Mia Fileman (00:05):
Are you tired of marketing jargon and empty promises? Me too. I'm Mia Fileman and this is Got Marketing? On the show, I deep dive with marketing insiders to unpack successful campaigns. I didn't earn the nickname, ‘The Campaign Lady’ for nothing. Get actionable tips, learn from winning strategies and avoid falling victim to marketing fads and fakery.
Mia Fileman (00:38):
Hello friend, and welcome to Gut Marketing? Today we are talking all things brand storytelling, as well as rebel brands with Michelle Newell. She's a brand and story activator who helps thought leaders, teams, and businesses turn their expertise into daring stories that shake up the status quo. Today, Michelle runs The Storytelling Business, where she promises it's possible for everyone, no matter their confidence or skill, to learn to tell better stories. Welcome to the show, Michelle. So nice to see you.
Michelle Newell (01:11):
It's good to see you too. Mia. Hi.
Mia Fileman (01:16):
Thank you so much for coming on to talk about this topic. This is something that I have wanted to discuss on the show for a while, and I saw your new e-book, you did a new lead magnet, and I downloaded it, and it was amazing. I'm going to link it in the show notes, and I was like, I found my person. She was right there all along in my community.
Michelle Newell (01:38):
I was here, waiting in the wings.
Mia Fileman (01:40):
Yeah.
Michelle Newell (01:41):
Great. I love talking about storytelling. Great. I love teaching storytelling.
Mia Fileman (01:56):
Great. Well, why don't we kick off with you just telling us a little bit about your backstory? What's brought you to this point where you are running The Storytelling Business?
Michelle Newell (02:08):
Yes, my backstory –a story everybody should have by the way, which is great. I'm glad you brought up the backstory. So, my backstory: I always wanted to be a storyteller, and I actually come from a long line of storytellers because my dad is a preacher, he's a reverend, and my opa, my grandfather, is a preacher, and my great grandfather is a preacher. And my great, great. So, we have a preacher in every generation of my family. And so I grew up watching my dad and my granddad deliver sermons pretty much every Sunday, and they were such engaging storytellers. This was not like your dry church service. This was really engaging messages about how to be a better person. And I actually got into a journalism degree at university. I thought, yes, I've made it and I didn't make it. I couldn't find my voice, and I was scared. And to be a storyteller, you've got to have some authenticity and you've got to inject some of yourself into your stories. And I'm sure we will cover some of that a little later. But because I didn't have that confidence because I couldn't find my voice, I've been running away from storytelling for so long and then slowly, slowly I found my feet again with it. So I've actually drafted a novel, scored an agent, but nobody ask me about the book because it's not going to happen. It's in a terrible state. But I got to experience a lot of fiction writing. I went to a lot of conferences. I used to run events for writers and children's book illustrators. And so I began immersing myself in the world of story again. And then I've worked in marketing for a decade and that's when I started this sort of safe storytelling environment. And until finally, I was brave enough to leapfrog into the storytelling business. And, I have found my voice now, and it's one of the reasons that I love teaching storytelling to brands and, to founders in particular because once you find your voice, and you find your confidence, storytelling comes so much more easily and you find that your business just really, really shines and grows.
Mia Fileman (04:05):
Oh, I have found the exact same thing. I'm actually re-running the very first campaign I ever launched for this business, which was called ‘Lessons in falling’. And I threw it together. It was a lot of work, but it only cost $2.49. But it was a seven-part content mini-series, which took people through my background in running an agency, scaling an agency, selling an agency while also navigating postnatal anxiety, and being a defense partner and moving around. And, there was a lot of relatable moments in my story, and it really helped to propel my brand, this brand, and got us those essential first hundred Instagram followers and those first couple of hundred email subscribers. Did I make 10k in 10 weeks? No, but it laid the foundation for what was to come, and it was literally just a story cut into seven parts.
Michelle Newell (05:03):
And do people still talk to you about it now? Do they still remind you of the time they read this bit about your story?
Mia Fileman (05:06):
And people are like, oh my God, I remember reading this the first time. That's how I first found out about you and I'm still here four years later.
Michelle Newell (05:15):
Yeah, I think that's a great example, Mia, because you are a very good, authentic, intimate, personal storyteller. You bring so much of yourself to your marketing, and people see themselves in you, and they feel like you see them as well because you've got like you said, the word relatable. You've got these relatable challenges and having a challenge and overcoming a challenge is one of the great ingredients for storytelling.
Mia Fileman (05:42):
Great. Well, we're going to talk about that. I know that there are people who are afraid to bring themselves into their content when they run a business. And I want to help them to climb ‘cringe mountain’ and do that, and how to do that in a way that aligns with how much of themselves they want to keep private and just for themselves. And spoiler alert, there is a lot more to me that people will never know about because I don't want to tell them. You know what I mean?
