What Business Am I In?
The Art and Science of Business Storytelling
Posted by Chris Sissons on Aug 21, 2024
Stories in Business ยป Chris Sissons
Do you know what business you are in? You have two options. Either you do know or you think you know and are mistaken. Which state are you in?
If you’re in the second category, you’ll believe you’re in the first! This is not a good place to be because if you don’t know your business, how can you market it?
Flip it around. Perhaps if your marketing is not producing results, you have not grasped the essence of what your business offers. There may be other reasons for marketing failure, but this one is pretty fundamental.
In my last post, I wrote about how art turns ideas into reality. So, we can see several potential weaknesses.
- Your original idea is not clear in your mind.
- Your business does not fully implement your idea. This means what you say contradicts what you do.
- You’ve lost sight of your idea, Although your business might fully represent it, you’re not expressing it clearly through your marketing.
- You aim for changes in the real world that are not fully consistent with your business. This does not necessarily mean your aim is wrong but there’s a mismatch with your business practice. One reason for this might be overwhelm, where the day-to-day management of your business obscures your business aims.
- Your market does not understand your business and so you find it derailed by their needs and assumptions.
- Your marketing methods are highly efficient but do not allow you to express your business aims clearly.
- Interaction with your market has led to changes in your business that you fully support but have not fully understood or taken on board.
There are probably more! But this illustrates the potential pitfalls in the basic structure of your marketing. What can be done?
This is the fifth in a sequence of posts about business storytelling. The first post was Marketing: Art or Science? The last post was The Business of Art and the sixth post will be The Invention Trap.
To try out one of your business-related stories and receive feedback from me plus a few other business owners, please comment below to arrange an informal conversation. I run these sessions free of charge on the second and fourth Thursdays. Restarts late September.
For a Goddess, Minerva is a spectacular failure as a magician. I asked her to produce an owl from her helmet. Instead, we find her owl produced Minerva from her helmet. And where did she get that hat? She tells me it has electricity, running water and Wifi!
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