An Industry Narrative Helps CEO’s Align Company Culture Around a Common Goal

A company that finds its voice and truly leads an industry often changes the world with new innovations and new ways of thinking. By blazing a path through unknown territory and beckoning others to follow, true industry leaders shape the future. It’s these brands that we remember through the decades, whose products become household names. Not only do organizations that achieve this kind of success provide good products or services, they offer a new way of looking at the world.

The best way for a company to rise above the noisy, crowded marketplace is through Strategic Narrative Marketing. Catapult PR has been blogging about the importance of this new approach to create and define categories. In case you’ve missed the fundamentals, here’s a quick recap:

Strategic Narrative Marketing is an approach to messaging development that leads companies through the process of developing and executing a unique industry narrative, removing the focus from the company and its products and instead looking at the betterment of an industry—creating a vision for both internal and external audiences to rally around. There are many benefits to developing a Strategic Narrative for your company, including creating or re-defining a category, differentiating yourself from the crowd, driving content marketing success, and more.

Change from the Inside Out

Another key benefit, powerful and maybe underestimated, is how a Strategic Narrative can help align company culture around a common goal. In the business world it’s easy to put a low priority on internal benefits and instead focus on the “bottom line.” But positive change often starts on the inside and works its way out.

A lot of companies have murky messaging. Especially in the technology business where mile-a-minute changes force organizations to continually re-invent in order to stay relevant. At Catapult we see far too many companies running in zig-zags around their marketplace—trying to catch up with whatever the “next big thing” is, only to drop that six months or a year later and chase the next buzzword.

As you can imagine, this is confusing and disheartening for employees. Morale drops when teams no longer know where to focus their energy, what to stand for and whether their jobs are secure. The confusion around messaging can inhibit synergy and lead to higher turnover rates.

Again, this scenario is not uncommon; I could quickly fill a page with names of these companies off the top of my head, and you could probably do the same. While the top-level executives spend months or years figuring out what kind of company they want to be, culture suffers and folks wonder if their work matters.

Creating an industry narrative that supersedes what competitors are saying, what analysts are saying and what hashtags are trending on Twitter, gives the company the opportunity to create its own strong path and a clear path for not just themselves but the industry as a whole. What employee wouldn’t want to work for a company like that?

How an Industry Narrative Changes Company Culture

Beyond the other obvious benefits of developing an industry narrative, discussed above, CEO’s have the opportunity to use the company narrative to unite teams around a common goal. A Strategic Narrative acts as an umbrella that brings together different initiatives the company works on and stories the company tells. All activities serve a unified purpose and that gives employees a sense of security as well as an understanding of how their contributions fit into the bigger picture.

When Catapult works with companies to walk them through this transformative process, the internal results are astounding. Every person in the organization can take pride in the company’s new leadership position and morale skyrockets when folks can rally around a cause that goes beyond selling products and instead shapes the industry and the world. Isn’t that what we all want as workers anyway? To know that our contributions are making a difference and serving a purpose?

Learn More

To find out more about how a Strategic Narrative can help your organization find its voice and stand out in the marketplace, watch this recent webinar where, along with guest Rogue Wave Software, we share several examples of how a Strategic Narrative Workshop launched or re-launched an organization and changed an industry.

To discuss how Catapult can work with you and start reaping the benefits of developing a Strategic Narrative, please get in touch. We’d love to hear from you!

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