Michelle Newell (06:11):
I think that is such a good point because so many people talk about vulnerability and authenticity, and then what they do is they overshare, they tell you everything. They put themselves potentially in a position where they feel that vulnerability goes too far, and you feel exposed, and you open yourself up to sort of personal attacks and criticism. And so we're not talking about doing that at all. I just want to reassure people that we are talking about you find your boundaries, and you tell your stories within those boundaries. And we won't have time today to talk about brand archetypes, but I do a lot of work with thought leaders around what their personal brand archetype is, and that becomes our safe space for how we show up publicly without giving away everything that then exposes stuff that we don't want other people to know and that other people don't need to know, quite frankly, for us to run our businesses successfully.
Mia Fileman (07:01):
Exactly. 100%. Yeah. Okay, well let's start with what is brand storytelling? This is a term that is battered around, and I think that there's a lot of confusion about what it even is. So maybe we can illustrate this with some examples of brands who do brand storytelling really well.
Michelle Newell (07:18):
So, brand storytelling. It is a little different to just content. What's the content you're putting out there? And people often confuse them, but brand stories do contain certain components. They are really values- driven, and purpose-driven. And it's almost like if you have your brand story or a few stories that can make up your brand story that becomes the backbone of your content marketing, and your other stories can sort of spread off that backbone. But your brand story really is all about making your brand human. It's probably what you'd say marketing is about, too. It's about making your business human and showcasing your values, your purpose, the people that work for you, and it's trying to set up this personal dynamic between the business and the audience. I wanted to ask you, you travelled abroad recently, didn't know anybody. How did you make friends? How did you get people to know you?
Mia Fileman (08:14):
I pick up friends at the bus stop, Michelle. I'm just like one of these raging extroverts who need people. And I move around so often that I know that if I don't put myself out there, I'm just going to be in a hurt lock off until I do. So I might as well just, I love it, really put myself out there. But that's a really good point because what I said to them, which piqued their interest, was like, ‘Hey, I'm an Australian travelling overseas for 12 months with my family’. And people were like, hold the phone. Tell me everything. Why love? How is this possible? How do you do this? Yes. How does this even work? So yeah, I mean, it was the most awesome pickup line.
Michelle Newell (8:56):
And so I don't want people to be scared of brand storytelling because we are all natural storytellers. It's what we do to connect with people. And human beings have used stories for generations for thousands of years to connect with people, to motivate, to inspire, to mislead as well. Storytelling isn't always used for good, but yeah, brand storytelling is just about relaxing into that space where your brand has got these human qualities where you can share and connect with your audience. I wanted to give you a little example. I think your audience will love this. I know you work with a lot of female founders, and so did you know that the person who invented literature as in the first sort of recorded written-down stories was a woman?
Mia Fileman (09:40):
No, I did not know that.
Michelle Newell (09:41):
No, I only found this out recently as well. And she was from Mesopotamia around 2000 B.C., so what's now modern-day Iraq, and her name was Enheduanna, and she was born into royalty, but she became this goddess, and she became a goddess through her storytelling and through recording her verses. And so she's almost like the original influencer as well, but it was all of her stories that made her powerful. So, she was able to influence the priests, the general public. So, if anyone's interested in it, oh, she also invented her own name as well.
Mia Fileman (10:17):
Oh, wow.
Michelle Newell (10:18):
So we can talk about that a little bit sooner, but how do you invent these words or get these motifs attached to your business and your brand? But for me as well, brand storytelling is a form of invention and reinvention. So you don't have to tell the story of precisely where you are now. You can tell a story of where your brand is going and the impact that it's going to make. And in terms of great storytellers for brand storytelling, product-based businesses, I love Who Gives a Crap, the toilet paper brand? Their backstory for a start is fabulous. The founder sat on a toilet with a bare bum, not a real toilet, but one that was in the warehouse to originally crowdfund for the business. So that story is told with the photo on their website and the brand has been cheeky and irreverent ever since. So, they really broke new ground when they launched that business. And it's very much an example of values-led storytelling where they're giving back to sanitation projects around the world through the money that they make. So I love their storytelling and their brand backstory really worth looking at. And then service-based businesses, I'm sure many of your listeners are service-based businesses and sometimes it feels hard to tell your story when you don't have a product. And it's especially hard if you're not the face of your business, for example, I know you've got Campaign Del Mar, but really I feel like it's brand Mia in a way, and you're such a powerful presence, but we don't all have that. And so there's a great venture capital firm called Blackbird. I don’t know, you've come across them.
Mia Fileman (11:50):
Yes. Yeah.
Michelle Newell (11:51):
Oh, their whole website is a masterclass in brand at storytelling. So, their brand is really people-driven… They say, we don't invest in startups, we invest in the founders. And I had to write down a couple of their little phrases because they're so beautiful. They say, we are true believers in founders. We believe love at first sight. We are comfortable with the misunderstood. So, I like it too because almost that manifesto-style. And then in terms of thought leadership, if you are the face of your brand, I think of Women Like Turia Pitt or Malala Yousafzai and what they have gone through in turning their incredible hardship and their experience and their trauma into powerful stories, and they use their brand story, what's happened to them as a way to propel a purpose story. This is who I'm here to serve. And they're very motivational speakers and they really uplift other women. That was a long answer, I'm sorry.
