Your Business Call-To-Action

In your business, at some point, you will come across a Call to Action. Think of your Call to Action as the point in every great book you’ve ever read where our hero’s world is interrupted by something and it forces them to take action.​​​​​​​​
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Typically businesses find themselves face-to-face with a Call to Action, or a  challenge some sort, that forces them reassess their brand or risk ruin, and one of the most common ones we see as an agency is the one we call The Fish Syndrome.​​​​​​​​
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Like a fish in a tank, your mouth moves and moves but no one is listening.​​​​​​​​
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Your content falls on silent ears, the engagement is meager, and the conversions lackluster, regardless of how hard you work on it.
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It’s discouraging to find yourself in this position as a business, and it can happen to anyone. It might even spell certain disaster if you can’t turn it around. We have huge clients with thousands of employees and 80+ years in business that find that they’ve lost their voice completely in the new world of heavy commoditization and competition.​​​​​​​​

Your Sign To Change

One of the first things we establish in your narrative strategy is your Call To Action(s), because only once we know what you’re up against can we help you overcome it. We even do this to new companies that haven’t even launched yet because you can usually get a sense of what your primary problems will be in operation, especially once we consider the options on our list.

For example, some brands fight what we call The Black Cat Syndrome, which is when you work in an industry that has negative public perceptions or impressions, whether they are rooted in truth or not. Take for example, a company that manufactures products out of plastic, or that grows palms for palm oil. Regardless of whether your company is producing products ethically or sustainably, the public perception is deep-set against your industry as a whole.

But once you know what you’re fighting against it’s easier to come up with strategies to combat it. You can stock your arsenal with the tools of communication and wage war against your challenges.

The Story is the Startegy

Once you know your Call To Action, then you can begin to launch a campaign against it with a counter story.

For example, we have one client that is a grower of palms for palm oil. You might be immediately inclined to recall that palm oil is horrible for the environment, and that its plantations are responsible for the deaths of thousands of species yearly. The truth is much more nuanced, in that palm plantations actually require much less square footage than other vegetable oils and are less destructive to the environment because of their smaller footprint. Not many people know that, and will happily boycott palm oil and buy corn oil without a second thought on the matter.

So how do you fight such perceptions? We wanted to flesh out their goal of being better perceived as a sustainable brand by giving them tools to live their story. One of these suggestions was to set up trail cameras around their plantations and have a live feed running day and night on their website.

It’s hard to argue that you’re not operating ethically and sustainably when you’re literally giving the public a window in, clearly you have nothing to hide. And seeing the litany of species that calls the plantation home doesn’t help either.

This recommendation was just one among many in a strategy guide that included their new brand narrative, their archetypes, plot, and more.