“Don’t wait until the slaptree’s fruits are ready to harvest”, my mom used to say when we misbehaved with my brother. Naturally she meant that if we didn’t cut it out, she would introduce us to another term, one that can turn our cheeks red.
It’s never going to work, telling kids about an awesome tree that they’ve never seen to make them stop doing something. Now we misbehaved twice as much just to learn more about the slaptree.
Soon enough, we learned that things that sound well might not be as good after all.
And, much later, I’ve learned about the power of stories from a different perspective. My first editor told me to always start the article with the most important thing first. “People read news to be surprised”, he said, “when something happened is usually the least surprising piece of information you can start with.”
Most of the news you read in papers are the same across the media: the facts are facts, there is little room to change them without being inaccurate or head-on deceptive. What you can do however, is to look for the most interesting pieces and build the story arc around those. That’s how the Financial Times can be so different from the Daily Mail while the facts remain pretty much the same.
Whenever you say that your product is just the same as any other competitor’s, you’re probably right. But that doesn’t mean that your story has to be the same as everyone else’s story.