Be the obvious choice
The Long Tale is a brand consultancy that helps B2B challengers take on market leaders
Whenever your business makes a sale, it’s because for that buyer, at that time, you became the obvious choice. But how do you become the obvious choice more often?
Big brands have a head start, because their size makes them obvious. If you’re smaller or newer, you need to find a different way to break through.
Brand messages that change your audience’s frame of reference can help you, by altering how your buyers make their decision.
Your audience’s frame of reference is the background against which they make decisions.
It has a huge effect on the choices they make. For example, if they’re completely focused on cost they’ll choose the cheapest. If they’re focused on scale, they’ll choose the biggest.
But frames of reference get much more interesting than that. And most importantly, they can be changed. For an expert-level speedrun, here’s the process in a nutshell.
If you give your audience the materials to construct a frame of reference that plays to your strengths, not your competitors’, you can encourage them to make a decision that will work for both of you.
Luckily, changing their frame of reference is quicker and easier than you might think. You already have the tools to hand. You don’t need to use up loads of time and money on research or new technology, or spend hundreds of thousands on advertising.
In a very real sense, you just need to be you.
What does the Long Tale offer?
Brand and product positioning
A single narrative, the story of your brand, written in clear, everyday language. It’s detailed enough to give inspiration and direction to everyone in your organisation. And short and simple enough to be used every day, everywhere.
Content strategy
Use the insight, experience and knowledge you already have on hand to start using your story quickly. Begin with the simplest (and most impactful) changes, and work outwards from there.
Communication coaching
Improve the return on your story by boosting your team’s implementation skills. Coaching helps you hone and enhance the structure and style of written brand content and presentations.
Introducing the Long Tale narrative
It’s your brand’s story in 300 words…
A narrative that can shift your audience’s frame of reference to something positive for both of you. 300 words are enough to get your story across, but not enough to send your audience to sleep.
written in everyday language, not brand-speak…
You don’t have to be a specialist to tell your story. In fact, the more of your people who see it, get behind it and use it every day, the better it works.
built on market, business and communication analysis…
The more information you can provide about your business, the better. Clients, audiences, strategy, opportunities, threats, revenue streams, business dynamics … it’s all part of your story. Supplemented by desk research, short customer interviews, and analysis of competitors’ messages, this part of the process builds up a picture of what currently drives decision-making in your market.
and made unique by your people’s beliefs
The Long Tale builds your brand message from unique source material: the talent, experience, beliefs and insight inside your organisation. Because your current strengths and uniqueness are what your customers are actually buying.)
Face to face interviews are the most important source of information – with key people, ideally from a wide variety of roles. Partly because the richest insight comes from speaking to human beings, not reading their PowerPoint slides. Mostly because your thinking and culture are what make your story unique. These are the levers that shift a frame of reference.
If you’d like to get down to the nitty-gritty now, we can set up a quick chat over the phone or face to face. If you’d like to know more, keep reading…
Will this work for you?
Absolutely! Especially if you answer yes to any of these questions:
- Do you constantly come up against the same established competitors – in other words, are you a challenger brand?
- Are the messages on your website essentially the same as those of your competitors? (Be honest…)
- Did you last touch your website more than five years ago? Is its structure and vocabulary inconsistent?
- Do you have multiple business lines that you struggle to fit into a single story?
- Are you thinking about, or in the process of conducting, a business direction or marketing review?
- Do you need to boost your new business performance?
- Is your new business documentation starting to look a bit untidy and flabby? Do slides routinely have more than a hundred words on them? Are you suffering from tender bloat?
- Are you adding new products, services or audiences to your established line-up?
Frequently asked questions
Because 300 words is longer (and more convincing) than a bland slogan that your people will parrot or, more likely, ignore.
Because it’s aimed at the long tail of businesses that don’t need the full services of an ad agency.
Because it will last a long time: the current record is 11 years and counting, for a Long Tale client that has grown and diversified around the narrative.
And because audiences actively want to get their teeth into longer, richer content when they find it rewarding.
We haven’t found one it doesn’t work for. So far that includes: commercial real estate, pharmaceutical intelligence, financial services, rail safety and operations, international risk management, commercial cleaning, green steel production, B2B support services, departmental and non-departmental government bodies, education technology, and calorie-controlled meal plans.
