story – Page 2 – Bronwyn Ritchie

Your story matters. Add bubbles

Your story matters.

It matters because you matter.

It matters because it can serve you.

What happens, then, if you add bubbles?

What are bubbles?

Fun?

Imagination?

A symbol of something else – dreams, beauty, the ethereal?

What happens if you add that to your story – fun, imagination, dreams, beauty, the ethereal?

Your story changes.

Now it has an element of fun/imagination/dreams/beauty/the ethereal – whatever it was that bubbles meant to you.

Now …

What does it mean to you if you think your story has that element – has always had it, or maybe will have it from now on?

Fun where maybe there was none.

Imagination where maybe you saw none.

Dreams – oops they were always there. What if you recognised them, gave them validity and used the fact, for yourself, that they were there?

And …

What does it mean to someone else if you add that element to the story you tell about yourself.

What will they think if you let them know you have fun in your story,

if you let them know there is imagination where maybe they saw none,

dreams that you hadn’t even recognised for yourself, but that hold significance for that person?

Your story matters – add bubbles!

All Marketers Are Liars: The Power of Telling Authentic Stories in a Low Trust World

All Marketers Are Liars: The Power of Telling Authentic Stories in a Low Trust World (2005)

This was the seventh published book by Seth Godin, and the third in a series of books on 21st century marketing, following Purple Cow and Free Prize Inside.

Basically, Seth Godin suggests that there are three questions to ask, as a marketer.

“What’s your story?”
“Will the people who need to hear this story believe it?”
“Is it true?”

First question “What’s your story?”

There are small businesses that are so focused on what they do that they forget to take the time to describe the story of why they do it.

If what you’re doing matters, really matters, then I hope you’ll take the time to tell a story. A story that resonates and a story that can become true.

What we do know (and what we talk about) is our story. Our story about why people use, recommend or are loyal to you and your products. Our story about the origin and the impact and the utility of what we buy.

Marketing is storytelling.

The story of your product, built into your product. The ad might be part of it, the copy might be part of it, but mostly, your product and your service and your people are all part of the story.

Tell it on purpose.

Second Question: “Will the people who need to hear this story believe it?”

Just to be clear…

The truth is elusive. No one knows the whole truth about anything. We certainly don’t know the truth about the things we buy and recommend and use.

You believe things that aren’t true.

Let me say that a different way: many things that are true are true because you believe them.

We believe what we want to believe, and once we believe something, it becomes a self-fulfilling truth.

If you think that (more expensive) wine is better, then it is. If you think your new boss is going to be more effective, then she will be. If you love the way a car handles, then you’re going to enjoy driving it.

That sounds so obvious, but if it is, why is it so ignored? Ignored by marketers, ignored by ordinarily rational consumers and ignored by our leaders.

Once we move beyond the simple satisfaction of needs, we move into the complex satisfaction of wants. And wants are hard to measure and difficult to understand. Which makes marketing the fascinating exercise it is.

Third question: Is it true?

When you are busy telling stories to people who want to hear them, you’ll be tempted to tell stories that just don’t hold up. Lies. Deceptions.

This sort of storytelling used to work pretty well. Joe McCarthy became famous while lying about the “Communist threat.” Bottled water companies made billions while lying about the purity of their product compared to tap water in the developed world.

The thing is, lying doesn’t pay off any more. That’s because when you fabricate a story that just doesn’t hold up to scrutiny, you get caught. Fast.

So, it’s tempting to put up a demagogue for Vice President, but it doesn’t take long for the reality to catch up with the story. It’s tempting to spin a tall tale about a piece of technology or a customer service policy, but once we see it in the wild, we talk about it and you whither away.

If your stories are inauthentic, you cross the line from fib to fraud. Marketers fail when they are selfish and scurrilous, when they abuse the tools of their trade and make the world worse. That’s a lesson learned the hard way by telemarketers, cigarette companies, and sleazy politicians.

Godin himself has said….

