BRING IN ROMANCE

• Everyone’s been very busy.

  I mean, everyone – our company, our company members to become, and also our customers and customers to become. We all run across an abundance of choices to make in our everyday lives. Each with so many options. The questions go on like, which service will I use? What will I do to earn money? How will I spend my time?

  Another question that closely follows is this: why do people choose what they get to choose? As far as I think, an enterprise’s core job is to become the one that gets chosen. To get chosen by customers at large. To get chosen by colleagues and “potential” colleagues. And that is, to find an answer to this question.

  Another day I found this quote from Steve Jobs to be convincing:

  This is a very complicated world; it’s a very noisy world. And we’re not going to get a chance to get people to remember much about us; no company is. So we have to be really clear on what we want them to know about us.

  Maybe this gives us a hint to the underlying reason why a whole lot of startups, and we, have been searching for the so-called “wow moments”. In other words, we want to spark in our customers moments of understanding and enchantment. Because these may be the things that actually persuade people.

  At this point, I want to make an important distinction between reality and interpretation. The fact that our app loads in less than half a second, or that our MAU is greater than 10M, these are reality. And these do not by themselves convey value. Thus, strictly speaking, these do not have the capacity to persuade people.

  It is never the speed itself that wows people. Imagine a world where everything is fast and fast at a same scale; the human interpretation would then conclude there is no relative significance. Rather, it is the comparison, or to say, interpretation in context that makes the speed really valuable.

  It goes similar with organizations. A community you want to belong to, or a company you want to put your most devotion into becomes that way because not of reality, but of subjective interpretations. Without a greater perception that is encompassing reality, a company can have more than double our customers and still be a boring X-making company (substitute X with something super ordinary).

  I would then ask, do we want to build an ordinary X company? I hope not.

  So the major goal an organization should be working on, along with shaping solid reality (which I’m sure we should be allocating most of our resources on), is to try and create *moments that change people’s interpretations.*The end goal? To make people believe. To make people believe in what we’re doing.

  This is where romance should come in. I know the word can have many meanings, but I am looking for a specific one. Afterwords I would mean by romance “a quality or feeling of mystery, excitement, and remoteness from everyday life”.

  I argue we need that excitement. We need to depart from the reality a little bit.

WHAT IS TO BE DONE?

• I will be shortly overcritical and be presenting some claims. I think we have had: a strong but stiff culture, a quite undetermined corporate and brand identity, and thus have less deserved affection. Let me take a chance to elaborate.
• Let’s talk about oratory.
  • To my understanding, oratory calls for the expression of character. It triggers images of colored language. But do concepts like these have had a place in our public branding and communication?
  • Language being a metaphor, I think we have generally lacked these qualities. That occurred to me when I had noticed the reasoning behind why we are not making a custom ringtone. Or during the conversation on our communication strategy regarding transfer fees. Or even on seeing how we operate when we’re closing down a service. If we had to imagine our businesses as real world offline relationships, there would have been room for us to do a bit differently. To be a more human communicator.
  • Our approaches were more likely to be practical than luxurious. Our approach was more likely to be reactive than proactive. Mostly it was “the science of X” rather than “the art of X”. I think people were generally cautious in taking on a subjective way of doing something.
  • I come to conclude that we are bad at oratory. And it follows to me that, before picking up color, there will likely be a glass ceiling above us. It will be hard for us to create larger outreach of influence. I think we are more and more feeling the need of a lovable character, and at the same time, facing the fact that some people will love or hate us because of that very character.
  • I think this is oratory in business. It can also be called, branding.
• Our goal should be to build narrative.
  • Brand is not necessarily a visual representation. I think visual is the least fundamental part. Brand is rather about identity. And identities are most effectively, or truthfully told with stories.
  • Narrative is basically a nonfiction story. And it differs from history in that it is a constructed perception of one’s past and present. So building narrative means an effort to generate and plant that story-like perception in people’s heads.
  • Effective narratives become one of the most important tools to reaching a shared understanding regarding an object. It is because they provide context, and they are almost real. They may be in various formats, and vary in quality.
  • If an organization or a cause shares a narrative, people can have a sense that they are up to something great. If it is about a creation, creators or users of it can feel they are taking part in something bigger. Thus, it is the most major foundation to identity and source of loyalty to such identities.
• Moat.
  • Let us proceed and make believers. People can and should join our movement. We need a totally different perspective from the practical to achieve this.
  • Shed light and it becomes more worthy. At least it feels like it’s more worthy. We need to make that feeling. This will be our moat.

Appendix

THE FRAMEWORK

• Let’s slice up the things we should do into a 3×3 matrix. Things will get more complex if there isn’t a clear picture of what contributes to what.

• The first dimension will be identity. It is about the question: whom are we building the narrative around? Who is X and where do they fit in this world? The distinction of identities is crucial because each identity has a story to tell on its own. Furthermore, identities are context-dependent, meaning one entity may hold multiple identities.

  • Identity as a workplace

    This is going to be the narrative of us, mainly appealing to ourselves and potential members of the “new type of organization”. It is related to concepts such as community, social capital, republicanism, meaning of work, organizational core values, the notion of history-making and so on.

  • Identity as creators

    This is going to be the narrative of us, mainly appealing to people who are interested in the making of our product. I think this is basically a story of successful fast-followers of Silicon Valley. We have managed to well adapt ourselves in changing circumstances, built design systems, have executed with excellence and so on.

  • Identity as a creation

    This is going to be the narrative of what we have made, and its relationship with its users and the world. I think customers and financial institutions of this nation are important communicators. If we dive in deeper we can build a compelling story out of it.

• The second dimension will be the type of job. The work we’re doing here is to produce and communicate the narratives of each identity. So a big part is the making, but more important is finding breakthroughs in distribution.

  • Steering identity

    Identities are not static. Actually, healthy and promising identities are the ones that constantly evolve. We definitely need to add more stuff on the minimally working status quo. Since the job also has to be mainly voluntary and decentralized, some messiness is inevitable. I sometimes see effort of control, but we need to let in more people to contribute to this.

  • Producing and communicating authentic versions of narrative

    When we are starting out for a big journey, we need solid intellectual grounds to help us get through. We should answer, what can be the most accurate romantic portrayal of the landscape? Since I think that our organization is not good at romantic portrayals, what we should do is to create a centralized library of words. It will be mainly documents and conversations. This may not reach a lot of people but it is important.

  • Producing and communicating commercial versions of narrative

    Traditional categories of distribution channels: the product/platform itself, homepage, blogs, goods, offline display & stores, gatherings and so on. We must also be thinking and experimenting outside of the big commercials approach.