Bernadette Jiwa has written half a dozen extraordinary books that humanize the too-often industrialized craft of marketing.

In Story Driven, she makes it clear that if we merely try to fill a hole in the market, we’re doomed to a cycle of rearview-mirror behavior. We’re nothing but a commodity in the making, always wary of our competition. We have no choice but to be driven by scarcity, focused on maintaining or perhaps slightly increasing our market share.

The alternative is to find and build and earn your story, the arc of the change you seek to produce. This is a generative posture, one based on possibility, not scarcity.

Now that you’ve chosen your audience, where do you want to take them? Bernadette shares ten things that good stories do; if the story you’re telling yourself (and others) doesn’t do these things for you, you might need to dig deeper and find a better story, one that’s more true and more effective.

Good Stories:

Connect us to our purpose and vision for our career or business.

Allow us to celebrate our strengths by remembering how we got from there to here.

Deepen our understanding of our unique value and what differentiates us in the marketplace.

Reinforce our core values.

Help us to act in alignment and make value-based decisions.

Encourage us to respond to customers instead of react to the marketplace.

Attract customers who want to support businesses that reflect or represent their values.

Build brand loyalty and give customers a story to tell.

Attract the kind of like-minded employees we want.

Help us to stay motivated and continue to do work we’re proud of.

This Is Marketing: You Can’t Be Seen Until You Learn To See (2018) – Seth Godin

Seth Godin on Your Story