“I wasn’t being completely truthful with you when I named this book. Marketers aren’t liars. They are just storytellers… I was trying to go to the edges. No one would hate a book called All Marketers Are Storytellers. No one would disagree with it. No one would challenge me on it. No one would talk about it.”^[1]

Godin is witty and his writing is compelling.

There is much to learn about marketing in All marketers are liars and subjects like framing, the attention economy, cognitive dissonance, and adoption curves, and, of course, marketing mindset.

He set out to “go to the edges”, cause hate, instigate disagreement. And perhaps he did.

The bottom line is that marketers were, and some continue to be, liars – to some extent. Storytelling allows us to stop that, and yet remain effective. As I wrote in this article , the brand story you tell is the brand you live, create, deliver.

Prepare to be blown away by the story, the message

This is a client story.

Not a testimonial,

a client story.

It is a classic hero’s journey – ordinary child, snatched into something he could not control, that challenged him almost beyond endurance, of a saviour/guru who took him out of the challenges and gave him the opportunity to create a different life. It even includes the return – coming full circle, with the hero feeling he was able to go back and reassure his mother, knowing that she would be proud of him and happy to see that he was settled and successful.

It has a message – several in fact – but it IS an advertisement.

It IS marketing.

Western Sydney University made it possible for him to return, to complete the circle, to wipe out the horribly challenging life and to be proud of what he had achieved.

What do your clients want? – pride in achievement, overcoming the challenges faced now …? What do they want to be able to do, have, be?

What is their story

… your “client story”?

THAT

is YOUR

marketing.

………………………………………………………………………..

If you would like help with writing and using your client story, please contact me here

It’s the ONE STORY you really need to tell, to use, to unpack, to make your marketing work seamlessly and easily.

Connecting the dots and the inspiration of David Bowie

R.I.P David Bowie.

He was an icon of our age. Meant so much to so many people for so many reasons. He strummed our pain. He gave us possibilities outside our squares. He provided sheer entertainment and amazing music. He stimulated our creativity. He gave us solace.

Many of us are now listening to his latest and final recording for the hints he embedded about his attitude to life … and to death.

Even then he was orchestrating his life. In 1976 he told Playboy “I’ve now decided that my death should be very precious. I really want to use it. I’d like my death to be as interesting as my life has been and will be.”

His wife, Iman tweeted just days prior “Sometimes you will never know the true value of a moment until it becomes a memory.”

And it’s true.

It’s only when we connect the dots backward that the story reveals itself.

We are now looking back at Bowie’s latest album, at the quotations, and connecting the dots back from the death of an icon, in order to understand his life and his extraordinary genius, and what it means for you and me, our understanding of our lives, and the possibilities for our selves.

Iman summed it up beautifully – it’s not until the moment becomes a memory that we are able to connect the dots back and find the story, the one we can use for ourselves to explain, to learn and to become more of what we want and need to be.

And wasn’t his life such an amazing story?!!

Your story is not his story. Neither is mine.

Each of us has our own story and it matters

to the extent that when we are looking to explain ourselves, to learn and to become more of what we want and need to be

and

when we are looking to explain ourselves so others can learn and become more of what they want and need to be

there are stories in our own lives that we can use.

Ordinary though those lives seem to be – those stories are there!

……………………………………………………….

If you would like to uncover the stories in your life to get the results you want, perhaps a “Connecting the dots – Finding the Stories” session with me would benefit you.

It’s guided brainstorming, with me, in person or via Skype, to pinpoint and define your story or stories so that you can grow your business, your brand, your leadership, your team or initiate the change you need to make in your own life. Go here to let me know the details of why you need the story or stories, and I will let you know how we will go about achieving it. Click here to Find your Story NOW

The story of a secret – your secret

Standing out in the deluge

We build ourselves out of story

We look at our life story as a timeline, stretching back to our births and forward to our deaths. We see it as an historic fact, and our story up until now has made us what we are. And it has. But there is more than one […]

The story principles Nike uses will work for you too.

This is marketing.

And

it’s a story.

And there’s

one word

behind that marketing,

one word

behind that story …

“Grit”.

Yes it’s Nike.

Yes they probably pay their creative/advertising team huge wages.

But those two principles can be applied to all marketing, everywhere.

