In his most famous TEDx speech, "The Art of Innovation," former Apple chief evangelist Guy Kawasaki outlined why businesses should ditch wordy, meaningless mission statements and define themselves with a two- or three-word corporate "mantra" explaining their unique contribution to the world.
To illustrate this point, Kawasaki picked on Wendy's. At the time of his speech, the fast food chain's mission statement was littered with nightmarish corporate buzzwords like "fostering leadership, innovation and partnerships" that had nothing to do with its customer experience-which generally consists of eating a burger, or perhaps a spicy chicken sandwich. Instead, he suggested Wendy's' mantra should be "Healthy Fast Food," and every business decision it made should support this crystal-clear idea of this benefit it provides to the world.
This may sound a little more Zen than my average post, but I think defining and channeling a corporate mantra is the crucial missing step that prevents many businesses from creating inspirational content marketing. It's probably not a coincidence that the brands we celebrate for producing the most consistently engaging content all have clearly identifiable mantras that guide each piece of content they produce.
Not convinced? Let's look at a few examples.
British Airways
The global airline's slogan is "To fly. To serve." Half of its focus is on service, and the unspoken subject of each sentence is people. Its mantra, then, could be "People-First Airline."
When you watch the brilliant and often award-winning stories on British Airways' YouTube channel, flight is always the backdrop, but people are more important. The moving mini-doc "Go Further to Get Closer" (2.4 million views) introduces us to a young Indian working couple that is always too busy to connect until they fall in love again on a trip to London. Even the somewhat ridiculous "Man vs. Plane," which shows off the power of the airline's next-generation machines, ultimately lets the human win the race.
IBM
IBM's slogan is "Innovation that Matters," and you could say that phrase doubles as the company's mantra. That probably explains why the running theme of its documentary-style "Made with IBM" commercials and its "Smarter Planet" content hub is how a type of technology (and notably, almost never a specific IBM product) is changing the lives of its clients.
For example, a recent report titled "The Evolving Promise of Genomic Medicine" explains how genome-based health records are poised to revolutionize healthcare and the life sciences, suggesting practical ways executives in these industries can pivot to take full advantage of this shift toward personalized medicine. IBM's "People 4 Smarter Cities" campaign created an online community for people to share ideas for making urban systems more efficient, while also serving as another outlet for the technology giant to run stories about its own solutions.
Products come and go, but innovation is an evergreen ideal. IBM understands how to cultivate and keep an audience.
HubSpot
This marketing and sales software company's stated mission is to "make the world more inbound," which is close enough to three words that I'll leave it alone. Hubspot's mantra is about educating people on a particular marketing methodology. And while founders Darmesh Shah and Brian Halligan certainly have made sure HubSpot practices what it preaches, their approach to inbound marketing is heavily weighted toward teaching.
In February 2007-the year after the company launched-HubSpot created a free tool called Website Grader that analyzed websites for inbound marketing effectiveness. By 2010, the tool had been used over 2 million times and was a huge driver of new business for the company.
Today, in addition to publishing several blogs and expanding upon Website Grader, HubSpot has found success with a mix of educational and product demonstration webinars. Shah and Halligan also did something decidedly old-fashioned that most CMOs never put in a marketing plan, though many should: They authored a book. The Amazon listing for Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Meda, and Blogs consistently ranks near the top of Google searches for "inbound marketing," bringing the company's viewpoint and story to those who are just learning about HubSpot's industry.
Marketing a process: The too-common alternative to marketing a mantra
If you're a business owner or marketer who doesn't create content that's tied to a mantra, you may naturally default to telling people about how the process you use to achieve your goals-a.k.a. "what you do"-is unique. While there are some situations in which talking about processes makes sense (typically for late-funnel or client messaging) it shouldn't become a theme in your content marketing.
Kawasaki explains why defining your business by what you do is a bad idea. His central example is how refrigeration technology changed drastically in the early 20th century, from cutting ice out of frozen lakes to freezing it centrally and, finally, to modern home refrigeration. None of the ice cutting businesses survived the leap to central freezing, let alone refrigerators, because all of them defined themselves by their process.
Regardless of how you choose to write your business strategy, I can give you four reasons why building a content marketing program about processes is a bad idea.
- As Kawasaki's fellow TED presenter Simon Sinek is fond of saying, "People don't buy what you do; they buy why you do it."
- Processes only become interesting after you've convinced people that the results they achieve are superior. Plenty of football fans would sit through a 30-minute documentary on Peyton Manning's pre-snap reads and adjustments; few could be bribed to watch a three-minute YouTube video about Blaine Gabbert's.
- Processes have short shelf lives. When they change, your old content becomes irrelevant and loses its business value.
- Mantras are broader and more relatable. A business in the refrigeration industry could come up with plenty of compelling human interest stories about bringing cool drinking water, frozen food or an ice hockey game to hot, arid and remote parts of the world. There's only so much you can write about central refrigeration technology.
Businesses should tell stories for the same reasons people do
An individual doesn't have to think about the mantra that drives his or her stories; it's something that most of us project naturally. However, a brand-especially one that communicates through many people-does.
In our personal lives, the kinds of stories we tell communicate to others who we are and how we see the world, attracting the kind of people we'll get along with.
That concept also applies to marketing. In a world where customers and clients increasingly align themselves with "authentic" brands, the content you create should always be tied to your unique sense of purpose.