What Is Your Best Kept Secret?

In this edition of our whitepaper, we present this challenge: Perform a search engine search of the phrase “most valuable brand.”  If your brand is listed among the top ten results, please call me immediately so that I can congratulate you!  If, like most of our brands, yours isn’t even listed among the results, may want to continue reading – not to become among that elite top 10, but to generate the appropriate value for your brand.

A starting point for building brand value is to answer these questions:  What is our brand story? Can anyone on our team tell our brand story? Do our team members effectively communicate our brand story to clients and prospects? My friend Cathy Lucas of Lucas Narratives, an expert in brand storytelling, brand ecosystems, and strategic planning and communication, helps her clients confidently answer all these questions.

Most of the prospects who arrive at Cathy’s threshold think they need help connecting with customers and prospects, telling their story better, or more effectively delivering their story.  Some ask for Cathy’s help rising above the “noise” and standing out to their customers and prospects.  Others want help getting team members to buy-in to the strategies they’re implementing.  Typically, the prospect really needs the creation, refreshing, or polishing of their brand story and help effectively sharing that story with the world.

Cathy shared that her starting points are understanding the client’s business and their goals so she will be helping fulfill their mission and attain their vision.  Next, Cathy and her team always conduct research, which may include focus groups, surveys, or interviews of stakeholders, employees, customers, prospects, benefactors, or board members.  Cathy and her team analyze the results and, based on understanding the business and the client’s goals, make recommendations about how the client and the client’s team can better convey their story and deliver on their promise.

Cathy gained some of her expertise helping clients develop and tell their brand stories while serving as Vice President of Strategy and External Affairs of Metropolitan State University of Denver.  “What I really do,” Cathy shared, “is provide that ‘strategic lens’ to understand marketing and communications.  Are you crafting and telling your story in a way that resonates with your intended audience? Do you have an ecosystem that demonstrates your value proposition?”

A great example of Cathy’s process having yielded powerful results is her work with the University of Northern Colorado (an institution still growing and thriving despite the author’s having graduated from it).  UNC learned of Cathy’s success developing and growing MSU’s brand and asked if she might lend her expertise to create a similar success for the Bears (UNC’s mascot).  With the help of two other team members, Cathy conducted a large survey, focus groups, and one-on-one interviews and developed an image of UNC’s brand status.  The image didn’t come as a surprise – the brand wasn’t “out there” at all.  UNC’s executives and staff hadn’t communicated to the community anything about what the University’s staff or students were accomplishing.  The institution wasn’t even using paid advertising.

Cathy worked with UNC’s President and senior leadership team and gave them recommendations about adopting a brand strategy.  The leaders adopted the strategy, and now Cathy’s working with the University’s marketing and communications teams to integrate her recommendations in the marketing strategy and implement it.

The strategy includes ‘proof points,’ information the team members share with the community. For example, 92% of students who attend UNC choose it because it’s a great fit and gives them a feeling of belonging.  Many of our readers are familiar with UNC’s history starting as a teacher’s college, but many of you may not know that lots of UNC’s teacher graduates take jobs at the university.  Another proof point: UNC employs some of the best-trained educators in the nation, and UNC professors are both teachers and experts in their fields of study.

Capitalizing on Greeley’s location within the 4^th fastest growing region in the country and the University’s leading rank in our state for the upward mobility of its students, Cathy and her team helped UNC garner buy-in on the in-house campaign “North of the Norm,” demonstrating the changing face of the brand of University and of Northern Colorado.

Another notable example Cathy shared with us was with the Colorado Business Roundtable.  However, Cathy had vastly different recommendations for the Roundtable.  The organization had a new CEO and new strategic plan and was seeking to amplify its brand by unapologetically sharing that business is a force for good.  By creating a video series of Roundtable member CEOs talking about the policy initiatives that they’d developed with the help of the Roundtable, and by sharing the videos by social media and through a partnership with 9News Cathy supported the Roundtable’s goal of better telling its story with academia, business, government and community.

As a final example, Cathy shared some details about her work for the Boettcher Foundation.  The Foundation had changed its strategy from funding capital projects only to funding programs throughout the state that equip leaders to meet Colorado’s challenges.  Cathy helped the Foundation create a suite of communication products to tell the Foundation’s story, including a brand storytelling hub and a podcast that is hosted by the CEO of the Foundation.  You may be familiar with the Boettcher Foundation’s history, having been created by Claude Boettcher in a hardware store in Leadville where he provided tools to miners.  Cathy and her team helped the Foundation develop and tell the current chapter of the Foundation’s story – its focus on providing the tools to help equip and bolster today’s leaders.

If Cathy were looking to hire someone like herself, she says she would ask for testimonials.  She would ask, “Who have you done this work for and what do they say about you?  What’s your success rate?”  She advises, “adopt the attitude ‘Don’t tell me, show me!’  Show me a case study or results about how you raised brand awareness over the last couple of years.”

Cathy shared that her ideal client is someone with a mission and that she loves helping organizations with strong stories to tell and who just need some help telling it.  Her favorite result involves a client embracing an idea that she created.

“You don’t want to be a well-kept secret!” Cathy warned, “Get your story out there and establish yourself as a business leader.  Create your strategy and position your CEO as a thought leader in your industry.”

If these admonitions ring true to you, please reach out to me.  I’ll be honored to connect you with Cathy.