Your business story is not just marketing or sales “spin”. It’s vitally important. To be authentic and credible your story must resonate with your target customers. It must be relevant. For this reason, it is very difficult (but obviously not impossible), to make up something simply because you think people will ”buy” it.
When thinking about working out what your story is – and by that I don’t mean fabricating a marketing lie, there are many things that you must understand. Most businesses know that first and foremost it is important to know what is unique about their business and/or product; why people will want to buy it. What fewer businesses factor in is what competitors are doing and saying, and what is important to existing and future customers. It’s at this point that it’s not uncommon for me to hear businesses say that no-one else offers a particular product or does what they do – so they don’t have any competitors. That’s rarely true. If there is a need – then people are usually filling that need in some way. If you want to be the successful solution for that product need then you’ve got to understand the attraction and weaknesses of customer’s existing solution. Keep your friends close and your enemies closer!
Without doing that you risk telling a story that no-one cares about with product positioning that isn’t relevant.