Storytelling: What Sets Great Brands Apart (Part 1)
We’ve all done it we walk into a store looking to purchase a particular brand named product and end up buying a different one.
Every wonder why?
Great brands are necessities, and as consumers, we relate to the brand story.
Brands that take the time and invest in crafting the user story are the ones that leap and set the stage to become necessities vs. a luxury. The user story is the basis for establishing your brand story.
The brand story is what sets your brand apart.
How Do You Craft Your User Story?
Before we start on creating a brand story, let’s take a few minutes to stop and create our user story.
User and Brand storytelling are not that different from any other form of storytelling. Some nuances go into telling a great story that is engaging and appealing to your target audience.
Start with what will your customers find interesting and compelling to read. Ask yourself the following questions:
- Who are our clients?
- What do they care about?
- What is important to them?
- What information are they seeking?
- What are they talking about?
- What is the tone and narrative around your brand?
- What medium will your story be told in?
- Will it be in writing,
- A podcast?
- A video series?
After you have the answers to the questions above, start outlining your brand story. As you work with the medium of choice keep in mind that each one has different ‘needs.’ For example, a video you need to think about the backdrop, music, the voice over characteristics, visual effects, and timing.
Every story regardless of the type of story (fiction, non-fiction, humor, romance, etc.) each has distinctive standard features.
These include:
- A conflict, adversity or struggle.
- Answers to questions raised as well as solutions to conflict, difficulty or struggle.
- Interesting characters that customers can relate to
- A basis in truth — a little exaggeration is ok, but your story needs to be believable as well as entertaining.
- An emotional element — stories that elicit an emotional response, particularly a positive one, are more likely to influence buying behavior.
- Humor — if it is appropriate for the brand.
- An element of surprise.
- A call to action — this can be subtle or intense depending on where you are in the funnel.
By creating a user story, you will effectively delve in on a particular customer persona and will be able to focus on developing a product and brand story that is specifically for that individual versus creating a generic product and hoping anybody will want it.
This will ensure customers who fit this persona will find your product useful and ideally a necessity.
Being aware of the benefits your clients will be rewarded with by using your product, gauging the effectiveness of the product is far easier after it is in the marketplace.
You create the user story that guides you in your product and marketing plan developments. This also aids you with establishing a continuous improvement path for your product in the future.
Creating A User Story
You need to take the process of building your user story seriously and invest the time, energy and resources. The more time and effort you put into developing an effective user story, the higher probability that you will end up with a greater understanding of your target audience, their needs, wants, problems and desires. Though user stories in their finished state are short and to-the-point, their creation is not something to be taken lightly. In fact, the more time and energy you spend on creating an effective user story, the more likely you are to come away with an in-depth understanding of your target customer — as well as how you can develop your product with their needs in mind.
The more time and effort you put into developing an effective user story, the higher probability that you will end up with a greater understanding of your target audience, their needs, wants, problems and desires.
Though user stories in their finished state are short and to-the-point, their creation is not something to be taken lightly.
In fact, the more time and energy you spend on creating an effective user story, the more likely you are to come away with an in-depth understanding of your target customer — as well as how you can develop your product with their needs in mind.
The result of a user story or persona is a short and to the point breakdown of the target audience, the time invested will pay off generously.
How do you construct a through understanding of your customer?
Personas and User Stories
Roman Pichler wrote an excellent piece that I recommend everyone read that suggest a plan for creating user stories: From Personas to User Stories.
These steps include:
- Analyzing and picking the right customer persona
- Developing “epics,” or broad user stories
- Drill into the specifics to create the final user story
Developing and Choosing Personas
Customer personas are created by analyzing various characteristics of the individuals that make up your client base and target audiences, such as their demographic and geographic information, as well as their personalities and behaviors.
Then taking this information, you create a fictional profile of a “typical” customer or customers. For example, a company that sells equipment for peewee football will likely have created a persona of a parent, and also one of a weekend warrior father.
In turn, the company will be more in-tune with what products to offer each persona, as well as how to market said products to each persona.
When it comes to creating a user story, you will only want to focus on one persona. If you intend for a variety of personas to use the new product you have in mind, you’ll simply need to create more than one user story instead of grouping multiple personas into a single story.
The reason for this is, different customers will use the same product in a variety of ways, for various reasons.
Consider the following two user stories:
As a father, I want a my son to be able to run the 40 in 15 seconds flat, so I he needs pads that won’t weigh him down.
As a mother, I want my son protected and his helmet needs to have the latest gear to prevent concussions.
Though the story revolves around two people using the same product, both are using it for almost opposite reasons.
When two or more personas use your product align, you still need to create separate user stories for each persona. While a particular use of a product might be common between two personas, the overall experiences and goal both have with the product won’t always be the same.
While you’ll most likely end up eventually creating multiple user stories for a variety of personas, begin by focusing on the primary persona you’ve had in mind while brainstorming your product.
Creating Stories
Remember the rather large example of a user story we gave earlier?
As a refresher, it was: “As a father, I want my son to be able to run the 40 in 15 seconds flat, so I he needs pads that won’t weigh him down.”
In actuality, it’s more appropriate to call this example a “blurb.”
A blurb is a rough “sketch” of a user story that provides a general overview of each aspect of the user story. In the example above, it’s clear that the target customer is a team lead or manager who is looking for a tool that will help them streamline processes for their team members.
.In the example above, it’s clear that the target customer is a father who is looking to outfit his son for peewee football but doesn’t want him weighed down in gear.
However, there are still a lot of questions that still need to be answered. How protected does he want his son? What’s his budget? What role or positon will he have on the team?
