I love a good story.  You probably do, too.  Stories influence, inspire and capture our imaginations like nothing else.  We tell them all the time, whether we realize it or not.  And they scare the heck out of many of my clients.

I’m not talking horror stories here, and I certainly don’t mean my clients are literally afraid of narratives. What sometimes gets me a deer-in-headlights look is suggesting they need to know and live and tell their own story in the world to have a really successful brand.  Maybe it’s a little intimidating to realize that answering the question who are you? is what jump starts a compelling brand identity—but it’s the surest path to being seen, heard and apprecman and woman with 3d book pile backgroundiated for something that draws the right clients, members, donors or other important audiences to you.

Traditional branding strategy says you should start by understanding your target audiences.  And of course you absolutely do need to know what they care about and what makes them tick.  First, though, you need to understand who you are and what you’re uniquely prepared to do so that you can have a vibrant, vital, authentic, arresting conversation with the world about it.  This applies whether you’re a solo practitioner or running a firm—a “self” is either an individual with a personal identity or a collective with a discernible character and capacity (which usually adds up to a strong  group culture).

When you understand yourself, you have a foundation for creating the kind of zeal that gets attention.  So if you want to get crystal clear on your unique value, start by typecasting you or your organization as the protagonist in a story you’re truly moved to live and tell in the world.  Then frame a narrative that’s based on the two key components of a truly great story:

  • Every inspiring protagonist has a quest—it’s the purpose that captures your reason for being; a fuel that enlivens and animates you.  Getting in touch with purpose keeps you and/or your people truly engaged in your work.
  • Every great story has a happy ending—it’s the promise or outcome you can always be counted on to deliver.  Getting in touch with promise clarifies what makes your story matter to anyone else.

I’m a Creator with a quest—and a purpose— to help my clients understand and let others know who they really are in the world.  I’m a zealot for “empowering self expression”—the kind that positions organizations and people to talk about what matters most to them.  Why should anyone care about that?  Well, I promise to help clients find a voice that will inspire and influence others (added bonus:  they’ll probably experience more aliveness and even joy while they’re doing it, too).

You’ve got a story as well, and it really should be the foundation for your brand personality and messaging.  You can start the process by “story typing” your enterprise, which involves exploring what kind of protagonist you or your organization is most like—and articulating a purpose or promise its story arc suggests.  Is that kind of process really good business?  You bet it is, and here are some of the many reasons why:

  • Story-based branding is built on the motivational drivers that have inspired and engaged human beings since the beginning of time.  You can use other techniques to inform your audiences, promote your services, and even connect with them on a personal level.  Nothing motivates better than evoking a narrative that suggests how everything is going to turn out, though (and casting yourself as the protagonist who can resolve whatever conflict might get in the way).
  • A great storyline helps you leverage both your strengths and your values.  The protagonists in great stories rely on a combination of strengths (what they’re good at) and values (what they care about) to accomplish their missions.  There’s no story without both.  Strengths are critical, but they’re actually not nearly as memorable as values.  At the end of the day, you’re most likely to be defined by the value system that others associate with you.  It makes great business sense to be deliberate about how you want to be perceived instead of letting other people draw their own conclusions about what you stand for.
  • An authentic storyline is your most powerful trust-building tool.  Truth-based communications build credibility and draw others in through genuine attraction to something that has a true pull for them.  That sets up an entirely different dynamic than basing your brand on what you think your audience wants to hear, and establishes a trust-focused relationship from the outset.  Conviction and passion just ring true, and that’s what story-based branding is all about.

So let your sense of self breathe life into your brand—and let your brand become an authentic expression that creates more success and fulfillment in your world.

This post was adapted from an earlier version that appeared on http://www.caprsa.com/news/.

Cindy Atlee wrote her first (and last!) novel at the age of 13. After a brief foray into journalism (interviewing Jimmy Buffet in a bowling counts as journalism, right?), she became a brand strategist, coach and facilitator—eventually serving as SVP, Branding & Organizational Culture, at the global public relations firm Porter Novelli.  She’s now founding partner at The Storybranding Group, where she helps clients define and give voice to what’s best, most distinctive and appealing about them.

