Communicating brand value to executives and investors isn’t about splashy websites or luxurious launch events. Instead, it is about storytelling, using a narrative to add value to existing perceptions that can either be backed up by your current product or supported by your prospective plans.
“You’re not going to get anywhere today if you don’t have a credible, unique story,” says Ken Wincko, SVP of Marketing at Cision and PR Newswire, in Branding for Growth: A C-Level Strategy. “Your content needs to provide value to the reader—be it fresh insight, entertainment or problem solving.”
A great example of this is Amazon. Since 1997, Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos has released a letter to shareholders which forecasts the next year’s innovations and reviews the past. It gives him a new opportunity to sell his investors on the value that Amazon provides. To accentuate his point, Bezos includes a copy of the 1997 shareholder letter at the end of the current year’s as a way to connect the past with the present. Or reminding why people invested in the first place.
That storytelling is one reason why Amazon has been able to survive market crashes and make risky bets.
Columnists like Farhad Manjoo of the New York Times have written extensively about how the brand operates like a charitable project, funded by the stock exchange, letting the world buy good stuff for cheap. Today the stock is valued at more than $720 a share up from $300 in December 2015. Bezos himself is the third richest man in the world largely due to selling stock in his own company.
So what story did Amazon tell?
It started with a process to save people money and time.
Amazon.com serves 1.5 million customers, 1997: “Today, online commerce saves customers money and precious time. Tomorrow, through personalization, online commerce will accelerate the very process of discovery. Amazon.com uses the Internet to create real value for its customers and, by doing so, hopes to create an enduring franchise, even in established and large markets.”
More than a decade later the brand promised to improve something ancient (reading and books) through innovation. The publishing industry is the established market that Amazon looked to grow its enduring franchise.
Amazon announces The Kindle, 2008: “You can buy a book directly from the device, and the whole book will be downloaded wirelessly, ready for reading, in less than 60 seconds … Instead of trying to duplicate physical bookstores, we’ve been inspired by them and worked to find things we could do in the new medium that could never be done in the old one.”
Finally, earlier this year Amazon announced that its cloud-based hosting service, Amazon Web Services (AWS) earned $10 billion in revenue. This surprised investors but Bezos used that surprise as a chance to align the success of AWS with the brand as a whole. His premise is that the core values of both AWS and Amazon.com are the same, to save customers time and money. Amazon.com serves consumers and AWS serves enterprises that need web based services.
Amazon $100 billion annual sales and Amazon Web Services earns $10 billion, 2016: “They (Amazon.com and AWS) share a distinctive organizational culture that cares deeply about and acts with conviction on a small number of principles. I’m talking about customer obsession rather than competitor obsession, eagerness to invent and pioneer, willingness to fail, the patience to think long-term, and the taking of professional pride in operational excellence. Through that lens, AWS and Amazon retail are very similar indeed.”
In the context of AWS, it doesn’t hurt to have a cases study about your brand’s work with Netflix as an example to share with clients but Rome wasn’t built in a day. Your brand’s Netflix is out there.
Benefits for storytellers
For brands like Amazon and more recently Tesla, your brand story can protect it from losses and drive deeper investment. Tesla has made bets that some analysts view as risky, such as the purchase of solar panel and energy company Solar City. However, these bets are being compared to those made by Bezos and those of Steve Jobs, two legendary brand storytellers.
Aswath Damodaran, at financial blog the Wall Street Pit, calls these brands story stocks, and these stories enable brands to live by different rules.
Bezos outlined this thesis well himself in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter.
“You can have the best technology, you can have the best business model, but if the storytelling isn’t amazing, it won’t matter. Nobody will watch.”
So tell your story! Use each touch point across multiple channels to add value to the narrative of your brand.
Download Branding for Growth: A C-Level Strategy to learn more about using PR to raise awareness, impact revenue, drive demand generation, and aid in fundraising. This executive strategy guide will show you how to extend your brand story throughout the year and always remain top of mind with your target audience.
Author James Rubec, Cision Content Strategist, is a content marketer, researcher and brand journalist who for the past year with Cision has told data stories about global news events, public affairs and what motivates people to take action. This builds off five years as an award winning public relations professional and journalist working out of Canada. Every great story has data behind it; when you find a way to share both, that’s where brands win!
Photo of Jeff Bezos sourced from Amazon Media Room.
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