The most effective and efficient way for creating relevance for your startup brand’s story is to make sure your brand plays a staring role in your target customer’s personal story.
What if your brand messaging and marketing communications activities where centered in resonance with your customers personal story. In other words, what if your customers connected more deeply to their own personal story as a result of your brand story?
Brands that represent deeply shared values with their customers always do this in a natural organic way.
Customers don’t perceive the story as marketing, but rather as a welcome outreach–like getting a thoughtful card from a good friend.
If you’re startup brand is experiencing a disconnect with your target audience, chances are your brand story is not an embedded component of the customer’s own personal story.
In today’s unforgiving marketplace, marketing has now become white noise. Marketing has become nothing more than low-level static in the air.
It’s near impossible for me-too brands to break though and earn customer attention, action, and advocacy. In every product category, ubiquitous choice is accelerating the pace of commoditization.
How enduring brands break out of the white noise.
Of course, what separates an enduring brand from the rest is it’s capability to break out and earn trusted brand engagement from customers. This is only accomplished through resonance and relevance.
Relevance is always anchored in shared values. Shared values put the message and audience in a state of resonance. Resonance embodies trust. Trust guarantees engagement and advocacy. It’s a “hip bone is connected to the leg bone” sort of thing.
The most effective and efficient tool for creating relevance for your brand is to ensure your brand plays a staring role in your target audience’s personal story.
Marketers in startup and early growth companies should be spending their creative energies knowing the audience and their story narratives intimately and how their brand authentically fits into their story.
Yet in the day-to-day world of tactics, promotions, price discounting, and one-upping competitors, it’s easy for marketers of startup brands to laminate their brand story on to their target customers.
This is why so much marketing is simply ignored.
Like attracts like. If our stories are aligned, chances are we are sharing our experiences and preferences together in meaningful ways.
There is no difference between how people create and maintain relationships and how brands do it.
Brands are simply a symbol or badge that connects the tribe to a highly-valued shared ideal. To cement the bond between brand story and customer story requires your brand be centered in these shared values and ideals.
Brand stories can only be relevant and resonate when:
Brand and audience share a common purpose. The fundamental reason the brand exists (beyond exchanging money) is the same for the audience.
The audience cares deeply about the brand's most compelling differentiator.
The brand shares personality attributes with the target audience.
The brand's “oneliness” is credible, believable and trusted by the audience
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