// April 18th, 2008 // Comments // Writing
When I meet startups, I often talk about the importance of “company narratives” – the stories that a company creates and retells to create its oral history, strengthen and refine its culture, and celebrate its heroes. In part, this is a story about the company narrative that is at the centre of a cool little business: Johnny Cupcakes.
Oh, and it’s also a story about why your company needs a narrative too.
Have you heard the one about…
The power of a company narrative is easy to illustrate. Most of us have one or two we remember, some large and significant, some silly but amusing. I like to draw upon some of the company narratives I was taught – and passed on to others – when working at companies like Yahoo!, when the crazy early days of Web 1.0 were fertile ground for imagination.
One Yahoo! story goes: in a particular room, there was a mess of servers and cables that admin guys were forbidden to mess with “because Filo put them together like that, nobody’s quite sure what they do, but if we unplug them to relocate them, it just might bring all of Yahoo! down.”
I’ll leave others to tell the tale of the Yahoo! employee who got a share price tattooed on his butt.
At WordPerfect, a company founded in Orem, Utah, which employed many Mormon staff, my favourite company narrative was about how the company’s database product, DataPerfect, was based on the Mormon church’s own genealogy software, and that completing and returning the warranty registration form was helping the church complete its goal of recording the genealogy of all humankind.
Like all good myths, these little narratives are simplified, tweaked, burnished and enriched by being handed down from person to person, and told and re-told. The weak ones die and the strong ones get stronger, becoming an element of viral marketing, moving beyond your company to customers, partners, competitors and the media. The greatest narratives will survive – even thrive on – being debunked on Wikipedia.
Johnny Cupcakes has an unusual name, and sells t-shirts from a small but successful chain of stores that look like bakeries, with trays of t-shirts instead of. What’s the story behind the name? Why sell clothes from a retail outlet that probably attracts more hungry junk-food fans than fashion buyers?
Johnny has all the motivation he needs to make his company narrative front-and-centre on his website. Before you’re ready to buy his products, you have questions – you want answers.
Johnny’s website is full of character, and the ‘about us’ story is a great example of how to do company narrative. The story is engaging, full of character, well separated into discrete episodes, and entertaining.
We could improve the viral and recall properties of this narrative by chunking it up into several separate narratives, each with their own space on the website, and rewritten so that each has the essential elements of a narrative: a hero, a story arc with a beginning, middle, climax and end, and a take-away message – a ‘moral’ to the story.
The introduction would work better if it started off with something along the lines of, “Hi, my name is Johnny Cupcake, do you have a moment for a great story?” – most good stories start with an introduction from the storyteller themselves. Warning the reader that this is a bit of a ‘shaggy dog story’ (it takes a while to tell) would also be helpful.
Shaggy dog stories like this one definitely need a counter-balance – the elevator pitch. Nowhere on Johnny Cupcakes’ website is there a brief, concise encapsulation of what the business is about and why you should care. Three bullet points that anyone can remember and deploy when a friend asks, “what’s all this about Johnny Cupcakes?”
Still, Johnny’s site is full of personality, wit and charm. It’s a great shaggy dog story presented in an engaging and self-effacing manner.
Every good company needs narratives. Get started on identifying yours and testing how well they are passed on from generation to generation.
If you don’t have one yet, drop me an email!
