyers need to know before making a purchase.
These stories are still educating people, but they’re doing it in a way that provides value for you and your organization closer to the purchase. To gain the trust required to get people to make any purchase, and especially a purchase that’s more than $100, you need to help them first.
Once you have the key objections covered and you’ve made sure you have content on your site that covers all of the positives your prospects are likely thinking about, then you can get into more of the how-to content about maintenance, having the best hot tub party, and maybe most importantly, how to tell people to get out of your hot tub when they’re overstayed their welcome.
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As a Canopy Expert Advisor, Dan Martin works with business leaders to strengthen the foundations of their marketing and communications programs, helping them save money and drive revenue. He brings a blend of strategic and tactical skill gained from an 18-year corporate career in finance, tech and nonprofit organizations. Dan earned his MBA in marketing from the Daniels College of Business.
If you’re looking for fractional experts like Dan who can help your business thrive in 2025, Canopy Advisory Group can help in every facet of the discovery, hiring and onboarding process. Contact us today to schedule a free consultation.