Mia Fileman (12:46):
No, that was great. Really, really great examples. I'm on board with all of those. I think July, the luggage brand has a wonderful brand story. I feel like I've lived and died with the ups and downs of their origin. And launching a luggage brand just as Covid hit about to close doors to now being the official luggage sponsor of the Australian Olympic teams is a really, really good example. I feel like the women behind Frank Body who also own an agency called Willow and Blake are masters at storytelling, at telling their story on LinkedIn as the founders behind, but also inventing Frank and telling Frank's story. And all of us women who use Frank Body seeing ourselves in Frank.
Michelle Newell (13:38):
Yeah, I think it's interesting as well that you bring up that example, and you've mentioned it yourself as well about that journey of founding a business. You don't have to just stick to telling the story of the product and the business, but you can also talk about everything else around running a business because that again, brings elements of you and your expertise and your challenge into your business. And it's those human stories that connect people to you and make them want to invest in you. I should say, I don't even really love Who Gives a Crap toilet paper. I don't think you're allowed to say that, but I think it's very scratchy and very thin. But I still want to have that toilet paper because the storytelling is so good when you read their copy, it's like it's a mate talking to you, a really naughty, cheeky mate, or maybe the naughty boy next door or something. And so you just want to be part of it out of the gang.
Mia Fileman (14:27):
So, what happens to our brain when we hear a story?
Michelle Newell (14:30):
Ah, good question. I find this really interesting. Someone said to me recently, why does it even matter? Why do you even know this stuff? And it's because I work with a lot of busy business owners and corporates, and people who don't have time for the fluff. They're like, I need to know that this actually works, and I'm going to get tangible results. And so there is a science to storytelling, and I think that that is really fascinating. So imagine if you just give people the data and the stats, here's our beautiful frank body moisturizer, and it, it'll make your skin 50% shiny. And when people hear stats and facts like that, there's only a couple of areas of the brain that are activated, like the comprehension centres of the brain. But if you tell a story in that narrative arc where there's some sort of rising tension or there's a challenge that was overcome, that then triggers so much more activity in your brain. And we often think when we encounter a new idea for the first time or we're challenged or that we've got this emotion, oh, I'm panicked, I'm anxious, I'm excited. But everything is actually coming from the brain. And so what we want to do with storytelling is sort of, I say it even though it sounds a little bit sort of evil, is we want to hijack the brain. We want to get on the front foot and help craft the emotions in our audience that we want them to feel about our business. So you need to tell stories that are going to make people feel potentially excited about your business, or they feel angry about a social issue, and so they want to support you. What happens is the brain releases hormones into the blood. So you've got your adrenaline and you cortisol, and so that's giving you the emotions and the feelings, but it is originally triggered by the brain. So a neuroscientist have studied it and seen that when they tell a group of people a story about a child who has cancer and his dad dealing with it and sort of that challenge and overcoming it. They give people money at the start of watching this film and they've hooked their brains and blood up to different systems. And at the end of that story, they say, do you want to keep the money, or do you want to donate it to a children's cancer charity? And what do you think they do?
Mia Fileman (16:32):
They donate it for sure.
Michelle Newell (16:33):
They donate it, yep. Because they've captured their hearts by first tapping into their brains. So…
Mia Fileman (16:40):
Yeah. Have you heard of the Significant Objects Study, Michelle?
Michelle Newell (16:43)
I don't know that I have.
Mia Fileman (16:47):
So, a couple of researchers wanted to demonstrate the power of storytelling, and so…
Michelle Newell (16:54):
Is this the eBay one?
Mia Fileman (16:56):
Yeah, the eBay one.
Michelle Newell (16:58):
Yes, yes. But tell it because it's so cool. Tell it.
Mia Fileman (17:01):
So they got onto eBay and they purchased a hundred objects for about a dollar each, so paid a hundred dollars. And, then they engaged authors, storytellers, just anyone who was willing to write a story about each object. And, then they re-listed it on eBay with the accompanying story, and they turned the hundred dollars. What they paid a hundred dollars for, they made $8,000.
Michelle Newell (17:30):
Wow. Yeah.
Mia Fileman (17:31):
Just by, and there were really silly objects like a little wooden horse and a little piggy bank, and it was a dollar to buy it. So, there was, but just having that backstory was so powerful. The listener should definitely check out ‘The Magical Science of Storytelling’. It is quite a famous Ted Talk by David, JP Phillips. It's had a 5.4 million views. If there was ever a Ted Talk to watch, it's definitely that one where he actually talks about the different chemicals that are ignited when we hear a story. So when we hear a story about love, we get a dose of Dopamine and yeah, I don't want to paraphrase, but it's only 17 minutes long. So definitely go and watch that Ted talk. But the way that I think of it is that we have been telling stories for hundreds of thousands of years. That is how humans are hardwired to learn and to connect with one another. So this idea of data and stats, this is quite a new thing and also quite a boring thing. If you think about how children learn at school or how they learn languages, it is all through storytelling.
