Narrative is one of those words in the water right now. Politicians talk about “resetting the narrative” after campaign missteps. Coaches go hoarse trying to change the narrative after a string of losses.
Savvy business leaders are recognizing the need, too, with the understanding that narrative can supercharge alignment across a growing organization and shift perceptions inside your walls and out. That’s because simple, clear, and compelling ideas work wonders. People forget facts and features, but they remember great stories.
Here are three signs that it’s time to get your story straight.
The ‘I don’t get it’ problem
Many clients, especially in the B2B category, have lost the plot, often due to rapid growth or an evolving business strategy. They have difficulty explaining their business at a backyard barbecue, much less to skeptical customers or investors.
This is often seen when a company’s marketing strategy relies on describing features instead of purpose. But if a customer only associates your brand with the features you’ve advertised, they will never understand what your company can do for them.
Take HubSpot. It began as one of the first “inbound marketing tools,” focusing on delivering educational content to its potential client. But decades and many acquisitions later, HubSpot today has grown into something much bigger.
To get there, chief marketing officer Kipp Bodnar has spent the past few years building a new narrative as a front-office CRM platform. This gives potential customers both a high-level overview of its offerings and specifics on how exactly HubSpot can meet their immediate and long-term needs.
Marketing and sales misalignment
Why can’t marketing and sales teams get along?
A lot of it comes down to priorities. Marketers are typically focused on influencing audiences at large, while sales is hearing directly from customers about individual challenges. Even with the best intentions, misalignment is often the norm.
That’s why narrative has to span upper funnel and lower funnel, becoming the common-language “middleware” to connect the organization as a whole.
Narratives stuck in marketing departments usually die, because they’re deprived of the crucial perspective gained from sales, HR, and other departments.
Giving marketing and sales teams one narrative that can live at both ends of the customer journey can help drive internal alignment and create a shared sense of purpose. It also helps your customers understand your business better, as your marketing and sales teams will be delivering one brand narrative instead of a muddled or contradictory mix of campaign slogans and product features.
Strategy without reward
Whether your business is publicly traded or privately held, investors’ primary concern is—understandably—performance. Revenue. Margins. Growth trajectory. Ebitda. But sometimes those metrics are all strong, and you’re still not getting the love you deserve.
Consider the case of Motorola. Over the last decade, CEO Greg Brown and his team divested their cellphone business and built a juggernaut through strategic acquisition and organic growth, with record earnings quarter after quarter. But the stock price had stagnated, and investors didn’t understand where the company was going.
In workshopping with Brown and his team, we realized how personally they took the mission of making the world a safer place. So we wrote a narrative around the key idea of “solving for safer.” The message electrified the organization and investors. From the first time Brown uttered “solving for safer” on CNBC, the stock took off. Six months later, it was up 20%.
The best of both worlds
In every one of these scenarios, a new brand narrative had a clear value—in dollars.
In that way, a brand narrative can be the best of both worlds for a CMO: building long-term brands while also driving real business outcomes—sometimes relatively quickly.
From shareholder meetings to presidential campaigns, a great brand narrative is disruptive, ironically, because it is so unifying. In a world of distraction, that’s a powerful currency.
