Judged By Your Map

Yesterday, in The Strategic Narrative Workshop, we talked about the difficulty of changing the place your company occupies in the minds of your customers.

People will put you in a mental box; you do the same. We all do the same.

It’s called positioning.

We do it for everything: people, places, moments, food, and of course, brands.

This is how positioning works: you may not keep the mess in your house under control, but inside your head, your brain wants to take care of keeping your “mental house” clean. So it’s constantly working to organize your stuff and make sense of every piece of information.

Everything needs to have a position in our minds because otherwise, our life experience would be overwhelming. It would be complete chaos.

That’s why unconsciously, we judge—all the time. Judging has a bad reputation. It’s inconvenient to admit doing it. But it seems like something we do anyway. It’s like we create a mental map for every situation with a million shortcuts that help us do things and think without really thinking or questioning.

Once you have your position in people’s minds, you’re there for a while. After that, your position may change, but it’s a slow process; unless you start over with new people and new relationships.

You can let people create their own mental map about you, your team, and your company. If it’s the position you wanted, then great. But otherwise, that’s a costly situation.

Or, you can create the map you want and give it to people. You can do that by gathering the stories that help people interpret the real purpose of your company, why it matters now. You can do that to increase people’s willingness to buy from you and work with you.

That’s called building a narrative, and if you do it intentionally, you can use it to steer your company in a better direction.

Want to learn how to create that map? The next Strategic Narrative Workshop starts September 14th. It’s “back to school”. Did you enroll yet?