Michelle Newell (18:48):
Yeah.
Mia Fileman (18:49):
So, what are some practical tips we can give the listener about crafting a compelling brand story?
Michelle Newell (18:56):
Practical tips? Firstly, I would say, I'll give you the first practical tip, and that's just write sh*t, which is from Stephen King. He says that in his book on writing. So often when we sit down to craft a story, we are already blocking ourselves from telling a good story because of our fear of writing or it not sounding right. So it's just about, first of all, giving it a go. And I say to people that it's not about where you are now. It's about where you want to go. So, imagine what do you want to be? What do you want your business to be? What impact do you ultimately want to have on your clients, your customers, your audience? So that's the power of storytelling. You can narrate this new future into being, and that sounds like a bit airy fairy, but to make it tangible, I know you like your grids and your things.
I know when you were choosing the Campaign Del Mar name, you had a special grid technique. So, I always say just a really simple line down the middle of a page now, and future, and this is me now, and this is future me, and this is business now, future me, current audience, future audience, and begin to think about what you can write and create into being, because the power of business, you are always evolving. So don't think about where you are now. Think about where you want to go. I would also say values. We know how crucial values are to storytelling, and that's really your core essence. So wherever you are now, wherever you want to go, your values are going to be what informs that. And, there's so many different ways to do values activities, but what I love to do in workshops with people, I lead them through this process of writing a love story, and they write a love story to anything they love anything at all. And then we do a bit of therapising around it, and we pause, and we say, well, why do I love that? What's being triggered for me? And out of that comes your values. So you don't have to always just say, here's a list of a hundred values, and I'm going to short list five. And, the next thing I would say for brand storytelling is really think about what sort of words and motifs you want your brand to own. What do you want to be intimately associated with you? And it can even be visual imagery. So for brand, I always think about palm trees and the sort of the blue, and I think, oh, I'm on a beach and I'm happy and relaxing.
Mia Fileman (21:11):
Right, exactly how I want you to think about it.
Michelle Newell (21:14):
Yeah. So you've got to build these associations with your brand story. I'm giving you quite random examples of practical tips because you can Google and you can also go to Chat GPT and you can ask Chat GPT to help you. I'm a big advocate for using AI to help you craft some of your ideas and your narrative. But think about those words. I love to own the words rebel and manifesto. I talk a lot about manifestos, and so I try and weave them into my storytelling, as well.
Mia Fileman (21:42):
I love those tips. I think they're fantastic and they're really approachable, so I appreciate you sharing those. And I just want to echo how important it's to just write sh*t. I've spoken about this before, but four years ago I was a very senior marketer running an agency who had content writers and copywriters. And so I never wrote anything other than briefs.
Michelle Newell (22:06):
Interesting. Okay.
Mia Fileman (22:08):
Nothing. And because as the agency director, I would write a brief, but we would get a specialist to actually write. We would get our copywriters to write lead magnets and e-books and white-papers, and all of that. And then everyone probably listening to this show, I became a bootstrapped small business owner like everyone else, but I was used to a certain level of copywriting, which was very high. And then all of a sudden I have to meet that level because I'm not willing to go beyond that because I can tell the difference between good copywriting. I just didn't know that I could produce that. And, so it was just a process of just needing to climb ‘Cringe Mountain’ and just start writing. And I wrote every day, and I wrote everything. I wrote the website copy. I wrote my own bio. I wrote all the Instagram posts, I wrote the lead magnet. I wrote everything. And most of it was terrible. And sometimes I go back and I look at what I wrote three years ago, and I'm like, heck, how did anyone give their money? It was not good. At any point you want to finish the sentence would be, now Mia, just come on. But it's such a, I love writing. So I think that that's an important thing is that I like to doing it, But you get better. You get so much better.
Michelle Newell (23:35):
You do get better. And I think people are a lot more forgiving these days. We really do sort of scan-read; we read words that felt wrong, or we read social media posts… And so, I think people are forgiving if your writing contains that honesty and there's something really genuine about it. You don't have to be a great writer. I mean, even Stephen King probably says he's not a great writer. He's a great storyteller. His characters, his ideas, that's what really drives his stories, not so much the words. And I love writing as well, but many, many people don't. And so I often say to people, instead of sitting at the keyboard, maybe try recording yourself talking aloud. I still do that a lot as well. I like to have an audience. So, I pretend I have an audience, and I'm giving them a speech, and I record it, and then I just put it through a transcription app. It types it all up for me. And then I have a look and I finesse it into words.
Mia Fileman (24:31):
I love that.
Michelle Newell (24:32):
Lots of hacks these days.
