OFF-MUTE 🔈
💬 Companies often struggle to make their stories compelling and clear.
😉 That’s why they hire us.
📕 When we engage with a new client, we conduct a Story Crafting workshop. This exercise prioritizes audiences, crystalizes the brand's superpowers and differentiators, and creates alignment among key stakeholders (everyone from comms/marketing to sales to HR).
💡 From there, we identify a revelation that will inform the new strategic narrative. It’s not a tagline or mission statement; it serves as a North Star for the entire comms program. Here’s how our Executive Vice President Samantha McGarry recommends finding yours:
🖼️ Describe a shift in the market. What’s the new game and how are you different from the old one? You must paint the big picture to convince your audience to move away from older, antiquated approaches, solutions, or ways of thinking and toward your modern, innovative strategy. What’s in it for them and how will making this shift set them up for success?
🆒 🆕 Communicate urgency (and relevance). For people to embrace this new mindset, you must demonstrate the urgency for the change to take root. Every good story needs relevance or it’ll fall on deaf ears. The key is to identify the intersection between your expertise, the media and cultural zeitgeist, and what your audiences care about.
💥 Delete Keep the tension. Purchase decisions don’t form in the mind, they form in the heart, and facts don’t create emotional connections. You must understand your audience’s emotional drivers, find the tension and weave it into your story. This helps drive curiosity.
🎯 Insert specificity into big concepts. Drop the jargon and get specific. It’s tricky but this is where the magic lies. Concepts like digital transformation or climate change or even AI are broadly discussed, so work to find your unique point of view (it must be timely!) within these spacious topics but keep your focus narrow and stay within your expertise. This approach can establish you as a thought leader and make your story newsworthy.
💡 Make it short and memorable. A great revelation should be able to double as a soundbite or pull quote. It needs to be memorable, thought-provoking, repeatable and shareable. Our CEO Beth Monaghan often says, “Messaging is an exercise in what you leave behind: so don’t try to stuff your revelation with all the things—or you’ll lose the nucleus of what sets you apart.” Here’s an example revelation for our client Xage Security, the leading provider of zero trust solutions for critical infrastructure: “An explicit trust mindset is needed to block the new generation of cyber attacks." Their tagline is: "Zero Trust Security for the Real World.”
