#32: A Story-Worthy Froto

Is your product better than the competition, or is it different?

For years, being better was hailed as the key to winning a market. Ship a better product. Offer a better price. Build a better brand.

But, then the category pirates arrived.

They looked around and noticed that the fight to be better often led to a race to the bottom. Businesses were competing on price point and feature parity with very little focus on value.

Their solution? A differentiated point of view (POV).

In today’s edition we’re going to examine how to build a strong POV that allows you to not only compete in, but win, your market.

Defining Your FROTO

Often the term POV is associated directly with category creation. This can be the case, but it doesn’t need to be. A strong point of view is critical to narrative design, whether you are trying to build a new category or not.

So, what is a POV? In a nutshell, it introduces a different way of approaching a problem or a new way of seeing the world.

If your corporate narrative or POV is centred on the way the world currently is, you’ll be in the weeds of competition forever. But, when you build a new world, you allow your business to define the rules of this reality. And the best part of defining the rules is that you can shape them in your favour.

When you move beyond better to focus on different, you’re making a choice to move beyond the status quo. To do this, you need to build a “FROM → TO” narrative (or FROTO) to help your customers make the journey.

Here are a few famous FROTOs you may recognize:

Drift

• FROM → The company controls the buying process

• TO → The buyer controls the buying process

• CATEGORY → Conversational Marketing

Peleton

• FROM → Attend in-studio classes to get connection

• TO → Fitness with friends, connected anytime from home

• CATEGORY → Connected Fitness

Your FROTO will be the foundation of your POV, so it’s important you nail this part first.

A 5-Step POV

“Legendary entrepreneurs know: everything is the way it is, because someone changed the way it was.” This quote by Christopher Lochhead, the author of Play Bigger, perfectly encapsulates the impact of narrative design.

Ready to be a change-maker? Here’s the 5-step framework I’ve followed at both Unbounce and Kajabi to craft our differentiated POV.

• Step 1: Identify the undeniable shift in the world

• Step 2: Articulate the problem that arises for your customers

• Step 3: Evangelize a different future

• Step 4: Demonstrate why the evolution to this future is challenging

• Step 5: Share how your product makes it easy

I’m going to walk you through how we applied this framework at Kajabi so you can see what this looks like in action.

• Step 1: The creator economy has a problem: it doesn’t work for creators. The rules have been written by social media platforms and big brands to meet their own objectives.

• Step 2: This means most creators don’t make enough money to survive, let alone thrive. The everyday creators working the hardest to make money from their knowledge and content are the ones receiving the smallest payout while big brands and social media platforms cash in.

• Step 3: Imagine a world where creators can earn a living directly from the people who value their content, without a middleman controlling their earnings. Financial freedom will no longer be a pipe dream, but something within reach.

• Step 4: Creators who monetize on social platforms are at the whims of algorithms - unfavourable updates have the power to impact a creator’s revenue by limiting their content’s exposure. Creators who opt for direct monetization off platform are penalized for their success - it’s common for these products to take up to 12% of all earnings.

• Step 5: Kajabi is committed to building an economic model that works for creators. We believe that in order for creators to see sustainable success, they need to be in the driver’s seat to own their audience, business model, pricing, and brand. We are calling it “Direct to Creator Economy”.

With this narrative, we’re bringing creators along on our FROTO journey - from a world where it’s next to impossible to earn money to one where their business success is entirely in their own hands. Now that’s something to celebrate.

This is by no means the only framework you can use to build a POV, there are many alternatives out there. But this simple 5-step process is a great place to begin.

What are some of your all-time favorite FROTOs? I always love to add to my list of examples!