What Stories Are People Telling About Your Business?

What stories are people telling about your business?

I’ve been pondering this question for the last couple of weeks. Us humans are natural storytellers: it’s largely how we communicate with each other. Plus, stories are sticky… we remember them long after the boring ol’ facts and figures have faded from our brains.

My ponderings all began with contact lenses. My husband and I get our contact lenses from a local optometrist. Every three months, like clockwork, they send us our lenses for the next three month period.

Usually.

See, this particular time, the person responsible for paying the optometrists’ account with the lens suppliers went on summer holiday. Said bill went unpaid. And, as a result, my husband’s lenses didn’t arrive.

The optometrist screwed up.

But we aren’t telling that story.

Yes, they messed up. It was inconvenient. But, whenever we tell anyone a story about these optometrists, we don’t dwell on this. It was a minor glitch.

Instead, we’re telling the story of Sheila, the receptionist, who after only meeting us once at our initial consultations, remembers our names and faces and prescriptions; who is always incredibly on the ball; and who on this occasion went out of her way to sort out the problem for us. We’re telling the story of how the optometrist provides really great service, sorts things out quickly when they do go wrong, and takes care of us and our eyes in a way that makes us feel like a million bucks even though we’re paying a third of what our previous Edinburgh-based optometrist (who never remembered who we were) used to charge.

What stories do you want people to tell about your business?

You can tell your own stories about your own business until you’re blue in the face. That’s marketing. If you take all the marketing material in the world at face value, every business out there is wonderful. According to themselves.

And people do buy on the basis of fancy schmancy marketing. No doubt about it. But people are also swayed, immensely so, by the informal stories that flow through the grapevine about you and your business.

These stories tell the truth about your business.

These stories can make you. Or they can break you.

What stories are people telling about your business?