How Great Storytelling Builds Brand Loyalty and Differentiates Products

Rae Morey:
You’re listening to Media Playbook, part of the Open Makers channel and Open Channels FM production. Adam. So WordPress is a really noisy space. Everyone’s putting out content, everybody’s got a product to promote. And I think that if you don’t have a good story or your brand doesn’t have a good story, you tend to just disappear into the background. So I want to dig into storytelling today with you. You know, you work in pr. I would say that storytelling isn’t just a PR trick. It’s actually about how people perceive your brand and perceive you and, you know, why they remember you, whether they should even care. So let’s start there. Why does story matter?

Adam Weeks:
Well, we live in an attention economy and like TikTok is like really taking up a lot of my time. Like, it’s like there’s so many things that want to vie for our ATT and storytelling. I don’t know how you actually measure this, but storytelling, essentially, people remember things like something like 18 times more often when it’s in a story structure, we remember stories. Our brains are just wired that way to follow story. And ideally, good storytelling, that’s an important part of this because we are like, oh, tell your story. We always hear, tell your story. Telling a story, a good storyteller, that’s a craft. That’s something that you can get better at. Everybody can get better at it.

Rae Morey:
Some people might roll their eyes at this. I think it’s just a marketing thing. When they hear the word storytelling, it might turn some people off. You know, people especially who might be developers or they’re not used to telling a story.

Adam Weeks:
Yeah.

Rae Morey:
So, you know, how do we help people understand that? Let’s. Let’s unpack what story actually means. Because I would say a feature list for a product or what a brand offers isn’t necessarily a story.

Adam Weeks:
Right.

Rae Morey:
So how do you help someone figure out what theirs is?

Adam Weeks:
That’s a really good point. And yeah, there’s a temptation. My product does X, Y and Z. You should buy does that. And it does it really well. What else do you want? Unfortunately, that’s not why people buy things. And you think about why is it? Someone makes a purchase, nobody buys something unless they need something. If life was perfect and everything was always great and hunky dory and everything peachy keen, you would never need to buy anything. And a good story has setting the scene, what’s at stake, rising tension, and then ideally a climax with a resolution and a happily ever after. And this can Be a feature length Disney film or any kind of film really. Or it can be a five word sentence, it can be super short story can be a lot of different things, but those are some of the elements that we need to have for a good story.

Rae Morey:
You make it sound so melodramatic.

Sponsor Announcer:
It is. When you.

Rae Morey:
I mean, it kind of. Yeah, it kind of is. Okay, so just a quick digression. Quick digression. I went camping recently with my husband and I woke up the next morning after our first night. I hadn’t been in our. We hadn’t slept in our hiking tent for a while and I woke up with a sore back. I’m getting old. And I said, I’m going to ask Santa for a new tent. I want a new tent. So my, my husband being. Being German and very efficient. The next weekend we went tent shopping and I had two criteria. I need to stand up in it and it needs to be really quick to set up. So, yeah, I hadn’t looked at tents in, in what, a decade? We’ve had our tent for a long time. So that, like you say, when you need something, that’s when you go looking for it. And then. Hear me out, I’m coming to the whole storytelling bit. We got to tent world, okay, as it’s called here. And it just so happened that one of the reps from the company was there demonstrating products. He’d come from New Zealand, you know, I live in Melbourne. And he greeted me at the door and said, oh, can I walk you through our products? Anyway, we ended up buying one of his tents. It was really great. And as he was telling us about their really innovative products, their air tents, he weaved in, he was a very good talker. He weaved in the story of the company, how they started, how he uses his tents with his own family, you know, how they develop the product. It’s like somebody in their company who comes across something and they’re like, oh, we’ve got to put this into the tent. So he really wove in how you know the whole story of the company. And I was really endeared to that. So you really sold me on it.

Adam Weeks:
I love that.

Rae Morey:
But it was definitely, it felt like the right place in the right time. But I’m sure he tells that story to everybody. He’s good at it, who he sees. He’s a good sales rep. But you know, for you as somebody who advises clients, not everybody has to be a great sales rep, right? How do you help someone figure out their story and help them to Be able to tell it in their own way, which might, might not necessarily, I should say, be talking to people and go, you know, being face to face.