Mia Fileman (24:34):
But I also love the fact that if you don't love writing and you don't want to write, then tell a story with visuals. Why does it have to be text-based? If anything? Visuals are even, a picture paints a thousand words. So, going back to ‘Lessons in falling’, we told the story through photos as well as through text, but I went back through thousands of photos from my life and I picked photos not necessarily that matched up with that specific time period, but just the emotion on my face or how I looked or just, it doesn't have to be literal. It is storytelling. And so with storytelling, we can take some liberties. So some of the images in ‘Lessons in falling’ are from my wedding day, even though I don't talk about my wedding day at all in the miniseries, but because it was my wedding day, there's a lot of expression in my face, in my eyes. And all of that was really great to just add colour and texture to the words. So I'm not saying you need to go out there and invent a story out of thin air. And even though people do Michelle, this rags to riches story where they're like, I used to dive for coupons. I'm like, you did not. It's not about inventing a story, but it is about we're adding colour and texture to it.
Michelle Newell (26:01):
And if you think about some films that are based on historical characters, like real people, people will often say afterwards, well, that's not what happened in the Freddie Mercury, Queen film…
Mia Fileman (26:10):
Oh, I love to that movie.
Michelle Newell (26:12):
Oh no, people said that didn't happen. That concert didn't happen at that point. And it's like, it doesn't matter because what the storyteller is trying to do is give you a sense of the emotion that was around this idea that was around this time, and this was the best selection of a scene to do that to you. So it's always about you in dialogue with your audience, and what emotion do you want to draw out of them? It doesn't have to be yet the precise image that matches that.
Mia Fileman (26:36):
This is actually a tip, but also an anecdote. So, sometimes in movies, books, often when they're turning a book into a movie, because they're constraint with time, they have to combine characters. So they create one character from actually three different characters. And you can do this too. They did this with Chernobyl, the about, oh my God, how good was that mini-series? We loved it. So that mini-series, which was just absolutely beautifully created… afterwards, and I'm sure other people do this, but you go into this Wikipedia deep-dive into wanting to learn everything about everything.
Michelle Newell (27:16):
You’re finding all the old photos.
Mia Fileman (27:18):
Yeah, yeah. And just being like, and who was that? And what was that? And then I found out that one of the main characters was actually not one person. It was an amalgamation of three people.
Michelle Newell (27:28):
I remember this, too.
Mia Fileman (27:30):
Yeah. So, a good tip for you when you are creating brand storytelling is think about your characters. You need to have characters. Think about who is your protagonist. It's always good to have a villain. And the villain can be a personal, the villain can be the patriarchy. Yeah, the villain can be circumstances. The villain can be Covid.
Michelle Newell (27:48):
You. Your own doubts.
Mia Fileman (27:50):
It can be environmental, it can be… anything, can be the villain. But think about your characters and then think about, oh, there's too many characters. And again, you don't have to be too literate about it. If three different people can be amalgamated into one character, then that's, that's not lying in my mind telling people that you were homeless when you were not homeless. That is just turning a story, refining the story so that it's digestible for your audience so that you're like, okay, how do we make this easy to consume in a really approachable way for our audience? I've got more tips.
Michelle Newell (28:11):
I don't know that we have time to explore them all.
Mia Fileman (28:14):
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Michelle Newell (29:00):
I think though, I do want to just go back to what you've said about having the protagonist, so the sort of the main character and then the antagonist, the evil, the baddy, and that challenge. And then there's usually a resolution to a story. It sort of wraps up a little bit. And if it doesn't necessarily wrap up neatly, it can project towards the future. This is where we're going. I actually have two different kinds of stories on my own about page on my website. So I recommend people have a look at those. One is written in the third person, and the other one is written with along a really clear narrative arc structure. So they're set up the or the rising tension, the conflict challenge, choice, and then resolution just to give people a sense of it. But the other thing I like to talk about is residue. And, it's a word that I was studying literature at university, and one of my lecturers used to say, what's the residue of this story? What do you remember? Long after you've closed the pages, you walk away. And the best stories are those ones where days later you're still thinking about the ending or still thinking about a moment or thinking about something you've taken away from it.
Mia Fileman (30:34):
Love that. So good. So good. I know people in business, we love to read nonfiction. We love, what was the James Clear one?
Michelle Newell (30:46):
Oh, atomic Habits. I love that book.
Mia Fileman (30:49):
Same. Art Gathering. We love nonfiction and that's great. I love nonfiction too. Like Clockwork by Markowitz, it's game-changing. But, actually my suggestion is if you want to be good at storytelling is read more fiction. Read lots of fiction, and actually go back to a Harry Potter or a Lord of the Rings and see how they tell stories and try to write your stories in that way, which means have cliffhangers build suspense. Don't just give them the punchline in the first sentence, but open a loop. Humans love to close loops. That's what we do. So if we start a sentence by saying, I slowly walk up to the stage, and then I see her, and then you're like, who did she see? Who is it? Who is it? And then we have to close that loop. Who did she see on the stage? So we use these techniques. So the more we understand these techniques, the more we can use them.
