Story Driven: You don't need to compete when you know who you are

by Bernadette Jiwa

The easiest part of telling your story is implementing the tactics—things like articulating your product’s features and benefits on a sales page or deciding what colour the logo should be. The hardest part is not only working out the mission, vision and values that are the foundation of your business, but also intentionally living them so you can achieve your goals. You have to begin by getting clear about why your business exists. The very act of questioning your purpose forces you to dig deeper. It invites you to clarify why you wanted to make that particular promise to those particular people in the first place and to create an action plan to deliver on it. As marketers, we believe that it’s our products and words that create value. But it’s the intention that informs the development of those products and the crafting of those words that delights people and thus differentiates us. Clarity of intention is where your story starts.