Adam Weeks:
Well, let’s sit a little bit in your tense story because I think we can use this as a good scaffolding, a way to think about this and this tent. Now, in some ways, one of the reasons you bought does have the list of things. It’s got a good zipper, it’s rainproof, it’s going to be, it’s going to last a long time. However, it’s going to stand up in it. It does now reflect on you. When you go to set this tent up, it is, the tent is representing you. And it’s like, yeah, this does mean something to me because it has a story. Funnily funny enough, we just bought a new tent as well. Our 10 year old tent just died because the zipper broke. And apparently the thing that we needed was our tent needed to have LED lights. I don’t know why it cost extra. So now there’s like a light switch on our tent. We haven’t used it yet, but good grief. But to the point of the reason that story worked is that it helps. It’s about you and it reflects on you and part of your story and that’s why it resonates. How do we then apply this is, I think we can go through very quickly through WordPress because that’s what we’re here to talk about. WordPress products and what we’re selling in WordPress is that nobody buys a WordPress product or hosting because everything is fine. They buy that because there is a problem, their tent broke, their plugin did not represent their agency well and then they need to go and find a solution. When people are looking for it, you want them to quickly find your story that will then reflect back on you because, and I’m going to turn it back to you real quick. As an agency owner you are putting up, your reputation is on the line for this solution and you need to make sure that it reflects your values and your quality of service and all of that.

Rae Morey:
I would add to that telling a generic story such as, you know, we want to empower everyone to succeed, we want every website to be faster that that could belong to anyone.

Adam Weeks:
Right.

Rae Morey:
And that’s not going to cut through. So it’s really about also thinking how do you differentiate what you do from your competitors? Yeah, it’s not like, oh, we, you know, you could be faster, you could be more performant or you could do something, you know, what really stands apart. I mean, this tent salesman, he was upfront about the fact that their tents cost more money. Yeah, very upfront. And he was like, and this is why. Because we do this and this and our competitors do this and this is how we stand apart. So I was like, yeah, hats off, buddy. You, you really, you stood your ground and explained why and you’re not trying to undersell yourself. So, yeah, yeah, respected that.

Adam Weeks:
We’ll pay more for triple stitching or whatever it is that is going to stand out. I want to buy this thing once and I want it to. Yep, we will pay more for quality. There are areas where it is just a race to the bottom. And I think some hosting companies have done this where it is a race to like $5 hosting, $3 hosting, 99 cents. We’ll pay you to host. Like, wait a second. Like, how is this business model working? And, yeah, you don’t want to be just a commodity.

Rae Morey:
Yeah, yeah. So, you know, what are the elements of a good story or how can we help, you know, business owners find their story? Adam, you know what, where can they look to find their story?

Adam Weeks:
This is. I think they can look no further than the reason that they started this company to begin with. Ideally, in most cases, there are exceptions, but most of the time a reason why someone built something is because it didn’t exist. They had a problem and they wanted to solve it. And why did you create this plugin? Like, well, I was looking for this and it didn’t exist, so I made the thing. Oh, okay. So people need the thing that you’re doing. So step one is identification of the problem. What is the problem that many people have? Many people struggle with. Let’s use the tents. Many people struggle with not being able to properly change clothes in their tent and stand up because their tent is too low. We built a tent. So, okay, so there’s the problem. Or many people have tents that, though, like, they don’t last very long and they shred in the wind or whatever it is that bad tents do. The zippers break. Many people struggle with this thing, this plug. The thing that the plugin solves, the security issue, this hosting thing. Many people struggle with this. And then, and this is what I believe your wonderful tent salesman did, is these are how we address those problems.

Rae Morey:
Yeah, exactly. So the tent salesman talked about their origin story. You know, he talked about the human elements of the people at their company who helped identify and fix products and develop accessories and all that kind of thing. But I don’t want to Be to the side of what’s having. An example that’s outside the WordPress space. If, you know, if. Let’s talk through some examples, some examples from the WordPress space, because I think there are lots that we could look at. What are some of your favorite examples of storytelling in the WordPress ecosystem?

Adam Weeks:
There are a lot of them. I think that we can look at the age of AI and recently Christian Taylor did a video of comparing hosting companies, and he did a secret shopper video, which I think was fascinating. And one of the things that came out in that is that hosting companies are using AI in increasing numbers to solve customer service issues. And this video was specifically about customer service. It wasn’t speed, it wasn’t performance security that he isolated this to. Hey, I’m going to pretend to be a customer that has this issue. But he went out of his way to really make a good video out of it. And the winners of this, it was BigScoots and then Rocket was really close. They got to a human being really quickly. And that, I think is a story. So BigScoots is telling the story about 90 seconds or less to a real human who can solve your problem. That, to me, is an interesting story. How many times have we been on hold waiting for a customer service rep? How many times have we typed in a chat bot window and asked a question that, you know, this chatbot cannot answer my question. I. I just need to talk to a person who can make a decision that I think is an interesting story. Humans first. Humans first. And hosting would be an example.