Michelle Newell (31:50):
Yeah, I think one of the classic ones is show don't tell. So instead of saying, I was so excited to launch my new business, you would say, I gathered all my best friends and family around, and we popped the champagne cork on the night. I launched my business. And suddenly people see it in their heads, like a little movie. They can see that champagne, they can see the friends. Whereas I was excited to launch my business. Oh, great. You're excited. Yeah. Show, don't tell. It's a classic.
Mia Fileman (32:18):
I love that. And that's also speaks to concrete language. Champagne is such a visual object. You are like, oh, I can picture champagne, I can picture it's taken form now. Whereas excited is an intangible thing. We all feel excitement in different ways.
Michelle Newell (32:34):
Different ways. Exactly. Yeah.
Mia Fileman (32:38):
But also, what you've described, Michelle, is that specificity leads to authenticity. Telling someone I'm excited is like, well, why should I believe you? How do I believe that you were excited? Whereas when you go to say, I've never been good at sharing my toys because when I was seven years old and Theo wouldn't share his Barbie doll with me, I ended up cutting all his hair off. And you're just like, well, now I believe that you're very bad at sharing, right?
Michelle Newell (33:06):
Yes. And you get that visual as well of cutting the hair off. It's vicious. I love it. I love it. So I recently posted on LinkedIn about my migraines, and I started writing that post saying, look, I've been really unwell, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then I thought, oh, Michelle, where's a story in these? So I wrote about how as a child, I had brought my father face washers for his head because he had headaches or migraines every weekend. And then my sister got them, and then I got them and I had this story and I thought, that's really nice. And I thought, but you know what? Who cares? This is all about you and your family. So I actually thought, where's the universal message? So this is another tip. What is the universal truth or the universal message of your story? And for me, it was the fact that so many Aussies live with chronic pain. I hadn't realised until I've just had this three-month period of endless migraines, and I was looking for support groups. And so I started the post with that about the percentage of people who live with chronic pain. I told my story, and then I ended it with a message to all those chronic pain sufferers. So the post became a little bit about me. Yes. But I made my story universal. And so you either have chronic pain and you get it, or you suddenly empathise with people with the pain. So yeah.
Mia Fileman (34:23):
Love that. That's so good. What a great tip. So why is it so important for brands to use founder-led content as part of their brand storytelling?
Michelle Newell (34:33):
I think it really does personalise and humanise the business brand. And I think you have done that so well in your own business in that every time you send your weekly newsletter, you have this little bit of a story about you or what you've been up to, something that's happened to you. And I feel like I know think we've only met once in person before at a one-roof event, but I feel like I know you, and you'll know how often I hit reply. It makes you take action. If you've got content about yourself associated with your business, people take action. I'm always hitting reply to you going, oh, Mia, you once mentioned something about July and their marketing and the Olympics. And I wrote, oh, Mia, I just found a July tote on the side of the road. I live in a fancy area where people just put good stuff out. You won't believe this. I found a July suitcase last week. A whole suitcase Mia in great condition.
Mia Fileman (35:28):
Oh, my goodness. You're the queen of finding because you only shop at op shops, right? People don't know this about you.
Michelle Newell (35:36):
Well, I have branched out a little bit recently, but I used to be a hundred per cent op shop. Yeah, love that. But you told the July story and straight Airway's like, oh, here's my own July story. I'm giving it back to you. So it becomes like this dialogue of Ah, she said this, she feels this, she believes this. Ah, me too. I'm going to connect him with that. You can't that kind of a relationship with your client or your customer if you're just talking about the services that you offer, products that you deliver. And I think as well, it's competitive out there, right? There are so many of us doing similar things in business. And what's your one big point of difference? It's you the founder, or it's the beautiful staff that you have working for you, or it's your clients. So it's this, your story, their story, or you have to find individual stories, but you particularly are sort of the key.
Mia Fileman (36:28):
Yeah. I just think people forget that corporate entities, which are businesses are boring and they have no personality and they actually have no value until someone decides that they do. Whereas humans have personality, they have nuance, they have flaws. And so until our brands have those things, they have value and they have personality. We as the founders have to lend ours to them.
Michelle Newell (36:51):
Yeah, that's a great point. Yeah.
Mia Fileman (36:52):
And I've had people kind of clap back at me going, yes, but Dissh the label, they don't do any founder-led content, and this brand doesn't do any founder-led content. I'm like, yeah, they spend $250,000 a month on Facebook ads. So until you have that kind of money, money, then fine. But small businesses, we need to operate from a different playbook to bigger businesses.
Michelle Newell (37:06):
Absolutely.
Mia Fileman (37:14):
And, we have to get scrappier. And the thing that is scrappier is that we can use founder-led content, which is much more engaging than branded content in order to punch above our weights because we don't have $250,000 a month to spend on Facebook ads.