Now, there will likely be more than one answer to many of these questions (and other questions, as well). Again, this means you’ll end up having multiple user stories under the umbrella of one overarching blurb.
By defining the story — and subsequently breaking it down into smaller user stories — you’ll guarantee that each small task you complete when developing your product effectively goes toward reaching your overall goals.
Carving Out User Stories
Once you’ve created a blurb, you can then “dial in” to create more definitive and usable user stories.
These user stories will help you develop individual features and benefits for your product that, when fully-deployed, will allow your customer to reach their stated goal and resolve their problem.
Let’s go back once more to the example from above. User stories that go along with this epic may read something like:
As a father, I want a my son to be able to run the 40 in 15 seconds flat, so I he needs pads that won’t weigh him down.
As a mother, I want my son protected and his helmet needs to have the latest gear to prevent concussions.
From these two parent user stories, you can derive that the hypothetical parent is looking for and build into your product the requisite benefits.
Should one of these benefits be lacking, the overall product more than likely will not solve the problem in your overall blurb.
- The facets of creating a user story through use of the IT — VEST model
Let’s get started.
The IT — VEST Model
As we’ve mentioned, it takes time and energy to create effective user stories. Despite their short length and overall simplicity, user stories can set your R&D and marketing teams on track for greatness or can kill the project.
When developing user stories, you should ensure they are:
- Independent
- Transferable
- Valuable
- Estimable
- Small
- Testable
Let’s take a deeper dive on each of these characteristics.
Independent
A single user story needs to be independent of all other accounts within a blurb umbrella. This will help avoid certain bias during development, such as overlapping priorities or unintentional ranking.
Going back to our above example regarding the parents with the peewee football player, the stories created are separate from each other, e.g., a benefit can exist without the others existing.
Transferable
Earlier, when discussing the differences between a user story and a use case, we found that use cases dictate the step-by-step processes of development while user stories directly care about reaching a particular goal.
This is because the course of reaching a user story’s goal should always be transferable.
In our example, our hypothetical user wants to ensure that their child is safe, but not weighted down with gear. There’s no mention of how they’d like this to happen or what type of gear — only that they need a other than a helmet to protect their son’s head from concussions.
For example, the user can feel assured that their son’s head will be protected with padding within the helmet, there may be no need to add sensors that replay the power of any hit to his helmet.
This goes back to what we said at the beginning of this article: You should develop products and features based on what your users want, not what you think they’ll want.
In that same thought process, you shouldn’t have the urge to add extra features that you think will “wow” your users if your users haven’t shown any desire for these features.
Valuable
The most important part of the formula we’ve discussed for creating user stories is the “so that” addition to the end of the user statement.
While the first two parts of a user story (the “who” and the “what”) are important, as well, it’s this “why” that gives the story value.
Consider the difference between these two statements:
As a father, I want a my son to be able to run the 40 in 15 seconds flat, so I he needs pads that won’t weigh him down.
As a mother, I want my son protected and his helmet needs to have the latest gear to prevent concussions.
In the first example, the reason the user wants to protect his son without unnecessary weight added by gear. Since there are some possible grounds for this individual to want to be able to do so, the R&D team might have a hard time developing this feature in a way that directly addresses the user’s needs.
On the other hand, the second example spells out exactly why the user wants to protect their son’s head — allowing the R&D team to create the very features desired with a particular end in mind.
Estimable
A proper user story will give your team a good idea of the time and effort it will take to create the product or feature that meets the end goal.
Recall that, because user stories are (or should be) independent, you can prioritize them based on your own needs or preferences (rather than being forced to complete them in sequential order, for example).
Ensuring your user stories are estimable allows you create a timeline for working on and wrapping up a particular story or group of stories.
One thing to note here is that estimable doesn’t mean exact. It’s virtually impossible to know for sure exactly how long it will take to wrap up a story — and there’s no need to, either.
Instead, estimate how long each story will take compared to each other; this will help you figure out which tasks to tackle first, and which ones to save for later.
Small
When we say “small” here, we mean “focused.”
Simply put: the smaller (or more focused) a story is, the easier it will be to complete. This is not just because a lower story will require less “legwork,” but also because there’s a smaller chance of encountering problems or getting distracted by unforeseen circumstances.
When assessing the “size” of a story, a good rule of thumb is: If it’s not estimable, it’s too long. And, while there’s no set time limit for how long a user story should take to complete, the consensus is that anything longer than a week should probably be considered an epic — and should be broken down into smaller user stories.
Testable
When creating a user story, one question should always be top of mind:
“How will I know when the story is complete?”
In other words, the goal for the user within a user’s story needs to be defined so that you know whether you’ve done what you’ve set out to do.
In the example we discussed regarding communication, the goal is clear: Create a feature that allows remote team leaders to communicate with their employees to determine what task they’re working on.
As with the “Valuable” section above, it’s in the “why” part of the user story that makes it testable. Using this same example, even if you create a communications feature into your project management tool, if it doesn’t allow for effective, real-time communication, it probably won’t meet the user’s expectations.
Lastly, creating a user story with testability in mind makes it easy for your team to know when they’re finished with the task at hand, or whether they have more work ahead of them.
Wrapping It Up
The process of creating a product or marketing message can be a bit hopeless and at times aimless if you don’t have specific goals in mind. Even if you do manage to create an amazing, innovative product, there’s no guarantee it will sell if you created it without a particular user persona in mind.
By creating and developing user stories before you set out to develop or design your product, you can determine exactly what consumers are looking for, and plan exactly what you can create that will help them reach their goals and resolve their problem.
Originally published at carolforden.com on August 7, 2017.