No. Market leaders don’t want or need to shift their audience’s frame of reference, because they already are the frame of reference. For all other brands, this is a good approach. The really sweet spot is smaller to mid-size B2B organisations, but the Long Tale is hugely versatile.
TL;DR… By setting the scene correctly, we can encourage people to draw different (more favourable) conclusions from the information we give them.
Longer version… It all boils down to how people really communicate.
Most of us instinctively think of communications a little like this:
We insert or package information neatly in containers of words and images. Through the act of communication the information is then transferred or downloaded or got across to audience members, whereupon it appears sharply and miraculously inside their minds.
This is called the conduit metaphor, identified and comprehensively demolished in 1979 by an American linguist named Michael Reddy.
Anyone who has dozed blankly through a presentation, or argued with their spouse, knows that facts and ideas don’t appear perfectly in audiences’ minds. More likely, they go badly off track, and so does the meeting (or candlelit dinner).
The reason for this is simple. There is no magic conduit to someone else’s mind. They can’t read (or see or hear) your thoughts. Instead, they have to reconstruct your meaning from scratch, starting with what they already know, and adding whatever cues, context and instructions they can decipher from you.
This is why setting the frame of reference, the context for choice, is so important. And why you shouldn’t leave it to chance.
Yes, it is. Current marketing practice focuses almost entirely on giving customers what they say they want. (“A faster horse,” as Henry Ford might have said.) The long tale helps customers make a better choice … which may or may not be what they already had in mind.
It varies depending on scope.
Fees are realistic for mid-size businesses. (Too low to impress big multinationals, but they wouldn’t be interested anyway: see Does it work for all brands?)
The Long Tale has no paid-for links with agencies or suppliers: our advice is always free of commercial bias. (So you won’t end up paying for expensive things you don’t need. Unless you really want to.)
You’ll also get a brand healthcheck, followed by a fully-referenced rationale and brand strategy document. And we don’t just drop these in your lap; you’ll be involved throughout the process.
Your brand story can’t help you if you leave it sitting on a server somewhere. It has most impact when it’s used frequently and consistently. So it needs to be handed over properly: brought to life internally and to relevant contractors or agencies, along with your expectations of how you’d like it be used.
The details vary with client: we can advise on a successful approach and get involved if appropriate.
We can help you tell your story where it counts most.
We generally start in the middle: with your sales and tender documents. These are things you’re already using, which your people already understand and value. And they’ll have the biggest impact with hot prospects.
We also create or advise on wider content and communication strategy. Your story can guide the output of multiple communication channels, letting them all work together. Our clients have put their narrative at the heart of RFI templates, sales presentations, job descriptions, content and thought leadership, websites, ad campaigns and new product and service development.
Yes. With organisations taking on more and more communication tasks internally, Long Tale communication coaching can help your people develop the tools and skills to be more effective communicators.
Tools like LLMs make it easier to produce words and pictures: sometimes, by the yard. But successful branded content needs a particular, consistent, approach. (Especially now that not all of your audience is human.) Depending on your needs, coaching sessions can include everything from how to structure a piece of writing and how to write in your brand’s tone to tricks and tips for writing and presenting an effective deck.
Absolutely. We’re not here to replace your favourite agency or supplier (or indeed, any supplier). We’re here to help you make their work more effective.
But if you need to find a supplier, we can give you some recommendations. (Again, advice is free of commercial bias.)
Because it’s built on more than thirty years of award-winning experience as a brand and communications strategist. (See here for more detail.)
No. It’s the wrong tool for the job.
AI can help with the early stages of research (when used with caution and checked, because … hallucinations). It’s obviously useful for understanding market prompts. It can also be a useful tool for stress-testing a position by arguing against it. But fundamentally AI spits out the most probable next word – roughly speaking, what the most people have said before in that context. Which is not what you need.
Yes, because it is designed to make it easy for you and your people to provide clear, consistent, relevant information to decision makers. It makes you stand out. But it also understands that to be taken seriously in your category, you still need to fit in.
Is a frame-shift right for your business?
If you’re still reading, it might well be. But it makes sense to find out for sure. If you’d like to leave your details, we can arrange a half-hour chat to discuss your needs.
