The Brand Story: Not Just for Customers

A well-known principle of marketing is that people don’t connect to facts. It’s stories that they connect to. More than a decade ago, American marketing guru Seth Godin argued that the story is a powerful instrument, and that the success of brands depends on companies’ storytelling abilities.

In most cases brand stories are used solely for external communications —  vis-a-vis customers. Companies busy themselves with customer experiences alongside precisely defining their brand persona, identifying motivating factors, analyzing the customer journey and maximizing value at contact points.

However, it’s clear today that the relevance of these issues goes well beyond the interaction between the company as a unit and the customer: there’s a critical connection between the the customer experience and the experience of the employee. Companies understand that their employees represent them when interacting with customers. Therefore, companies that want to leverage their brand identities to convey a message to their customers must actually start internally. That means ensuring that their brand and organizational identities are uniform.

The term “StoryVesting” refers to the ability of an organization to tell its story in-house. It starts with getting buy-in among employees for a company’s vision and goals. StoryVesting also include a deeper dimensions of that connection: employees’ mental connection, a feeling of identity, and sense of belonging. Imagine an evangelist employee and the powerful impact they can have on the experience of customers they interact with everyday.

This symbiotic relationship between the customer and and the client experiences should be built on three elements:

The Customer’s Story: proper identification of target audiences, personas, motivations, and needs.

“Our Story:” The company’s narrative; a definition of what the product, service or whatever else the company is offering.

Vested Employees: Staff who believe in and identify with these two stories, and bring a sense of mission and larger significance to their work.

The most prominent example of this is Zappos, the online shoe marketplace. Every employee knows and can proudly recite the essence of the company: delivering happiness to people. Zappos was the first company in the U.S. to accept returned goods by delivery without charge, even if they had been used. This created a relationship of trust and inclusion with its customers. In addition, Zappos recruited generous employees who had never worked with a sales script to staff its customer service hotline. There’s even an urban legend about Zappos’ record setting service call: 10 continuous hours of customer care.

Ultimately, Zappos became the shoe store that was acquired by Amazon for the astronomical sum of $928 million. Tony Hsieh, the Zappos’ CEO at the time, wrote in his blog: “A big part of the reason why Amazon is interested in us is because they recognize the value of our culture, our people, and our brand.”  While Zappos had a good story, its market value also depended on its employees’ powerful identification with the company’s brand story. As Zappos employees believed in and were inspired by this story, the customers they came into contact with similarly became believers.

Business don’t just appeal to people —  they are a product of them.