What Gets You Out of Bed?
This article talks about the power of enthusiasm, and how this can be the secret ingredient to successfully conveying your message to wider audiences.
Enthusiasm is inspiring
A pure source of inspiration is seeing a person doing something they love. It’s hard not to get inspired by their enthusiasm and their achievements. Even if you don’t care about their passion in the same way they do, there’s something intrinsically human about seeing people thriving, achieving greatness, or simply doing something that makes them feel alive. When that’s shared as a story, or we witness it, that enthusiasm rubs off. It’s deeply satisfying. It becomes communal.
When it’s communal, the story becomes capable of crossing boundaries: interests, culture, preferences, sometimes even socio-economic and political divides. Think about the FIFA World Cup, as a recent example.
To tell your story, begin with ‘why’
One of my (Corey’s) favourite things at Kumeū Media is collaborating with people on their messaging. An aspect of good messaging is communicating the enthusiasm or the psychology behind what you’re doing in a way that will resonate with your audience.
For this reason, the necessary starting point is often answering ‘why’ questions. Beginning with ‘why’ sets the tone for, and helps explain, the things your business actually does. In answering these questions, something relatable usually emerges that can be shared more widely and is likely to resonate with others.
Let’s imagine a manufacturer of leather shoes. Kind of boring. But if you ask the founder ‘why do you get out of bed in the morning?’ or ‘why did you start your business?’ you get something more interesting.
The founder always enjoyed working with their hands. They grew up captivated as they watched their grandparent working leather. They easily smile when recalling the smell of the workshop, their grandparent’s aged hands as they cut and sewed the leather, and the laughter they shared.
The founder went to uni, got a computer-based admin job, and hated it. They began thinking about their enjoyment for working with leather and creating objects someone can use for years. This inspired them to quit their job and begin making leather shoes.
Now you have a backstory. It transcends basic shoes – it’s about human connection, tradition and craft, and perhaps a little nostalgia.
Now the specifics
At this stage in a messaging exercise, we dig deeper, turning to ‘what’ and ‘how’ questions. Answering these types of questions adds a layer of specificity to your story and complements the ‘why’ questions. Here are some examples:
What do you do?
How do you do it?
What problems do you solve?
What does success look like?
What impact do you want to have?
What sort of personality does your business have?
The shoemaker explains that their real niche is crafting leather school shoes, for children, that are comfortable, functional, and stylish. Most shoemakers create basic but serviceable shoes in black leather. Whereas, this business aspires for children to be proud of their shoes and for the shoes to reflect the personality of the wearer. To achieve this, they use a selection of leathers of different colours and toughness in a range of styles. To them, success is for children to feel happy and confident in their shoes, and to be able to use them for multiple seasons. In doing this exercise the founder realises they want the personality of their business to be more fun, personable, and colourful.
The benefits of messaging
Once you have an answer to the ‘why’, ‘what’, and ‘how’ questions, it becomes easier to craft clear and actionable messaging. This might be formalised in your mission, vision, values, and positioning statements. Headlines, taglines, and tone of voice guides often arise quite naturally from doing this work, which you can then use to advertise or market your business. If you’re doing this work at the same time as developing your branding, you could use this information to add to your brand guidelines.
The benefit of doing these exercises is really for clarity. As a business you become much clearer about how you want to talk to your audience. It is easier for employees or contractors to get an immediate sense of the DNA of your organisation, and how they can support it. It consolidates your guiding philosophies into a singular, informative document. You can then reference the document as a guide to all the messages you want to share in the future. Finally, if we circle back to the beginning of this article, teasing out your messaging makes it easier to share your enthusiasm, which can be irresistible!
