Story Telling

I don't know if you know or not but in addition to all the stuff and other groups I'm in, I am a volunteer with Big Brothers Big Sisters too. And my little brother (who isn't so little anymore) and I went on a ghost tour in downtown Charleston on Saturday night. It was the best Saturday night date I've had in a long time. During this tour we walked around Charleston in the dark and were told creepy stories about all kinds of prominent and not so prominent characters. Which got me thinking about story telling for business.

In the marketing industry we talk about story telling all the time. Isn't that what marketing basically is? Story telling? I'm a believer that businesses have several different stories to tell. There is the brand story, which is your core message about who you are and what you do. Then there are all the other stories, which are your marketing campaigns and individual product or service stories. The key to all these stories is that they are interesting and relate back to the brand story.

At B&A, our story is that we are elephants. We are big and powerful but gentle and you know we are there when we walk in the room. We stand out from the crowd because we are smart, creative and eccentric. To define our story we started with a culture board (which will soon be a very cool art project in our new office) with all the words that describe who we are so now we have a story to tell and can create all of our sub-stories. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.