There is no shortage of companies wanting to tell you about their offering. They will gladly go into great detail. And pester you with even more detail if you give them your email address. 

They’ll tell you about their unique technology. Or, superior customer service. Or unparalleled quality. They’ll crow about the unique value they bring to the table. 

Does that sound like most of the brand interactions you have? Probably so. It’s kind of what we expect. Which is sad, because it’s a low bar.

Why is it all about them?

Stop and think about this. We just accept that we have very few alternatives to listening to some brand drone on about themselves. We have to wade through the self-absorbed hype so we maybe can find a nugget of truth. The real story that will help us make a decision to spend our money or time with this brand.

That sucks. Imagine if you had an acquaintance that did nothing but talk about himself. Constantly. With little regard for you or your life. I guarantee you’d pretty quickly distance yourself from this jerk. Yet, we let organizations and their brands treat us this way. You could say they have something we need, so we have to put up with this nonsense. But once again, that’s a really low bar.

The shift

You know those great brands. They just kind of get you. Engagement with them seems less like an assault of hype and more like a conversation. Are they anomalies? Just a fluke we run across every once in a while? If not, what is it that sets them apart?

Engagement with this rare breed of brands feels like a warm embrace. These brands understand that the key to winning our attention, engagement, and even love lies in making a crucial shift – moving from informing to inspiring.

This is easy to say, but tough to do. After all, we have been conditioned to promote rather than to serve.

Promoting is self-focused. It’s all about me and what I want you to do. So I get aggressive, interrupting what you’re doing and pushing my agenda on you.

Serving is outward-focused. It’s about understanding the needs and desires of those we hope to serve. And then finding a way to speak to those things. It’s not taking our current self-hype and spinning it to sound more caring. And it doesn’t mean we can’t offer our products or services. It just means that everything has to come from a place where their agenda comes first.

How to make the transformation

Are you ready to make your brand more relevant and meaningful to those you hope to serve? Here are some ways to think about making this shift.

Show some respect
Show those you hope to serve that you get what’s important to them. That means really digging into the process of understanding them. This will help you move from forcing your message on them to offering meaningful help. 

Make it about them
Take a hard look at how you speak to the market. Is it all about your agenda? How can you make it more about the needs and desires of those you hope serve? Do you have valuable thought leadership you could selflessly share? Maybe you can spin up a free online tool that would be incredibly useful to them. There are so many ideas that will emerge when you start thinking about what’s important to them first.

Get out of their heads and into their hearts
It’s not unusual to believe that we make decisions in a very rational way. But the truth is that our decisions are made in the part of our brain that is responsible for emotions. We then use the rational part of our brain to, well, rationalize it. If we want to reach people in a deeply meaningful way, we must move from trying to win them over with our barrage of facts and figures. We have to figure out how to make our brands meaningful to them. Every one of us has an idealized self that we are working toward. It is a very emotional thing. That’s why it is such a powerful factor. And why brands that understand it are the ones that we end up loving.

For more on making the move from informing to inspiring, check out my book Big Audacious Meaning – Unleashing Your Purpose-Driven Story.