I have this recurring dream where a large group of people I’m working with are mostly milling around in this very large, efotolia_120436866ntirely concrete building. All of them have come to me with important messages or ideas that they started out really excited to develop and share–but something is stopping them from doing that. Instead of working, they keep going back inside and sitting down in one of the building’s many small, empty, windowless rooms.

The rooms have thick, strong walls that don’t allow any sound to travel through. They’re gray and colorless, with nothing in them to fuel inspiration or imagination. They look a lot like cells, except for one thing. The rooms are entirely open in front, with no barrier at all to prevent anyone from walking right out and back into the world. Most of the people in my dream stay right where they are, though–inside these rooms with their ideas inside themselves, unexpressed.

It doesn’t take a dream analyst to interpret what’s going on for me here! My vision is for everyone to unleash a voice in the world–and to work in places and on teams where it’s heard and appreciated. I’ve always thought this dream was meant to remind me of what it looks like and feels like when that doesn’t happen.

Why don’t we let our voices be heard?

I never expected more concrete business information from a dream, though, but that’s what happened recently when I had a much longer version of it. This time, I was able to start asking people who were still in the rooms what was going on and why they weren’t excited about sharing their messages any longer. I always heard one of three things:
  • Some were deliberately reining themselves in–deciding what they have to say is too big or too bold so they have to scale it back, and killing their enthusiasm in the process.
  • Others had given up because they didn’t have a “perfect” message–they’d tinkered and tinkered with in, and ended up stripping most of the real life out of what they wanted to share.
  • A few people had sought out and taken too much input from other people–now they didn’t even recognize their own ideas or feel much of the passion that had fueled them in the first place.
So, I woke up and realized I needed to share what I learned from this dream. And before this turns into a bummer of a blog post, let’s flip what I found out was holding others back into really positive lessons for getting your own voice heard:
  • Lesson #1: Let your biggest, boldest ideas shape what you share. Those big ideas are what motivate you to act; get them out there and into the world if you want others to pay attention.
  • Lesson #2: Don’t overthink what you’re burning to say. The most important part of starting a dialog with real life in it means getting the conversation going.
  • Lesson #3: Find your own authentic point of view. Sure, it’s nice to know what other people think. But it’s your own point of view that sets you apart and gets you heard (even when others don’t agree with everything you’re saying).

I need to share more boldly, too

So, it turns out this dream wasn’t meant just for my clients. There’s a powerful message for me in here as well (after all, I was the dreamer!). I’ve got some ideas of my own that I may not share often enough or loudly enough, one for each area of my work life (branding, employee engagement & team/culture building, and leadership/professional development. Here they are (and look for blog posts on each topic in the coming weeks):
  • Branding: Great branding and messaging starts out as inside job. It tells your story in a way that invites others in–and its main objective is to create resonant aliveness with others.
  • Team/culture building and employee engagement: Workplaces need to start letting people bring their whole selves to work. Mostly, we let people tell half their story at work, and it’s the half about performance and what they do (not presence and who they are).
  • Leadership development: We need to start looking for authentic advantage in our workplaces-not competitive advantage. Competitive advantage says “I need to move as fast as I can and outmaneuver someone else and by doing that I’ll win.” Authentic advantage says “I have gifts and talents and ideas and intuitions that other people don’t, and if I contribute them we all get to win.”
Do you have a big idea to share? An unfiltered message? A passionate point of view? Join the ranks of the self expressed and tell me about it!  Post a comment or send me a tweet @storybrander.

And if you haven’t taken the Professional Strengths, Values & Story Survey yet, check it out here to find out who you are in the story you’re most moved to unleash in the world: http://www.storybranding.com/take-the-svss-survey/.

