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Writer's picturestevendeebrown

Who Owns the Story?

In an ideal world there is one corporate story with a variety of story lines. And there would be a plethora of interesting sub-story lines to bring them to life for different stakeholders, or personas in today's marketing parlance. We derive each keynote, communication event, or marketing asset from this master story. Each presenter would elaborate their work in the context of the corporate story, connecting to the megatrends, macro financial indicators and outcomes, and resulting customer relationships. It's such a clean hierarchical model, easy to conceive, create, and articulate. What could go wrong?



Well, for one, change happens. Time passes. New products emerge. You acquire a company. Your business grows. Competitors shift. Requiring the story to evolve. At every level. And somehow, you have to corral all of that new information on a regular basis, realign and fill the fissures, and polish it all up for sharing. This process is a decentralized activity by people that may not sync with each other and may not know they should sync with each other.


There are a few ways that organizations cope with this challenge. One is to develop, refresh, and scrub everything on some not-too-high frequency. We do this once a year for our sales conference in January. There are high returns for every presenter to update and polish their stories to kickoff the year, deliver training, and provide sales collateral. All R&D and marketing focus on the strategy, the value proposition, discovery and qualification, and sales tools. The editorial and brand teams focus on compliance and the voice. And the legal team can choose a high leverage moment to enforce their various policies blessing the content. It's a production of massive proportions. And with work from home a new variable enters of video. It's one thing to review and approve the slides. Now we have to check what the presenter says in the video as well?


Another technique is to use the major marketing campaign pulses each year. Pick a (very) few product launches, promotional campaigns, major publications, marketing events, or other communication events. Your team might publish three content magazines a year. Each has it's own theme and stories. Each issue presents an opportunity to refresh everything and publish to the team. Any more than 3 per year might over drive the team, or result in lower quality. We use our user conferences for this purpose.


We're talking about corporate story telling and thought leadership campaigns. And aligning the rest of the company's collateral with those. As a technology company we include data in keynotes and executive articles. And the data needs to be up to date. And this tight connection between the corporate story and data is where the friction occurs.


In my previous blog, What is Executive Communications?, I mentioned that I solicited input from several industry peers. One of those is very strongly top down in their approach, developing a baseline presentation, and then directing their large executive leadership team to deliver the story at a variety of events. The central team controls the content, the adaption to the event and audience, and they train the presenters. Not everyone has that size of team and scale to justify the strong centralized command and control approach.



When developing keynotes, I partner with the owner of the story. Yes, I first read their mind, as I shared in a previous blog on The First Public Keynote. Then I propose the story and content. But the story owner, the presenter, is the decision maker of what they want to say and what to present to get their messages across. This can be simple, or not, depending on the strength of my mind reading skills and the weather (lol). Eventually we find a happy place with the content and the speaker, and then run the content through legal team review.


A highly delicate situation occurs when preparing for what we call management review meetings, or even more so in executive review meetings. Imagine one of the top 5 electronics companies in the world. Imagine our CEO and President meeting with the CEO, President, CTO, and Senior VPs of this customer. What do they talk about? The sales team has certain product level quota objectives, and are most familiar with customer's sensitivities and opportunities. Each business group GM is responsible for a plethora of product initiatives and deployments to manage with these global customers. The CEO and President bring macro revenue, strategy and collaboration objectives - these are teacher customers. Each constituent has a perspective on the messages and content.


If the CEOs are the hosts, and our President is the presenter, who owns that story? In reality these constituents own it together - it's a negotiation between each group. Ultimately in this case the sales leader for the account owns the story. And they are responsible for addressing the interests of the other parties.


In all these story and content creation scenarios, you develop great stories along with the content to convey them. These can most often waterfall into other keynotes and presentations. And the cycle begins again.

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