Rae Morey:
It’s definitely a differentiator in this AI age, isn’t it?

Adam Weeks:
Yeah.

Rae Morey:
Yeah. Speaking of humans, I think one of my favorite examples of branding is probably ollie and Mike McAllister and Patrick, who I think, I think Mike has a really great energy to the way he tells his company’s story. It’s not necessarily the way he’s not telling like some kind of story over and over again. It’s more the feeling and the personality of Ollie that he’s bringing out in his social posts. And I think that’s a really clever way of bringing other people along on what he’s trying to achieve.

Adam Weeks:
He’s enthusiastic.

Rae Morey:
Yeah, yeah. And he’s infusing that in everything. And I think that works really well. So it’s not necessarily like, you know, here’s our origin story, here’s what we’re doing, you know, come on this journey with us as we create cool stuff. Right? Yeah, I think that works.

Adam Weeks:
When you talk about storytelling, you can do a trope of it was a dark and stormy night and we did. You know, it’s like, okay, you can tell an interesting story but if you’re telling it in a boring vanilla way and everything is fine, no one cares. Rather than it was a dark and stormy night like oh, now I’m engaged because you’re enthusiastically caring about this. I would say another person that I think does this pretty well is Roger from Kinsta as he is interviewing people. The guy, even when he’s taking you out to breakfast, you did whatever it is, he is enthusiastic, he’s enjoyable to be around and he has an enthusiasm for the thing he’s doing. You can tell a boring story in an interesting way and bring it quite a ways to make it interesting simply with enthusiasm. And I think we were talking about Omnisend, you know.

Rae Morey:
Yeah, Omnisend’s a lot of fun. Right. If you compare them to like mailchimp, another email platform.

Adam Weeks:
Great.

Rae Morey:
You know, if you’re in the WordPress space, who are you going to remember? If you see, you know, on social media you see a lot of Omnisends fun posts. Bernard does a great job with sharing some of those funny videos.

Adam Weeks:
His big yawn thing, even just that picture that he.

Rae Morey:
Yeah.

Adam Weeks:
Is great.

Rae Morey:
It’s just a bit different. It’s just a bit different. And they’ve infused some fun into their brand and I think that works really well for them. It makes the brand more approachable and. But also memorable.

Adam Weeks:
Yeah.

Rae Morey:
If you’re thinking of email platforms, WordPress, you know, they might jump out at you because. Oh yeah, I keep seeing them around. They’re always. Their branding is everywhere. Right.

Adam Weeks:
And that goes back, I think to the memorability of story. We remember and ideally a good story makes you feel something. There’s an emotion. And we remember emotions better than we remember facts. It just. It’s gonna. Deeper grooves in our brain when we feel something.

Rae Morey:
Yeah, absolutely. So I’m interested in how you advise your clients. How would you approach, you know, one of your clients to, you know, find their story and amplify it.

Adam Weeks:
So one of the really important ways is to be comfortable with who you’re not. And over and over again, we see this happen where there’s something called feature creep. Just because I can do something doesn’t mean I should do something there. I remember someone used an example of a remote control for like a VCR, you know, in the 90s or something. And you have this big remote control, and it’s got like 40 buttons on it. Like, what do you need? 40 buttons? I need, like, pause, play. I don’t need to find the Gregorian calendar on my VCR, but the engineer and like, but I can do this. I can have a button that will do the thing. We want to let everybody know that we can solve everybody’s problems. And in a way, you probably can solve a lot of problems, but you can’t solve. You’re not best suited. And I think Apple is a good example of this, where they’re often famous for not doing a thing or not including a feature. Hey, Samsung lets me do this on my phone, but Apple doesn’t. Well, it’s working. It’s not. I mean, Samsung definitely sells a lot of phones, but Apple, that’s part of their signature, is what they remove.

Rae Morey:
Yeah, I think that’s really important to consider being clear who you’re not for. The. You know, coming back to the tent salesman, he was very clear that it was not basement bargain brand. These were tents for people, particularly families, who want to invest in a tent that’s going to last for a decade of school holidays. Right. Because that’s what I was looking for.

Sponsor Announcer:
Yeah.

Rae Morey:
And. And so, you know, it wasn’t. It wasn’t the cheapest brand, but it was really good quality. It wasn’t like super. Super expensive, but it was also in a good price range. It was really high quality. But, yeah, he was very upfront about who it wasn’t for. And I think that’s really important to be specific also in your storytelling, who you’re for, but also who you’re not for.

