A great brand story needs a strong title

So you’re a marketer, and it’s your job to promote your brand. Not only to get people interested in your products and services, but to convert that interest into sales.

You compete in a highly competitive category, filled with tough competition and saturated with advertising, publicity and sales messaging.

Compounding the challenge is a media landscape that’s incredibly fragmented. Your audience is spread across traditional media like TV, cable, radio and print. Digital media such as search, social and mobile are making things even harder.

Budgets are limited. Expectations for brand and sales growth are high. And it feels increasingly difficult to get results that show ROI to your management.

With these concerns pressing in from all sides, it’s to fall into what  I call the “logical messaging” pit.

It’s the place where you focus on building campaigns and marketing materials that try to convey and explain all the features and benefits of your products and service.

You hold tight to a strategy rooted in rational decision making and strict brand and communication guidelines that need to be followed—all while expecting original thinking and creative ideas that drive growth.

The “logical messaging” pit is a very hard to escape once you’re in it. For most brands it’s a dead end that kills creativity and strips emotion out of brand marketing.

Let me explain why the “logical messaging” trap is one you need to avoid.

Imagine that your brand is a book. It sits on a shelf in a bookstore surrounded by dozens, or maybe even hundreds, of other books that all cover the same category and topic.

Prospective buyers face an overwhelming number of choices. While the content inside each book likely covers the same subject matter – i.e. your brand and competitors address the same need  – whether someone chooses to buy your book (or not) depends mainly on one thing:

The Title of Your Book

To explain my point, let’s consider an example from the financial services industry. That category is saturated with competition and a staggering amount of advertising and marketing.

If you were looking for information and help on investing, a quick scan of companies and their websites might leave lay out the choices and descriptions in the following ways:

1. Challenge the status quo, investing made easy
2. Helping you achieve financial success
3. Take control of your investments
4. Investment guidance you can trust
5. Wealth management advice and strategies to reach your goals

Do any of these titles speak to you? Do they inspire you to engage with the company and brand?

Sadly, these are the real messages, taken from leading firms in the investment industry, whose names I’m leaving out.

All of them are deeply trapped in the “logical messaging” pit. Their websites speak to “award-winning tools”, “advice and relationships you can trust,” and a “personalized approach.”

Not a single one of these leading brands tells their story in an emotionally compelling way. There’s nothing inspiring to make prospective investors engage with the brand.

I’m not saying logic and reason aren’t important to making smart investment choices. Rather that these benefits are assumed, and they don’t differentiate one brand from another.

Imagine instead if in your search for investment advice you came across a book titled: “The Intelligent Investor.” Would feeling smart about money motivate you to engage? Would it give you confidence?

Developing a clear, succinct and emotionally meaningful title for what your brand story is all about is one of the best ways you can set your business apart and inspire consumers to engage.

Brand storytelling is not about ad slogans and taglines. It’s about avoiding or getting out of the “logical messaging” trap and tapping into the emotion that motivates consumer behavior.