The Corporate Story is written in order to provide organisations with a starting block for developing a strategic message. The story helps you to understand exactly where your company’s coming from, where you’re going and what values you stand for – and it starts with positioning. (This positioning is in relation to how you want to be seen in the eyes of your competition and your stakeholders.)
Before you write your corporate story you will need to analyse your company identity and reputation; such as employee’s attitudes, what they believe in – and also your value drivers, what is crucial to your business; your capabilities and what gives you your competitive advantage.
Bringing these all together will create your “plot”. The “plot” then might focus on areas such as your company’s abilities, areas of specialism, focused activities, what you’re involved in and your accomplishments.
Once you’ve gathered all of this information then from this point onwards you can enhance and continue to build your corporate story up.
Once you’re clear what your story involves and you know that it works then you can start to implement it.
The implementation phase will consist of a series of communication activities or PR which will reinforce the key messages and create the desired identity in the mind of your stakeholders.
Remember, in order to measure all of the above you will have to establish what your benchmark is; what is the current attitude and reputation towards your company prior to you creating your story.
Also remember, creating a story and consequently building a reputation takes time. Reputation is a function of time and is not something that’s going to happen overnight, it could take 3-5 years.