And you can apply them no matter what your marketing budget.

What is your product/client story?

What is the one word behind your story, behind your marketing, behind your brand?

After that it just remains for you to find places to tell that story.

The danger of a single story

Our lives, our cultures, are composed of many overlapping stories. Novelist Chimamanda Adichie tells the story of how she found her authentic cultural voice — and warns that if we hear only a single story about another person or country, we risk a critical misunderstanding.

In Nigeria, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel Half of a Yellow Sun has helped inspire new, cross-generational communication about the Biafran war. In this and in her other works, she seeks to instill dignity into the finest details of each character, whether poor, middle class or rich, exposing along the way the deep scars of colonialism in the African landscape.

Adichie’s newest book, The Thing Around Your Neck, is a brilliant collection of stories about Nigerians struggling to cope with a corrupted context in their home country, and about the Nigerian immigrant experience.

Adichie builds on the literary tradition of Igbo literary giant Chinua Achebe—and when she found out that Achebe liked Half of a Yellow Sun, she says she cried for a whole day. What he said about her rings true: “We do not usually associate wisdom with beginners, but here is a new writer endowed with the gift of ancient storytellers.”
“When she turned 10 and read Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, about the clash between Igbo tradition and the British colonial way of life, everything changed: ‘I realized that people who looked like me could live in books.’ She has been writing about Africa ever since.” Washington Post

Would you let your son dive into this pool? Would a story change your mind?

I love visiting waterfalls and creeks and swimming holes in the rainforest.

There is beauty.

There is peace.

But also a sense of activity as the water moves through its environment, trickling or roaring, making music of its own and changing the landscape as it goes.

This was a river, one of many, that we visited on our holiday last month, with all of the beauty and peace and movement.

It is a popular tourist place, with facilities for visitors including beautifully maintained walks and lookouts.

The river runs through huge rocks and the place is actually called “The Boulders”.

At many of the places we had visited before this one, there were swimming “holes” where people were swimming in the rivers, cold though the temperature was at the time, and other places where tour guides showed their clients how to inch across the rocks and slide safely with the water to a pool below.

It’s something that people do.

I have never swum in these water holes, but I like to see the joy and fun that people have who do.

At a lake we visited there were the usual young men daring each other to feats of daring by diving backwards with a somersault into the lake, off a pontoon.

And in watercourses all around the country on any given day, there are children swinging out over lagoons and waterholes on an old tyre attached to a rope and jumping off into the water.

And all around the country, in any given year there will be accidents – people who want that fun, carefree joy and challenge – but who dive into shallow water or land on something submerged in the water. There are people absolutely incapacitated because of such accidents or even worse.

……………………………………………………

In many places there are signs, just like this one …

and on the whole, people abide by them.

Not always.

……………………………………………………

If I were a young man (or woman, though it seems to be young men who are more tempted), would I abide by them?

If I were a young man’s mother, would I want him to abide by them?

I know the temptation is strong for the fun, carefree joy and challenge, and I know it is not always resisted.

……………………………………………………

But at The Boulders, the signs were different.

And here’s where the story comes in.

I had never ever before seen a sign that said “Many people have died here”, and it was repeated on signs throughout the area.

People have died here.

That is a four word story.

I like to think it would have more impact than the standard sign.

If you were a young man (or woman), would you be more likely to abide by the rule?

If you were a young man’s parent or friend, would you be more likely to persuade him?

I would like to think so.

I know as a mother … I would.

I was caught by this thought every time we passed such a sign.

But then when we walked out of the rainforest into the car park, I noticed this plaque on a rock.

Did he dive … and die? Perhaps not, but if the story is that he did,

imagine his mother, his father, his friends, his family, his community and how they felt when he did not return – forever – just because of that daredevil impulse.

That is a heartrending story of a young man who did not live out his life as he could have and whose death must have caused waves and years of anguish.

If you were a young man (or woman), would you be more likely to abide by the rule … knowing that story?

If you were a young man’s parent or friend, would you be more likely to persuade him?

I would like to think so.

I know as a mother … I would.

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