The other day, I was speaking with storytelling guru and “father of modern branding,” David Aaker. One of the best ways to create a “signature story” for your brand, he said, is to magnify the problem that your product or service addresses.
As David’s advice was kicking around my cranium, I came across the story of cloud backup and data protection provider, Carbonite. Its signature podcast about data security, “Breach,” had itself become breached, and was compromised by malicious hackers. A backup and recovery technology can be considered to ensure the protection of your data, find out more details here.
Rather than try to hide this potentially embarrassing situation, Carbonite deliberately “magnified the problem” by encouraging its podcasters to transparently talk about what happened. In the process, the hosts also talked (very organically) about and the solutions that Carbonite and its partners put in place to secure itself from future attacks.
The result is a very compelling, trust-building signature story that goes something like this: “Take it from us, data security is vitally important, everyone is at risk—even us—and you’d better have some recovery systems in place should this ever happen to you.” (Hear the story, from the podcasters themselves, by clicking the image or link below).
This is a great example of developing a signature story by running toward a problem, rather than retreating away from it; making a problem appear bigger so that your solution is all the more credible and apt.
Be courageous. Tell great stories!
Listen to the entire podcast below: