How do you craft a brand narrative that satisfies your stakeholders?
Your people.
Your investors.
Your prospects and clients.
Strategic marketing leader Samantha Rideout has experienced this problem, too. And at B2B Form 2024, she provided a blueprint you can use to unify your brand’s narrative.
Watch this clip from Samantha’s session or read the transcript below.
And for other creative approaches to your branding strategy, check out the 59 recordings from B2B Forum 2024 or get your discounted ticket for B2B Forum 2025 now!
How does your product fit into your brand story? How do we put these levels together?
Now, maybe you have a brand that has one product. And congratulations, if that’s you, that’s probably a pretty easy job, no offense.
But more likely you probably have a product suite, a portfolio of brands or products or different divisions.
Maybe there’s been some M&A, and there’s a parent company and legacy branding.
Maybe there are white labeled products, private labeled products.
There’s a lot to it.
So how do we develop our brand story, our product story?
With all of that, I look at it like building a house.
You have your roof. That’s your brand. Everything has to fit logically under that brand.
Then your floors separate your different brands, or different divisions, depending on how your company is split up.
And then, each floor looks like a room, but use your imagination to picture more than one room on each level. (I’m not a graphic designer, obviously.)
Each room represents a product suite.
And then the products are the furniture within the rooms.
So all of these different pieces need to fit logically under the roof, under the brand story.
And everyone’s looking at this house with a different perspective.
You have your people team. They’re the real estate agents. They have the Zillow listing, and they’re showing you this house and saying, “how do I get you in this house today?”
You have your investors. They’re flying over in their private jet. They’re looking at the whole landscape. They’re saying, “how does this house stand out to all the other houses around here?”
And then you have your clients or your prospects. They’re buying the chair and saying, “how can I see this in my own house?”
So each narrative is different. But they should all gel together and, again, fit logically under that brand story.
And we do that by connecting our brand purpose to our product purpose.
So, how do we craft our product narratives?
Our product storytelling fits within the architecture of our story.
We’ll get a little bit more tactical and go through three different approaches to structuring product narratives.
First is your functional narrative. It is your New York City apartment of narratives. Sure, your bathtub is in your kitchen, but you know what the bathtub is for. You know what your stove is for. You can still understand from a functional perspective what the product does.\
Then you go to the other end of the spectrum. You have your elaborate, sophisticated, ornate, Downton Abbey of product narratives. Now, this one might look a lot nicer than the first one, but that’s not to say that it is necessarily better.
I look at the second one and it does not align with my lived experience because my children would destroy that room in a second.
And when I look at that, I also think of an example from a B2B SaaS solution that I used to work at. We had this feature that our clients loved. We had this very slick reporting feature. Any random question that came up from an executive, in seconds they could spin up a dashboard or they could do a PDF export, depending on what type of executive it was.
And they were always impressing their bosses. They were always impressing the executive team. They loved this. It consistently showed up as our best feature.
I of course, did my homework, looked at all our competitors. They didn’t have anything like this.
And I thought, “wow! Yahtzee! Did I just win?”
We have this differentiated value driver that no one else has… but it wasn’t moving the needle in sales conversations.
What was my mistake?
I had the client feedback. I had the competitor perspective.
We were losing to “no decision.”
And chances are—statistically speaking—you probably are, too.
Because in a survey of 2.5 million sales conversations, 40 to 60% end in no decision.
We had this beautiful feature, but it was losing out to hideous-but-functional spreadsheets.
No one’s going to make a change unless they have to make a change.
And beauty is not a business decision.
But it is such an excellent segue into my third product narrative: your customizable Barbie dreamhouse of product narratives.
(And I did this presentation for my 7-year-old daughter to test it out. She gives very honest feedback. And she told me the worst thing about my presentation was that it was too long.
So I tried to take that into account.
And the best thing was that I referenced Barbies. So you’re enjoying the best part of my presentation right now.)
But the Barbie Dream House, I mean…
This type of product narrative tells a different story to everyone, because when you think about this as a product, it’s changed very little through the years.
In the nineties—when I was playing with my Barbie Dream House in Newfoundland, Canada, out in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean—I was acting out very different scenarios with my Barbies than my daughter does today in New York, with her 2020s sensibilities.
The product stays the same.
But how we interact with it is different.
I thought, “what a great analogy for product narratives!”
Because we’re not changing the product.
We’re just talking about it differently, for different audiences.
And [the analogy] works really well with the Barbie slogan: “You can be anything you want to be!”
That’s kind of how we set this up.
So how do we take, “you can be anything you want to be,” and turn it into something that we can share with our sales team, and train them on, or put on our website as one uniform message.
How do we get there?
Get the rest of this session here!
Published Dec 18, 2024
MarketingProfs B2B Forum 2024 was our favorite yet. There was a buzz in the air that’s hard to explain. It’s like we all needed to be in those rooms together more than ever to combat the chaotic state of the world around us and how challenging B2B marketing has been since the last few years.
If you missed it, you can’t go back to get that feeling. But there is still a chance to catch the keynotes and all other recorded sessions to get the amazing insights our speakers shared. Attendees who were there and our PRO members get access to all recordings! So if you’re PRO, simply log in and get to watching. Or, upgrade to a PRO membership today for access. Recordings are available through March 31, 2025.
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