Adam Weeks:
Yeah.

Rae Morey:
Because if you try to be something for everyone, you’re not really being something for anyone. You know, a specific audience, and you might not attract the clients or the customers that you necessarily want.

Adam Weeks:
And I think with the tent Analogy.

Rae Morey:
Yeah.

Adam Weeks:
If you’re looking for the super cheap tent that is just going to get you by for a weekend, we’re not for you. We’ll send you over to those guys, they’ve got a tent for you. If you’re looking maybe for a like a hyper, like backpacking, ultralight backpacking tent for like, all right, those guys over there, they’ve got that tent. We do this thing well. And if, and if this is what you need, we’d love to help you. And we’ll put our name up against anybody else who’s also selling a tent like this. Being confident in who you are is attractive. I think, like just in, in everything, being confident is attractive. And when you are willing to say who you’re for, that is going to be helpful because not. You were telling a story about the restaurants near you, what do they do?

Rae Morey:
So in Australia, and any Australian listeners might, might resonate with this, but, you know, because we’re in the Asia Pacific, there are a lot of kind of Asian restaurants around, particularly Melbourne, where I am and I suppose other places. But you know, sometimes there might be, and I’m not saying every Asian restaurant is like this, but there might be some restaurants in some suburbs of Melbourne that have a 20 page menu and they have everything from fried rice and, you know, honey chicken to sushi and Indian curries and Vietnamese dishes. You know, they’ll cover every Asian country. And you’re thinking, was this a Chinese restaurant or are they doing, is this a Vietnamese restaurant? Because you wouldn’t go into a restaurant and think, you know, when you’re after a particular dish, you kind of look at the menu and think, well, they’ve got 20 pages of dishes from every Asian country. What do they actually do well here, what can I trust what I’m going to eat at this restaurant? Because I don’t know if they can do the dish that I want really well because they’ve got so many other dishes. And I think that, I think that applies to other businesses. In the tech world, in WordPress space, if you’re trying to do everything, how are you doing your core things really well? And you know, how do your customers perceive your ability to deliver on the things that you’re promising? If you’re promising so many things?

Adam Weeks:
Right. I think that with those restaurants, like those restaurants are open and they are doing business, but they are maybe not thriving in a way that if they were to specialize, I think of like Swiss army knives, like these knives, those red knives with the little cross on them that open up like 30 different things. People buy those, they’re good knives, but they are not purposeful for doing a specific thing. If you are a professional, you aren’t going to use a Swiss army knife for making food. You know, like, yes, it could cut a steak or whatnot, but you’re not going to prepare food. You’re going to want chef knives. You’re. If you are sawing down a tree, you’re not going to use a little saw inside the Swift army knife. You’re going to actually buy something that serves that. And those are different things. They are purpose built. And when a company tries to say that our solution is for everybody under the sun and we can help your grandma too, it’s like, wait, no, my grandma doesn’t need all of this. Like, she doesn’t even know what a website is. But we might be limiting some clients. Maybe someone could, like, yeah, be comfortable with not being for everybody and potentially losing out on a small minute chance that somebody might still buy your thing. But you’re going up against, you know, the world when you’re in WordPress.

Rae Morey:
Absolutely. I think it might be helpful to, you know, we’ve got five minutes left or so it might be good to go through an exercise of how to look at your business and, you know, unpack. So I think it’s really important to be able to explain, you know, to know your elevator pitch. I think we’ve talked about this before. How do you get your clients to unpack who they are in an elevator pitch?

Adam Weeks:
All right, so I love this example and how I think of it is help people use as few calories as possible to understand what you do when you think. When your brain, you can actually, I didn’t move at all. I sat in a chair all day and why am I hungry? Like, well, you were. You’re in a thinking business. And when our brains are working hard, we are using up calories, literally. And if you can cut through the noise using story, you will connect quicker and faster with people because they will more easily be able to understand. Oh, yeah, you’re for me or you’re not for me or however we’re gonna do. So let’s see. Would you want to give me a scenario like, what type of company do we want to do this for? And we’ll see if we can do it on the spot.

Rae Morey:
Oh, okay.

Adam Weeks:
How.

Rae Morey:
How about the repository?

Sponsor Announcer:
How would you.

Rae Morey:
What’s the elevated pitch?

Adam Weeks:
I love this. My company, I love this. Okay. The repository. Okay, so first off, we do have to do a Little bit of thought exercise on why does the repository exist? What is the problem that it is solving? And so let’s dive into that. And you’re the perfect person to ask why does the repository exist, Ray?