Michelle Newell (37:23):
Also, if you think of one of the biggest brands in the world, Apple, you think of Steve Jobs and how much founder-led content there was from somebody at the helm of a company that big. It's oh, he alone. So it doesn't necessarily sit that just because you're a big brand, you don't have to do founder-led content anymore. It can work across all scale and size of businesses. It just depends on whether it aligns to what your business does and why. And for Steve Jobs it did. He was his quirky, creative individual pushing boundaries. And that totally aligned with Apple and the brand. I feel like the brand's lost their way a little bit since he's gone.
Mia Fileman (38:10):
And they're still actually leaning on that a little bit. The Steve Jobs. Yeah. Interesting. You mentioned earlier on in the chat, rebel and Manifesto. What does a rebel brand mean to you?
Michelle Newell (38:16):
I actually have a manifesto on my website about future rebels. If people think, "Oh, I want to be a rebel, but I don't know how yet", I've got a manifesto to encourage them. But for me, rebel brands are firstly led by people who aren't afraid to stand a little alone and go against the grain. And if I think of an example, I always think of Verve money, Verve Super with Christina Hobbs. I think her name is.
Mia Fileman (39:43):
Christina Hobbs. Legend.
Michelle Newell (39:45):
Legend. And some of the stuff she comes out with on LinkedIn, whoa, like Burn. She takes no prisoners. That woman, she's amazing, and it's controversial, but it's really feminist-led for people who don't know her, she's very much an advocate for equity for women professionally and personally with our finances. And she's sort of expanded beyond that. She talks about a lot of issues associated with women, but oh wow, what a rebel. I would not be brave enough to say some of the stuff she says, but gee, it lands. She gets the likes. She has these trucks driving around with billboard campaigns for different issues. So she's amazing. She's not afraid to say what she thinks, and as a result, she makes an impact. And I think as well, rebel Brands sometimes might be promoting ideas that seem impossible until they are possible and they become mainstream. And, rebel brands also have innovative ideas. So they do things quite differently. They make different types of products, or they make the same products toilet paper, but they really use that business in a new way for a different kind of purpose, just close to home as well. Verity from Checklist Legal, I think she's a bit of a rebel in the law world.
Mia Fileman (40:09):
Yeah, definitely another legend. Yeah, shaking up, challenging the status quo. Definitely. Okay, great. And I mean, I consider myself a bit of a rebel.
Michelle Newell (40:19):
I would say. So you have not been afraid to take on them. What are they, the million-dollar influencers? I made a million dollars last night from one freebie download.
Mia Fileman (40:31):
Yeah, yeah. And that polarises, rebel brands are going to polarise.
Michelle Newell (40:39):
Yeah, absolutely.
Mia Fileman (40:41):
I've definitely had people say, ‘No, you give off mean girl energy. It's quite negative. Why don't you just be nice, be nice to everyone on the internet?’ What are your thoughts on that, Michelle?
Michelle Newell (40:51):
I'm a very nice girl because, as I told you at the beginning, I come from a long line of reverence, church abiding, law abiding folk. So I've always played nice all my life, even though actually I've always questioned everything about the way the world works. And I've always been quite a challenger and a critique behind the scenes. But when I launched the storytelling business, it was so vanilla. It was so bland and boring. I tried to copy what everyone else was doing, and I just offered nice standard marketing services. Now, Mia, do you think I was attracting the kind of people I wanted to work with?
Mia Fileman (41:26):
No, I hink it needed
Michelle Newell (41:28):
No, I was attracting the most boring jobs to work on with clients who were doing some just pretty normal work. And this was not the kind of people that I wanted to be working with. So I think you can play it safe, and you can be vanilla, and you can be nice, but what is going to happen is that you're going to have to continue to exist in that space. And it starts to get very uncomfortable because if that's not really, you are not attracting the kind of people that you want to work with. So I'm all for polarising because I think for every one person you put off, there's another two lining up. I get a lot of messages from people saying, oh, thank you for saying that. I was thinking that, but I couldn't say it publicly, et cetera, et cetera. And I think the more that we are ourselves and we bring more of our full selves to our businesses and our content and our stories, we open up that space for other people to feel safe to do the same. And not everybody is in this position that we are of privileged middle-class white women. So people have to lead the way, people like us who are more privileged so that others begin to feel that there's safety in them sharing their stories as well.