I’m excited to let everyone know that now you can download my new, free eBook–Bringing Your Message to Life.  In it, I offer some very easy-to-use tips for creating messages that will really get heard.  And, I share some simple, story-based communications tools to bring real life to the things you have to say.

Here’s one of the most important tips in Bringing Your Message to Life People deeply relate to characters in the stories they love. If they see you as part of a story that really matters, they’ll relate to you, too. So take a look at the eBook if you’d like to know more about how to cast your organization, your business (or yourself) as the central character in a story that moves your audiences.

There’s lots of other material in the eBook as well, like a compelling framework for creating messages at every rung of a four-step communications ladder; help with focusing your messaging on the “happy endings” that mean the most to you and to others; and pointers on how you can harness the power of your most under-utitlized communications resource–the people who work for your organization.

Of course, that last one only works if those people are really part of your story and want to share it.  In addition to getting this eBook ready, I’ve been using a lot of my blue sky thinking time this summer to focus on internal branding and employee engagement and what they really mean.  Here’s what I know for sure about that: if  you look at your organization through a story-based lens, you can see what gives your culture life (or why it’s dormant).  If there’s a powerful purpose and compelling promise at the core of your enterprise, you’ve got a premise that starts to engage your workforce.  If your people can see how their own stories align with the organization’s, you’ve probably got really passion and commitment.

I’ll be sharing some new tools and resources on the front soon.  Meanwhile, take a look at Bringing Your Message to Life–and please share your thoughts!

I love a good story.  You probably do, too.  Stories influence, inspire and capture our imaginations like nothing else.  We tell them all the time.  And they scare the heck out of many of my clients.

I don’t mean my clients are literally afraid of stories.  I mean they sometimes get intimidated at the thought of using story to communicate about an organization, product or service.  Some don’t know where to begin.  Others don’t know what kind of story to tell.  Some don’t think they’ll be taken seriously unless they have lots of facts and information share.

So here’s the good news:  You don’t have to tell a story at all to make your communications a lot more interesting–or to dramatically increase the chance that your messages will be heard–or to make the kind of human connection with an audience that starts to build a real relationship.  But you do have to use story-based communications principles. Here are four core principles to remember:

1.  Begin at the end. If you don’t know where to begin, remember this:  when it comes to quickly engaging other people in what you have to say, it’s the outcomes they care about (the “happy endings,” so to speak).  In formal marketing speak, that means shifting your communications strategy to an outcome-base orientation.  In plain speak, it means telling people what’s going to happen for them if they get involved with you (e.g., buy something, donate, advocate for your position, etc.).    Tell them less about what you do and more about how it’s going to turn out.

2.  Typecast yourself. If you don’t know what kind of story to tell, mentally cast your organization in the role of a character it’s most like–and talk about the things that character would talk about.  Maybe you’re organization is most like a Creator that helps people innovate or express something.  Maybe you’re like a Hero that helps others overcome challenges.  Maybe you most resemble a Jester that helps people have fun.  Each of those characters would say very different things if asked to make a presentation about you, probably in a lively and interesting way.  Knowing who you are and what role you play in the world can bring your communications to life, too.  For help with this, you can find a free story typing survey on my website (http://www.storybranding.com/take-the-svss-survey/) that will tell you which one of 12 great characters you or your organization is most like.

3.  Get serious about sharing your values. The characters in great stories rely on a combination of strengths (what they’re good at) and values (what they care about) to accomplish their missions.  Strengths are critical, but they’re not as memorable as values.  Most organizational communications focus a lot on strengths and a lot less on values.  At the end of the day, though, you’ll be defined by the value system that others associate with you.   They’re the most critical part of your identity infrastructure because they make you seem real and alive to others.

4.  Tell the truth. Okay, so some of the great stories we love to hear aren’t exactly true.  But when it comes to organizational communications, nothing is more important than authenticity.  Telling the truth about who you are and what you or your products/services really mean attracts the people who will be your best customers or employees or advocates.  And if creating an attraction field for your work isn’t what you’ve set out to do, why tell a story at all?