Tall Stories for Small Businesses

by Gregory Thomas

You don’t have to be a Fortune 500 company or international conglomerate to merit a brand. In fact, to develop your brand, the same process and criteria are involved.

There are two things that are vitally important when positioning yourself as a small business: telling a narrative and understanding “WIIFM” (What’s In It For Me). In developing and maintaining your business, it is imperative that you are able to convey to your prospects and customers who you are, what you sell and why they need it from you.

A key (if not the most important) element in developing a brand is the understanding of the brand’s quality, its value in the market. Author Tom Wolfe once said “every person is a brand.” You don’t have to be a Fortune 500 company or international conglomerate to merit a brand. In fact, to develop your brand, the same process and criteria are involved. The most important step is telling your story. Pos-itioning yourself as the largest, oldest, most technologically savvy brand means nothing if your customers don’t know who you are.

Your beliefs are closely related to your attitudes, what you say and what you do. Your attitudes shape where you want to go. For beliefs and attitudes to guide you, you must first start with your mindset. This mindset is the basis for your identity program.

One of the first things done in a brand positioning is an audit. An audit of collateral, personnel, facilities and materials provides a good picture of what your company can do. But who are you?

Two crucial first steps in creating a narrative is selecting an incident worthy of writing about and finding the central, relevant, salient point in that incident. Narrative is best used to illustrate the “personal, developmental path” a person has taken to reach a particular point in his/her life. We use narrative in discussing a book or a film, getting people engaged in the setting, the characters and their passions/joys/sorrows.

So a narrative is actually very fitting in developing the “story” of your company and yourself. Storytelling has been the primary form of communication since the days of the cave paintings. The end objective has been to help convey a thought, idea or history. Through these narrative constructs, we have been able to learn about civilization and the path it has laid out for us. This is the type of material a brand is made from, and we all have it. This is branding.

Understanding the need for a narrative, to develop your “story” with its beginning, middle and end, will not be something you’ll necessarily want to rush to print. But it will help when discussing your firm, your products, and your goals and aspirations to those who need to hear it: your current and potential customers. It will give you a story that will reinforce the characters who play leading roles, and the visions they have.

A marketing mindset isn’t just developing your collateral, signage or packaging. It is the way you think about how all these elements work together to achieve your marketing goals. It is about tying all your activity to the “narrative” of your business.

As a small business owner, the WIIFM process amounts to getting everyone to buy into your idea, whether it’s good or bad. The all important Holy Grail of WIIFM—“getting from ME to WE”—is gathering strong consensus among your team.

A few suggestions for success include:

1. Identifying potential WIIFM candidates. Become a good listener and judge of body language. It’s often not what you say but how you say it.

2. Choosing your battles. Not everything is worth the effort of trying to build consensus. You must calculate strategically how consensus-building will help in the long run.

3. Creating the right team. Just as it’s important to get the “heavy hitters” to form your consensus team, it’s of equal importance to bring in some of the “heavy lifters.” These are the people who may be at the bottom of the organization but will be your best stakeholders if given the opportunity.

4. Sharing the Vision. Regardless of your position, it is important to share your vision with your clients, customers and employees. The vision is something all must share.

5. Being humble enough to accept ideas that will enhance your plan. Don’t steal them; make sure everyone knows the contributors. Remember that regardless of how good your vision is, there is still room for input.

Gregory Thomas has been a brand consultant in Los Angeles for the past 30 years. He is now the Chairman of Design/School of Fine Arts, KU. He can be reached at: gthomas@ku.edu.