What's Your Story?: Storytelling to Move Markets, Audiences, People, and Brands

Ryan Mathews and Watts Wacker

Storytelling is the universal human activity. Every society, at every stage of history, has told stories–and listened to them intently, passionately. Stories are how people tell each other who they are, where they came from, how they’re unique, what they believe. Stories capture their memories of the past and their hopes for the future. Stories are one more thing, too: They are your most powerful, most underutilized tool for competitive advantage. Whether you know it or not, your business is already telling stories. What’s Your Story? will help you take control of those stories and make them work for you. Legendary business thinkers Ryan Mathews and Watts Wacker reveal how to craft an unforgettable story…create the back story that makes it believable…and make sure your story cuts through today’s relentless bombardment of consumer messages…and gets heard, remembered, and acted on.

• The ten functions of storytelling
  Discover what stories can do for your business
• The abolition of context
  Telling stories when the past no longer defines the future
• The five most important story themes
  Leveraging themes your audiences will understand and believe
• Applied storytelling 101
  Storytelling for your industry, your company, your brand, and you
• Mastering yourstoryteller’s toolbox
  Making your stories more compelling, more believable, and downright unforgettable

 Use Storytelling to Gain Powerful Competitive Advantage in Today’s Increasingly Skeptical Marketplace

• Leverage the incredible power of storytelling in marketing, sales, investor relations, recruitment, change management, and more
• Indispensable techniques for every CxO, entrepreneur, and marketing, sales, and communications executive
• The latest breakthrough book from best-selling futurists Ryan Mathews and Watts Wacker!

Discover the most powerful words your business can say: “Let me tell you a story…”

Storytelling is hardwired deep into every human being...and it has been, since before marketing, before PR, even before humans learned to write. Everyone responds to a story told well. Now, legendary business thinkers Ryan Mathews and Watts Wacker show how to tell the stories of your business: not just well, but brilliantly. You’ll learn how to craft stories that are both true and believable...identify primal themes that will resonate with your audiences...leverage storytelling techniques that go back to Shakespeare and Homer...tell stories that supercharge your company, your brand, and your career!

This book is available in hardcover.

The Myth of Excellence :
Why Great Companies Never Try to Be the Best at Everything

Ryan Mathews and Fred Crawford

The Undiscovered Consumer and the Mistake of Universal Excellence

What do customers really want? And how can companies best serve them? Fred Crawford and Ryan Mathews set off on what they describe as an “expedition into the commercial wilderness” to find the answers. When they analyzed the responses to their initial survey they were stunned by the results. What they discovered is a new consumer - one whom very few companies understand, much less sell a product or service to. These consumers are desperately searching for values, an increasingly scarce resource in our rapidly changing and challenging world. And increasingly they are turning to business to reaffirm these values. As one consumer put it: “I can find value everywhere, but can’t find values anywhere.”

Crawford and Mathews’ initial inquiries eventually grew into a major research study involving more than 10,000 consumers, interviews with executives from scores of leading companies around the world and dozens of international client engagements. Their conclusion: Most companies priding themselves on how well they “know” their customers aren’t really listening to them at all. Consumers are fed up with all the fuss about “world-class performance” and “excellence”. What they are aggressively demanding is recognition, respect, trust, fairness and honesty.

Believing that they are still in a position to dictate the terms of commercial engagement, businesses have bought into the myth of excellence – the clearly false and destructive theory that a company ought to be great at everything it does, that is all the components of every commercial transaction - price, product, access, experience and service. This is always a mistake because “the predictable outcome [is] that the company ends up world class at nothing; not well-differentiated and therefore not thought of by consumers at the moment of need.”

Instead, Crawford and Mathews suggest that companies engage in Consumer Relevancy, a strategy of dominating in one element of a transaction, differentiating on a second and being at industry par (i.e. average) on the remaining three. It’s not necessary for businesses to equally invest time and money on all five attributes and their customers don’t want them to. Imagine the confusion if Tiffany started offering deep discounts on diamonds and McDonald’s began selling free-range chicken and tofu.

The Myth of Excellence provides a blueprint for companies seeking to offer values-based products and services and shows how to realize the commercial opportunities that exist just beyond its current grasp – opportunities to reduce operating costs, boost bottom-line profitability and, most importantly, begin to engage in a meaningful dialogue with consumers.

This book is available in paperback and hardcover.

The Deviant's Advantage:
How Fringe Ideas Create Mass Markets

Ryan Mathews and Watts Wacker

Don’t consider yourself deviant? Well, that just may be a career breaker. Odds are the idea or product that will transform your business or industry tomorrow is out there right now, hiding in the shadows of the Fringe, raw, messy, untamed, and just waiting to be exploited. Trapping, taming, and marketing it is the key to burying your competition and staying ahead of your market.

Deviance is nothing more than a marked separation from the norm and is the source of innovation, the kind of breakthrough thinking that creates new markets and tumbles traditional ones. Positive deviation is an inexhaustible font of new ideas, products, and services. It’s the source of all creative thinking and dynamic new market development and ultimately the basis of all incremental profit.

The Deviant’s Advantage describes how deviance proceeds along a traceable trajectory from the Fringe, where it originates but has zero commercial potential; to the Edge, where word of mouth creates a limited audience; to the Realm of the Cool, where the buzz and market momentum really start to build; to the Next Big Thing, where demand is honed and intensifies; finally landing at Social Convention, the heart of the mass market.

Ryan Mathews and Watts Wacker, two of America’s most respected futurists, trace the “Path of the Devox” (the voice, spirit, or incarnation of deviant ideas, products, and individuals), using it as a way to explain how and why:
* Christian fundamentalism morphed from college Bible studies to Republican party king-making
* Reebok cares more about what’s on the feet of kids in Detroit and Philadelphia than what the so-hip-it-hurts set is wearing in New York or on Rodeo Drive
* Napster exploded from an idea germinating inside a sixteen-year-old to a movement with 60 million subscribers that very nearly destroyed the music industry
* Hugh Hefner went from America’s most public pornographer to a cultural icon with decidedly Puritan sensibilities

Mathews and Wacker also look at what happens to formerly deviant products and ideas after they are replaced by the next wave from the Fringe—how they morph into Cliché (where their commercial potential may actually increase), become Icons or even Archetypes, or fade into Oblivion, and how you can profitably manage even a fading concept.

Looking for the next big idea for your business? Then it’s past time to quit staring at the Social Convention for inspiration and start scouring the Fringes of society. Tomorrow’s breakthrough concept is lurking out there right now, in the mind of a deviant individual. Your choice is simple: find it and exploit it, or be buried by those who do.

This book is available in hardback in english and german, and also as an audio download. A paperback edition will be available in March 2004.