Meghan Keaney Anderson

Here are a few of my favorite storytelling frameworks. I like these because they've stood the test of time and have been flexible enough to extend to multiple different companies and circumstances. It's important to note that storytelling frameworks are different than positioning frameworks and you'll need both. Positioning is more lasting and fundamental. Storytelling is a way to bring that positioning to life in a way that reflects a moment in time. Here are the frameworks: The transformationa ...Read More

Qualitative data: There is little than qualitative research - customer interviews, listening to sales call recordings, beta group message testing - to understand the trends of what motivates and matters to your target audience. Often times qualitative data takes a back seat to quantitative, but for storytelling this is where the story really comes together in the specific words, observed emotions and examples of real people. A few examples from my past: In preparing for the launch of Ops Hub - a ...Read More

My current company Watershed is actually a similar case here so I'll use them as an example. Watershed is a software platform that helps companies measure their carbon footprint so they can report on it and make plans for reductions. Measuring emissions is an incredibly complex data cleansing, standardization and calculation process that can be highly error-proned and one of the ways Watershed differentiates is by the level of rigor that goes into its proprietary methodology for measurement. But ...Read More

People want to become better. They want to move from pain to solution, from being mediocre to being their best selves. The drive to become is, as far as I can tell, universal. Whether in a novel or a 30 second spot, the stories that speak to us the most make us feel like we're in the midst of a positive change somehow. If you focus too much on the positive -- the value prop -- or too much on the negative -- the painpoint -- you lose the transformation which is the whole point of the story. I wor ...Read More

My first impulse is want to ask more about the strategy behind personifying the brand. The risk in doing so is that you make the story more about your brand or mascot than about the customer, which has worked occasionally, but also carries extra weight. The customer has to both like your product and your personified mascot. It's harder to make a uniquely lovable and lasting character than many think (RIP, Zendesk buddha). But there are good reasons for personifying the brand. For example, if you ...Read More

Competitive posititioning is a core element of product positioning. The primary architecture of brand and product-level positioning comes down to this: Audience: Who are you primarily building for and marketing to?  Pain/Enemy: What is their biggest pain point or problem? Solution: How do you address this problem? Differentiation: What makes your approach to solving this problem different and better? Urgency: Why is now an important right time to address this issue? Competitive positioning lives ...Read More

This is a great one. First, try not to differentiate on features alone. Most features can be copied, they aren't defensible enough from a long-term perspective. Your overall approach to building products - your unique point of view on the market -- that should be the source of your differentiation. Features can, on the other hand, be great proof points of your differentiation. For example, Third Love is a bra and underwear brand that tried to differentiate from Victorias secret by being more inc ...Read More

I try to create competitive intel at a couple of different levels of abstraction: High-level: Usually in the form of a 2X2 which demonstrates the biggest difference between us and the rest of our field. The point of this is to give sales teams a highly memorable soundbite at a categorical level, e.g. "Unlike point solutions, we are comprehensive." "Unlike clunky enterprise platforms, we are easy to use." Detailed: For the most frequently encountered competitors (we're talking 2-3 here not 8-10) ...Read More