Brand Story
The oldest form is still the norm.
Hurdle
Left alone, Product & Sales can arm-wrestle. Marketing may be doing its own thing. There's no unified narrative, so the company has less market impact.
Solution
Disruptors enter the market faster than ever. Regardless of company size or resources, whoever tells the best story wins. From now on, that company is yours.
Mandate
"Organizations succeed by producing a single brand narrative, carrying the same messages throughout the organization AND externally to the market. They fail when they don't produce an end-to-end experience."
Offer a pitch, and people excuse themselves. Tell a story, and they gather around. You've reached a level of revenue that you can be proud of. Now the risk is being comfortable. Let's take the opportunity to up our game and raise the stakes for competitors who want to take our customers.
Customers pay more, on average, for brands with a compelling story driving their dialogue with the market.
It's a pain to continually cook up new, potentially random campaigns from scratch. A unified narrative can produce campaigns endlessly.
If you're going out to the market in multiple venues—P2P Sales, LinkedIn, Google Search, Email, it's incredibly helpful for a single narrative to create momentum behind the Sales Team.
A story people can parse allows others to champion and advocate for the brand more effectively. They can sum up "here's what they're about" because we can.
An ongoing series
gets more queries.
An Aspirational Narrative
Is behind every choice to learn something or decision to buy.
It Goes Back 40,000 Years
Story inspired our tribes to explore & migrate . . .
And the best stories drew others to our fires.
Our species thrived, as a brand, because someone told effective stories.
"Every organization has a story behind it. Constituents are drawn to that story, because it fulfills our human desires and motivations. Story is the central Bonfire."
Daniel DiGriz, Digital Ecologist® at MadPipe®
Effective Brand Stories
Connect your audience to their core aspirations, and you win them for life.
Your Audience Will Go With You
Because your story is powerful, and your message gets across.
"Organizations succeed by producing a single brand narrative, carrying the same messages throughout the organization AND externally to the market. They fail when they don't produce an end-to-end experience." – Daniel DiGriz
If you're still around, your pilot is a success. The series lies in telling a consistent story across as many episodes as possible.
Campaigns
What you say a lot shapes a person's thought.
Problem
You've got a compelling brand story, but you need to turn it into unified sales & marketing campaigns that last all year. You want the pilot to become the episodic series.
Hurdle
You can tell a good story, but telling it more than once, a dozen times in a quarter, is a challenge. How do you maintain the balance of a clear point and a specific ask?
Solution
Let's take the premise of your brand narrative, and the goal of your current sales push, and riff on it across multiple topics for a multi-month campaign.
Mandate
It takes repetition to get an overall, big picture idea across—up to 20 repetitions. That's the "effective frequency" of the message. So let's run campaigns of up to 20 cycles that drive the idea home.
Most messages ends up as a single blog post or one piece of sales collateral. That's a FAIL from the standpoint of ordinary human frailty. The number of times someone has to see or hear a message, perhaps in different ways, before it is fully absorbed and actionable varies based on context. Varying shorthand numbers exist: 3, 7, 20. But the rule is simple in that it's usually more than once and is different for everyone. MadPipe is going to do a lot better getting your sales argument across through long-term campaigns than one-offs emails, etc.
Managed Hosting Company (B2B) "Worry Free Growth" Campaign
First 4 Weeks
Scalable Performance
🕓Jan 13
Managed Security
🕓Jan 20
Control Panel Heaven
🕓Jan 27
Launch Faster
🕓Feb 3
Conference Host for Business (B2B) "Seamless Collaboration" Campaign
First 2 Months
One Consistent Experience
🕓Sep 30
Mixed Teams w/o Friction
🕓Oct 14
Distributed Staff Realities
🕓Oct 28
Scalability as a Value
🕓Nov 11
Document Service (B2B/B2C) "Paperless Forever" Campaign
First 4 Months
Paperless = Secure
🕓June 3
Paperless = Organized
🕓July 1
Paperless = Accurate
🕓Aug 5
Paperless = Prepared
🕓Sep 2
Count to ten,
then play it again.
Your "Play it again, Sam." beats their "Wham bam, thank you ma'am."
Advertising
Ads should be smart, so people don't have to be.
Problem
You've got a compelling brand story, but you need to turn it into unified sales & marketing campaigns that last all year. You want the pilot to become the episodic series.
Hurdle
You can tell a good story, but telling it more than once, a dozen times in a quarter, is a challenge. How do you maintain the balance of a clear point and a specific ask?
Solution
MadPipe will take the premise of your brand narrative, and the goal of your current sales push, and riff on it across multiple topics for a multi-month campaign.
Mandate
It takes repetition to get an overall, big picture idea across—up to 20 repetitions. That's the "effective frequency" of the message. So let's run campaigns of up to 20 cycles that drive the idea home.
Most messages ends up as a single blog post or one piece of sales collateral. That's a FAIL from the standpoint of ordinary human frailty. The number of times someone has to see or hear a message, perhaps in different ways, before it is fully absorbed and actionable varies based on context. Varying shorthand numbers exist: 3, 7, 20. But the rule is simple in that it's usually more than once and is different for everyone. MadPipe is going to do a lot better getting your sales argument across through long-term campaigns than one-offs emails, etc.
These Guys?
Usual creative level.
We are the number one name in digital signage for retail, whatever the heck "number one name" means. We're trusted for x# of years. Full service. Satisfaction guaranteed. Blah blah blah.
Available today. No risk trial. Digital to our core. Enable growth. Any other trivial or unconvincing features or generic slogans we could throw in. Hey this isn't terrible, it's just what everyone's doing.
Or Their Competitors
With MadPipe on their Team
Otherwise why? It's not 1984, and your customers aren't Orwellian shoppers blindly absorbing whatever message gets thrown at them. So are you ready to get their attention? Like, for real?
Let's be candid: most executives don't even understand blockchain. They don't have to. With near-instant deployment, you won't have to overcome anxiety over technical concepts. It's spinning up a server or setting up an iPhone: no big deal.
Prolific and witty
beats seldom and sh....
Ads should be smart, so people don't have to be.
Corporate Mission
The applause is for the cause.
Problem
As the plenitude of options grows, company mission and mission-driven marketing drives buyer choices. But relatively few corporate responsibility programs are convincingly impactful.
Hurdle
You could declare a cause and throw some money at it, but customers are smart. They're aware of bandwagon ethics and unimpressed with a few carbon credits or planting the occasional tree.
Solution
Let's take on something aligned with your product roadmap, sales premise, brand story, company culture, & internal skillsets. Let's pull it from your DNA, not strain it from a momentary trend.
Mandate
Buyers want to feel good about their choices. They want to know the companies they do business with care about the world that forms the context of those selections. Make it deeper than a mission page & win their loyalty.
THERE'S A RECIPE FOR VALIDATING YOUR CORPORATE MISSION.
This simple Venn Diagram tells us the strength of the mission and whether it is likely to be credible and succeed if resourced effectively.
66%
Believe brands can create real change in the world.
53%
Believe they only pitch corporate responsibility for PR/perception or marketing reasons.
36%
Find a mission more credible if it impacts business operations.
29%
Find a mission more credible if it impacts employees.
24%
Find a mission more credible if the business leadership supports or speaks out on the mission.
15%
Find a mission more credible if the mission has employee support.
Data Source: SproutSocial
Taking a stand
makes it a brand.
Success is Seeing the Needle Move!
And everything else is codswallop.
You can only improve
what you can prove.
The Glory is in the Story
Seems like you're still here . . .
