Latest / Straight To Voicemail / How do you rebuild trust when your brand story changes? | Josh Privett, Communications Strategist and Principal Copywriter, Mantra
Transcript
- RACHEL ELSTS DOWNEY: [00:00:10] Noise is everywhere. Sameness, surface level messaging brands chasing attention instead of earning trust. And when the story shifts, the only way forward is showing up as yourself. And that's what Josh Privett helps companies do. He runs a company called Mantra, and he pushes brands past the generic— finding the story that's new and true. And I might add, simple. Because when the message resonates, it doesn't just rebuild trust, it pulls in the people who actually want what you're offering. So I had to call him. How do you build trust when your brand story changes? JOSHUA PRIVETT: [00:00:57] Hey Rachel. Got your message. Thanks so much for asking about building trust when you gotta change the brand narrative. [00:01:06] I think it's really important that when you are trying to capture attention in this noisy, noisy market,changing the narrative and building trust by being your true self is the way to do it. At Mantra, what we try to do is help companies change the narrative so that they're true to themselves. Cause it's not about trying to reach everyone, it's about trying to reach the right people out there. And there's always the best fit customer who is just waiting to find the best fit company for them. One of the things that we encounter when we do engagements with clients is that there often is a hesitation to really lean in to their true message. We often identify a lot of the miscommunication or lack of customer connection or just like an ineffective messages coming down to just copycatting what everyone else is saying. Are they really gonna be better? Are they really gonna take care of me? Are they really gonna follow through on their promises? So last year we got to work with this awesome, physical therapy group called Foundation Physical Therapy in Atlanta, Georgia. And what makes them really cool is that they have a kind of, non-traditional business model. [00:02:20] They're an out of network cash only practice, which, from an outsider's perspective, I didn't really know what that meant. Physical therapy was just physical therapy. I think most people think that way. It's just a standard thing connected to your insurance, but they exist outside of that because they saw some problems and weaknesses with the traditional model that they wanted to rectify. The problem when we started working with them is everything that they talked about in their marketing, all of their messaging as it was coming to customers was they sounded just like every other physical therapist. They could not clearly distinguish themselves and what made them special. And that makes sense, right? I mean,that's what they know. But they knew they needed to say something different. [00:03:02] So when we started working with them, we sat down and we talked with leadership and we interviewedtheir champion patients who kept coming back even after the initial injury was healed. And what we found is that the language they used internally and the language their patients used was much closer to the language you might find at, like, a wellness kind of space, like a yoga studio. And when we kind of revealed this to them, like, this is your true self. [00:03:27] This is the language you use. Language like, "holistic," " wellness," "mindfulness." Oh, they really got scared for a second and they were worried that leaning into this kind of true vision of themselves would maybe alienate their customers.We kind of talked to them and said, "You know, your business challenge is you're getting people in, but they don't realize how you're different. They realize after one visit, two visits that you're not the right fit for them. They're confused about your business model even, and you're losing a lot of patients. And so it became this exercise of where they needed to trust us so that we could show them, "Hey, we're going to create a message around what you truly do and how you truly talk internally, and how your patients talk about you so that you can attract the right people." [00:04:11] So we developed this message for them around the mantra, " Build a Better You." And it wasn't just, " fix your knee pain," or "live injury free," or all these other kinds of physical therapy sounding slogans. But the idea of a better you, the whole you, the mind and the body, and connecting to kind of the special services that they provided that were more than just knee exercises. And once we launched that message and kind of created an entire marketing campaign around it that really demonstrated how this "Better You" model could be seen here and not at other traditional physical therapy clinics; once we let them lean into their true selves, they immediately saw a huge increase. It was like 77% in three months of new patients. They hit record numbers of patients seeking them out and staying. It was incredible and it was all because when they changed the narrative to focus on what they were truly about and just trusted that what they stood for and their approach was enough, well, they just found the people that were looking for them. [00:05:18] This is a really great topic and I'm so glad that you asked about it. Well, I can't wait to hear how you're doing and, can't wait to talk more business another time. Have a great day.