Mia Fileman (42:33):
I mean, I'm a very nice person. People who know me think I'm very, very nice, but people will always know where they stand with me. I'm so done with the people who are nice to your face and then talk shit about you behind their back. And, unfortunately, online business is so high school you wouldn't believe. I believe that friends are honest with each other. It's a line from the West Wing favourite TV show ever made. And as a result, honesty is hard and change requires some agitation. Yes. I understand that you get more bees with honey in some circumstances, but not really in online business because you just blend in like everyone else like you were mentioning. Exactly. And so agitating people being controversial, being a circuit breaker into what people have commonly believed about marketing is how I am going about the change that I want to see and the change that I want to see is that I want to see the end of false and misleading advertising in this country. It's like this deceptive, underhanded marketing is causing people to lose a lot of money, close their businesses, lose self-esteem, lose confidence because we have turned marketing into this disgusting psychological weapon to get people to buy from us. And, as a result, marketing is now this really dirty word as opposed to marketing has the power to start movements. Black Lives Matter is a marketing campaign. Me2 is a marketing campaign. Marketing can be a force for good. Like you mentioned Christina Hobbs and her Cupcakes campaign. This is her trying to create social impact through marketing. But then for all the Christina Hobbs of the world, there seems to be a hundred million guru influencers telling you that all the secrets to becoming a squillion is by doing their online course.
Michelle Newell (44:49):
And, I think there's always, there's a hidden underlying message in that kind of narrative. And that is, you are not enough. You are not good enough. You need to copy me in order to be enough. And the other thing as well is that women always seem to be pitted against each other, and we have to pause and recognise that there's bigger fights to fight here. I mean, a lot of this dodgy marketing you're talking about, we know where that comes from. And that was that whole bro hustle marketing culture. And so I think we have bigger enemies than each other. And I think it does take a lot for you to stand up and be bold and to confront some of these negative kind of actions in the marketing industry because you're being cut down by men and women, and people don't like disruptive women either.
Mia Fileman (45:37):
Correct. Correct. And so I think that's an important point, Michelle, is that I want people to understand that when someone is like, oh, just be nice or just play, you've got Ming Girl energy. This is a silencing technique.
Michelle Newell (46:50):
Absolutely.
Mia Fileman (46:51):
They're trying to get me to go back to being a good girl because they don't want me to talk about what I want to talk about and to create the change that I want to see. It's a way of putting me back in my box and being like, oh, well, she's just a mean girl, dismissing the change that I want to create Anywho, let's not have a brewer's chat. So, the crux of your work is empowering people to build a better future through storytelling to catalyze change. I guess my final question for today is do you think small businesses have the power to change the world?
Michelle Newell (46:30):
I do. I do. I think that's not to say that we don't need top down change as well. I think we need bottom-up small businesses and then we need government and big business at the top changing as well. But absolutely. And, think of, for example, Greta Thunberg, who started this huge global environmental movement, like one little girl, she was still at school, well, skipping school every Friday to sit outside the Swedish parliament with her sign, and suddenly she was two and three, and 10, and a hundred and a thousand. And she now is the leader of a movement. Or you think about a brand Tom's, do you know Tom's? So Espadrilles shoes? Yeah. So, I remember when my friend took me to LA, she's American, and she said, oh, here's one of the original Tom's stores in LA. And I was like, what is this brand? And they actually implemented the first one-for-one program as a business. So you buy one pair of shoes and we'll give one to a street child somewhere in the world. And Toms has had a great impact with that, but what that initiative sparked is the same or similar initiatives across other businesses. So it's that ripple effect. And so other businesses now do something similar or they're riffing off that idea. So I think we need to think about ourselves as that little ripple. We're starting the ripple, and then it's either influencing other businesses, our customers and clients, et cetera. So absolutely, we can do it.
Mia Fileman (48:01):
Exactly. And it's a shame because big businesses come in and then they basically steal the ideas of the smaller businesses, but we are seeing exactly as you said, these ripples Zero Co is one of my favourite brands. It's all refillable, household cleaning, personal use products, and now we're seeing in supermarkets, refillable bottles, refills, and they are the catalyst for this change.
Michelle Newell (48:30):
Absolutely. That's a great word. The catalyst. We can be the catalyst for change.
Mia Fileman (48:35):
Well, it was such an absolute pleasure talking with you today, Michelle. I could have spoken for a whole other hour.
Michelle Newell (48:38):
Me too.
Mia Fileman (48:40):
Is there anything that you would like to leave us on?
Michelle Newell (48:44):
Oh, wow. I need to say one incredibly inspiring thing. I think I already said it when I said just right sh*t. But I think what we should do instead of saying something inspiring is challenge your listeners to go away and look at their business backstory or their purpose story and think, is this my future, my purpose story? Is this the future I want to create? And I want you to have a look at that story and rewrite it if it's not fresh enough at the moment, and then send it to Mia and show her what you've done and inspire us.
Mia Fileman (48:56):
Great, great prompt. I really love that. Thank you for being so generous with your time, and with your ideas and with your stories, Michelle, and I can't wait to publish this episode.
Michelle Newell (49:07):
Great. I can't wait to hear it played back. Thanks, Mia. Bye.
Mia Fileman (49:14)
Thank you. You listened right up until the end, so why not hit that subscribe button and keep the good marketing rolling? Podcast reviews are like warm hugs, and they're also the best way to support a small business. You can connect with me, Mia Fileman, on Instagram or LinkedIn, and feel free to send me a message. I'm super friendly.
