What’s your legend?

In This Lesson: Developing your legend.

If you complete this lesson you’ll learn how to position yourself as the “natural choice” to deliver your products. You’ll learn how to avoid becoming totally invisible to your customers. And how to avoid having them accuse you of just being “in it for the money”.

The Challenge: Understanding our customers problems isn’t enough.

Being a slightly self obsessed species, we tend to think that our problems are unique and that no one else suffers quite as much as us. So when a company tells us that they understand our problems, it’s a good start, but we’re still a little sceptical.

We tend to tell ourselves things like, “They don’t really care about me, they’re just in it for the money”. And most of us don’t trust or like people who are just in it for the money.

To combat this, there’s no better way than to demonstrate WHY we got into this business in the first place.

The Obstacle: People want to buy from people just like them, almost.

A lot of people don’t like to think that others are smarter or more capable than them. It creates feelings of envy. We prefer people who seem to be “just like us”. And when it comes to buying, we prefer to buy from people “just like us, but who have achieved what we want to achieve”. We like to think “If they can do it, I can do it”. It makes us feel like the things we want are within our reach. If we appear too far ahead in our success, too far removed from our customers “level” we effectively become invisible to them. They now regard us as a different species.

The Strategy: Tell them how this all got started.

So, to be visible and relevant to our customers, we must story of how we suffered the same problem as them. And how we created a solution to make things better for ourselves.

You can call it your legend. Your origin story, or your back story.

“I solved this problem for myself, or my friends and family, now I’m sharing it with you” is a much more believable story than “I’m such a saint I decided to spend my life selflessly helping others”.

It’s also a much more appealing story than “I’m in it to make money”.

Explain the problem from YOUR perspective

We’re telling a similar story to the one we looked at last time. It’s still a story about having a problem and finding a solution. But this time it’s from YOUR perspective. So we’re drumming home the core message in two different ways, for double the impact.

Examples of origin stories.

Apple: Steve Jobs told the story, (throughout Apple’s growth into one of the world’s most profitable companies) that he started the company with his friend Woz, in their garage. Not to make money, but to create computers just for themselves and their friends.
eBay: The eBay founder Pierre Omidyar created the site to be a “perfect marketplace”, but when the press asked for a better origin story, one was created! History was rewritten, as it often is, and the story became that Pierre created eBay so that his girlfriend could trade her Pez candy dispenser collection. This simple, home grown solution to a personal problem was a legend that the press were now happy to spread.
Nike: The legend of Nike begins (several years after the company actually started importing sports shoes from Japan) with founder Bill Bowerman, a University track coach poring rubber into his wife’s waffle iron in a successful attempt to create a better running shoe.
Best Made Company: Here’s the legend from one of my favourite young, and rapidly growing brands… “Our company was founded in 2009 by Peter Buchanan-Smith who saw a need for a better axe: an evocative tool that played an indispensable role in his life working on cattle farms and paddling and portaging the lakes of Northern Canada. Peter knew that a well made axe — the oldest and most invaluable tool known to mankind — could not only function as a lifeline in the wilderness, but at home it could be a magnificent window into that wilderness and inspire people to reconnect with their hands, craft, and nature.” (What does it all mean? I don’t really know, but thousands of Graphic Designers have now got designer axes hanging over their computer desks to help them dream of the outdoors.)
Patagonia: Yvon Chouinard, Patagonia’s founder, had a passion for climbing at a young age, but no money for equipment. So, to provide pitons for his long climbs, he bought himself an anvil from a junk yard and taught himself how to blacksmith. Cutting up old harvester blades to provide his raw materials. The word spread and soon friends had to have Chouinard’s chrome-molybdenum steel pitons. Before he knew it he was in business. He could forge two of his pitons in an hour, and sold them for $1.50 each.
KFC: Good Old Colonel Sanders invented a new type of pressurised deep fat frier. But deep fat frying isn’t sexy. So he told a story about a secret recipe. A special blend of 11 herbs and spices that brought him fame and fortune.

Putting It Into Action: Estimated time – less than an hour.

Remember, people love to share “home grown” stories. Ones that emphasise how this all started out with a personal, not a financial need.

It’s time for you to put together your own home grown legend or origin story. Tell us, in the comments, in just a few sentences, how and why you started your business to “scratch your own itch” or help the people close to you.

You can use this origin story as a key part of both your “About” page and your sales pitch.