Rae Morey:
To deliver news about and for the WordPress ecosystem. Yeah.

Adam Weeks:
And is that being done by others, mostly me?

Rae Morey:
Yeah.

Adam Weeks:
Not really. There are others, like TechCrunch or something that might carry a really big story, but it’s not doing the core WordPress news that we all care about.

Rae Morey:
Yeah. I mean there are lots of other players in the WordPress news space. I just do things, I guess a little differently.

Adam Weeks:
Yeah. And I would say that. And we had for many years the Tavern, which was a fantastic. It is currently on hiatus with no real. No if it’s ever coming back. We don’t know. There was a conversation that said, oh, I missed the Tavern. And the comments in Slack were, we don’t really need the Tavern, we have the repository.

Rae Morey:
And that’s really nice.

Adam Weeks:
That is true because of your consistency over time. So we’re going to build this story out. A lot, a lot of people struggle to keep up with the fast pace of news in the WordPress ecosystem. Would you say that’s true?

Rae Morey:
So let’s just say that, yeah, things change very quickly.

Adam Weeks:
A lot of people struggle with that. On a weekly basis the repository newsletter brings trusted fact based reporting about the WordPress ecosystem to help you keep on top of what’s happening and better understand the ecosystem that you’re in. So with that kind of thing we identified the problem. Right. That it’s hard to keep up. And what we struggle with, so what’s the problem? And then what you do to solve that problem is on a regular basis quality reporting. And then the part of it that’s. That’s also important is so that. So what does success look like? If I am a reader of the repository, I am able to gather, I’m able to keep on top of the most important news in the WordPress ecosystem to help me be successful, to help me know what’s going on in this industry that impacts my life. But we kind of had a.

Rae Morey:
That’s a really good point.

Adam Weeks:
A little story.

Rae Morey:
Yeah. Yeah. Finding that the success for the client or customer.

Adam Weeks:
Yeah.

Rae Morey:
Or in my case, reader. Yeah, it’s really important to identify that. Yeah.

Adam Weeks:
Part of my business as someone who works in this ecosystem is I need to know what’s going on and if I don’t, things can change, whether it’s with a release or with something that’s maybe happening with the automatic and WP engine turmoil or whatever is going with an event that’s coming up. I need to know these things and how to stay on top of this fast changing giant ecosystem. That is very special important to me.

Rae Morey:
Yeah, I mean like you say, it’s about finding for your business what makes you different, what makes you stand out, you know, and also why should anybody care? That comes back to how I cover stories, make it, you know, finding that thing that sets you apart and people should care about.

Sponsor Announcer:
Yeah.

Adam Weeks:
And with the repository, you’re consistent. I know that it’s always going to come out there.

Rae Morey:
You’re.

Adam Weeks:
You don’t miss that. It is based that you have done your research. You are a reporter. You know, you aren’t just like, I’m writing about something I like. You know, you have the chops, the background to say that like no, I’m like, this is a legitimate news source and you can trust what is here and it’s. And we get to be a part of the conversation and maybe we disagree or agree. That’s not really even the point. But this is, our ecosystem is stronger because the repository exists and it’s a very significant tent pole part of, you know, of this ecosystem working.

Rae Morey:
Oh, I appreciate all that. Now I want to go and rewrite all of my, all of my branding on my site. Well, I hope anybody listening, you know, this has got the brain juices flowing because, you know, I think it’s really important like you say, the framework that you offered for discovering your elevator pitch, that’s a really good way to identify what’s important to you and to the people who are consuming your product or viewing your brand.

Adam Weeks:
So yeah, we’ll sum up a couple of things. I think as we’re bringing this to a close, I think a few things I want to people to keep in mind is be enthusiastic, be confident, acknowledge that you’re not for everybody. Understand what the problem is that your customers have. Like understand what that problem is and empathize. Yeah, that’s difficult. A lot of people struggle with that thing. That’s a big deal. Be okay. Like again, people don’t buy things unless there’s something wrong, unless you need a tent or less, you know, whatever it is, understand that there’s a problem and then that the story is really about them, that you’re helping them tell their story of success. And then we take just like the story arc is set, the scene rising, tension, climax, which is that decision to purchase your product and resolution the happily ever after. Keep those things in mind. As you are thinking about telling your story, and if you can have someone else tell your story for you, boom, even better.

Rae Morey:
Well, on that note, this has been a really great conversation. Adam, thank you. Yeah.

Adam Weeks:
Fun times. All right. Thank you.