When our passion for business is more than lip service…

‘We help businesses to…’ Nah, how about ‘we like helping businesses to..’ Wait a second, ‘We love helping businesses too…’ Scratch that, I’ve got it ‘We are passionate about helping businesses to achieve their goals’. Bingo! Nothing beats a bit of passion does it?

We often struggle to describe the way we go about our business within our business. Are we going a step too far when we start talking about passion?

A bit of passion in the workplace…

Take the example of the individual tasked with creating content for their B2B website. What is the conventional route to follow when introducing our company? Would it be the curation of a business timeline that articulates the core reason that the business exists? Or, perhaps to lead with a sentence acknowledging their business presence as ‘one of the leading providers’?

Making a career out of passion…

So, I understand you like your job? In fact, you’d go as far to say that you love your job?

This isn’t a series of questions directed to you, the reader, but one that we all try to emphasise within our own personal elevator-pitch. If we’re not at the stage of ‘loving’ our job, we’re at the stage of wanting to ‘love our job’. Whether we believe it or not, we use words to over-emphasise our feelings towards what we do. We believe it differentiates us.

Are you one step on from love?

If everybody around us pronounces their love for their job, yet again, we look to differentiate our message further. Now, we start to enter the realms of true emotion. We become passionate towards what we do.  We use passion as a term that differentiates us further from those that simply ‘love’ what they do. A recent Linkedin connection request informed me of his passion for  ‘helping people reach their goals’. Really?

Sometimes, when we focus purely on the ‘who and what’ rather than the ‘how and why’, we run out of sensible descriptors and allow ourselves to take one step too far. By its very definition passion is ‘a strong and barely controllable emotion’. The next stage on? Do we lust our jobs? Again, by definition lust is a ‘passionate desire for something’.

What is your true differentiator?

The words that describe who you are and what you do are just that. Words. When we focus on words as our differentiator we naturally indulge our audience in a show of talk rather than a display of action.

Words constrain our message. Sometimes we need to simplify our message rather than overindulge to the stage where we lose all meaning. Passion. Really?

You want to see passion?

You’ve probably used, or at least heard of, AirBnB. A travel business that changed the way we book accommodation. Their site allows us to ‘find a place to stay’. One simple headline message.

Example of Simple Marketing Message

AirBnB actively invite their audience to share their stories. AirBnB well and truly broke convention within the travel sector. To do so, requires a tremendous level of trust within their marketplace. So, they highlight the very reasons why their existing customers trust AirBnB. The transparent nature of AirBnB alleviates the concerns of the first time user. They had two options available to them

  • ‘talking’ about who and what AirBnB is, or
  • ‘displaying’ how and why AirBnB exists

AirBnB took the 2nd option. A lot of their competitors don’t:

Complicated Marketing Message

 

There is a place for passion within your work…

In October 2013 AirBnB co-founder, Brian Chesky, asked his team to reflect upon the ‘culture’ that had made their business such a success. He then decided to share the email he circulated to his colleagues. He retells the story of the moment he asked an investor, who had just outlaid $150m in funding, for a ‘single important piece of advice’. The response, ‘Don’t fuck up the culture.’

To Chesky, culture ‘is simply a shared way of doing something with passion.’ Underneath that simple opening headline ‘find a place to stay’ lives a business with passion in its blood. A passion that is displayed rather than a passion that is described.

You just have to prove it

If you’re going to go down the road of describing your business using real emotive terms, then be prepared to back it up. That’s what differentiates you and your business from the pack. We can all talk a good talk, it’s the actions and stories that display that talk that truly counts.

Show me, rather than tell me, why you are a ‘leading business’ within your industry or ‘passionate about outcome’. That’s what will win you connection with your online audience.


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Ian Rhodes

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First employee of an ecommerce startup back in 1998. I've been using building and growing ecommerce brands ever since (including my own). Get weekly growth lessons from my own work delivered to your inbox below.

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