Looking for the right audience? Start with a better story.
Storytelling
8 articles
How to market a message most people disagree with
PR for founders, campaigners and anyone whose position is the thing being argued with. Why reach makes it worse, what to do with the loudest critic, and how to build the small group of believers who actually move it.
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Give your brand story a shape
A story has a shape, and so should the way you talk about your brand. Borrowing the narrative arc, and bending it to fit an event or a campaign.
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The one line people repeat when you are not in the room
Your positioning is not what you say about yourself. It is what someone else says about you to a third person, badly, from memory.
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Start with the problem, not the product
Every founder opens with what they built. Every listener is waiting to hear whether it is for them. Those are not the same sentence.
Read itWhy your origin story is probably boring, and how to fix it
Nobody cares that you and your co-founder met at university. They care about the moment you realised the problem was real.
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Write the case study before you have the case
It sounds backwards. It is the fastest way to find out whether what you are building is worth writing about at all.
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How to talk about what you do at a dinner table
The pitch you have rehearsed is the wrong length, the wrong register, and aimed at the wrong person. Here is what to say instead.
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The words your customers use are better than yours
You have been staring at this for a year and you have invented vocabulary. Your customers have not. Go and take theirs.
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