Erich Stauffer

Tag: Brands

  • The Skinny Coconut Oil Story: History vs Story

    When a company is asked to provide their story, they typically tell their company’s history, but what people really want is their company’s story. What is the difference between history and story? Let’s look at some examples:

    Company History A

    Founded by field service experts in 2001, Field Service Management Software offers solutions that enable end-to-end field service operations. Our comprehensive suite of integrated products provides intelligent and automated field service scheduling, partner management and real-time wireless communications for mobile field service resources.

    Company History B

    Our story starts three years ago with two brothers, two backpacks, and one wild adventure…an adventure that would open their eyes to healthy foods around the world. With their hearts set on exploration, Luke and Matt Geddie ventured through Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, India, and Vietnam with a desire to see and experience everything nature had to provide.

    Both of these examples are stories about how the company started. It may be interesting to some, but it fails in one big way: it doesn’t make the reader the hero of the story. Let’s see how we could write it differently:

    Company Story A

    Originally developed for one of the largest companies in the world, this exclusive software is now available for small business owners like you. Get the power of enterprise-grade field management software you deserve at a price your company can afford.

    Company Story B

    When her son brought home a new type of coconut oil from Vietnam, she immediately noticed a difference. As a holistic practitioner who understood the power of raw, alkaline foods, she wanted to do everything she could to help other people like her get access to this new type of oil.

    History vs. Story

    What’s the difference between the ‘company history’ examples and the ‘company story’ examples? When companies are forced to fill out “About Us” pages and description boxes on social media, it’s easy for them to state facts, but what people identify with is stories – but in particular, stories the target market can identify with.

    In the first example, the software company is trying to invoke trust by saying they’ve been in business “since 2001”, but in software-years, that’s an eternity and it wouldn’t really matter if they had said “2011”. In the ‘story’ version, the focus is shifted more towards the value that the customer now can access. Something has been unlocked for them, something that’s precious and rare. They are now the hero for recognizing this exclusive opportunity to get “enterprise-grade software” that’s just recently been made available for small business owners like them.

    In the second example, the coconut oil company is trying to make the two, young founders be the hero of the ‘company history‘ by telling about their exotic travels through Southeast Asia, but this has nothing to do with their typical customer: a holistically-minded mother. In the ‘story’ example, the orientation of the story is flipped to be told from the perspective of the mother, who is more like the target audience. This helps readers identify with the story and they begin to think about how they can be a part of that story – to help spread the word about this new oil.

  • Geek Hand and The Settler’s League

    Hate the Game, Not the Player

    I set out to create a new “Home” brand of technology consulting so that I could offer Indianapolis computer repair in homes without damaging the brand I was establishing with business customers.  I came up with “Professional Technology Consulting at Home,” but the domain was taken so I started looking around and trying different keywords.  I found that “codageek.com – The last geek you’ll ever need,” was available, but I kept looking.  I eventually stumbled upon “geekhand.com” after looking up synonyms for ‘friendly’ (handy).

    I liked “Geek Hand” enough to consider grabbing it, but I wanted to do a little bit of research on the name and domain first.  I found that it had been used prior by another person for personal use and had since been abandoned.  I liked that there were already a lot of backlinks to it from other sites, but because much of the links were from sites about gaming, I wondered if it was the right fit for my in-home computer repair business product I was developing for Indianapolis business consulting firm, Watershawl, Inc., where I was CEO.  It seemed like it might be better off as a part of my blog network at Cost Publishing Media Group as a board game micro-site.

    I went ahead and picked up the domain, setup WordPress, the theme, the plugins, and the SEO.  I created a logo for it which consisted of a 0 and 1 which has both game and binary code meanings.  I used this logo as a background on Twitter and as it’s icon.  By the way, I don’t hardly purchase domains unless the username is also available on Twitter.  In this case, both were available and I took that as a sign before purchasing the domain.  While all of this setup is going on I’m thinking about content and products to sell or promote.  I did a quick search on Amazon and determine that board games, video games, and card games would be my primary products with the “news” of the site being centered around the geek culture of movies, television, and conventions like Comic-Con.

    To promote the site automatically I did two things: I setup a Tumblr account to pull in WordPress posts automatically push tweets out to Twitter and a Facebook page to push out to Twitter anything I post there.  So I only really have to post in WordPress, then copy the link to the post to Facebook to post on what is now the ‘Settler’s League’ page there in order to have coverage to Tumblr, Facebook, and Twitter all at once.  Sometimes I’ll bounce those around on my Facebook wall and on other Twitter accounts I manage for different brands.

    The next step was to add content and put the promotional procedure into place, which I did.  I had a minor problem with links overflowing in the footer, but a quick CSS tweak fixed that.  I have a WordPress theme that I use as a base for most of my Cost Pub sites.  I also make custom WordPress themes and do web design and SEO for the Indianapolis area using Watershawl’s Growmotion marketing where we Growmote web sites–first we build them then we promote them; don’t just promote your business, grow your business with Growmotion.

    Update: I have since converted Geek Hand into more of it’s original role of personal computer repair, but with a slant towards mobile phones – a play on the ‘hand’ in the title.  Here’s the link to the new Geek Hand Facebook page in case you’re interested and a link to Settler’s League’s home page.