Story sells: turning a 20-year-old product marketplace into a brand

Twenty years in business, twenty years online and no story anyone could repeat. Here's how a marketplace became a brand.

For its first 20 years, the company was a marketplace: a one-stop shop for medical supplies. When it started designing its own products, it kept operating like one. The thinking was very Field of Dreams: if you build it, they will come.

Then the company stopped selling competitors' brands to focus on its own. The catalog got smaller, and it wasn't the convenient place to buy the brands customers already knew anymore. It had to stand for something on its own.

The great news: it did. The company's values and core operating principles were on every wall in the building. They just weren't on any of its web pages.

When I joined, marketing meant website support. There were great products and no story. That isn't a marketing problem. It's a story problem, and you can't fix a story problem with a bigger ad budget. So I led the charge to tell it.

Listen first

We didn't start by writing. We started by listening. We read customer reviews and talked to our customer service team, the people who hear from customers every day. Why did this product matter so much to them? What was the emotional way in?

We also acknowledged the suck. Positivity is great, but the human experience is multifaceted, and no one is excited to buy adult diapers. So we chose honest and real. We wanted to feel like a friend, not a company.

Then build the story

What we heard shaped the positioning: who the product is for, what it does that nothing else does, and why that matters to someone who'd rather not think about it at all. Then we wrote the voice: honest, real and human. Then a messaging architecture with standards for each stage of the funnel, so a product page, a TV spot and a customer email all sound like the same company.

A brand people cite, share and buy from isn't built by producing more. It's built by deciding what to say and then saying it everywhere.

Bring the storytellers in-house

If the story is the strategy, the storytellers can't be on loan. Our social media was run by an agency. We decided it was a key storytelling platform and brought it in-house. Freelance blog writers became in-house content managers.

Then we scaled, from ad hoc requests to 40+ published pieces a month. Volume is easy once you know what you're saying. Volume before you know is just noise, and expensive noise.

Say it everywhere

The product page answers the same questions the ad raised. The email after an order sounds like the person who wrote the ad, not a shipping system. The blog, the video and social all tell one story from different angles.

Consistency is boring to talk about, and it's the entire game. Every place the story is told slightly differently is a place the customer has to reconcile it, and customers don't do that work. They leave.

From story to movement

A good story works on new customers and loyal ones. Loyal customers become advocates, and advocates tell the story for you. That's the flywheel.

So we stopped just telling the story and started building a movement:

• A customer hero club that captured 500 customer stories.
• A fan event. For a medical product.
• A brand ambassador program in a category most people can't even name.

Turns out people will talk about adult diapers. You just have to give them a reason.

The results followed the story

Organic search grew 32% in a year the industry declined 2.5%. Conversion on blog traffic went from 3.1% to 15.3%, because the blog stopped being a library and became part of the store. Revenue grew 53% in under three years.

+53%revenue in under three years.

I want to be careful about causality. The story didn't sell the product by itself. Great products sold the product. What the story did was remove the friction between someone having a problem and understanding, quickly, that this was the answer.

If you're turning a marketplace into a brand

Listen before you write. Your reviews and your customer service team already know more of the story than you think.

Write the story before you redesign. A redesign without a position is expensive decoration.

Bring your storytellers in-house. The people telling your story every day should know it by heart.

Then say it everywhere, including the places nobody thinks of as marketing. The packing slip. The hold music. The way the phone is answered.

And check your walls. Your story might already be hanging there.