What story do you want to associate with? The scrappy new comer who battles the odds to win or the established behemoth who can’t win on the merits so resorts to cronyism and lawsuits? Do you want to associate with the company devoted to its customers or the one that basically tricks customers for the quick sale? At the end of the day results are what matters, even if you have the best story with a bad offering you are going to lose, but to grow, a great story helps.
Consider the case of t-shirts offered by Nike and Reebok mentioned here
” The average consumer’s relationship with Reebok was much shallower. Sure, Reebok had a story (Cybill Shepherd wore them to the Emmys!), but that story didn’t amount to anything substantial or meaningful. Despite its strong sales, the Reebok brand lacked meaning.
To get that story point across to Reebok, we devised a simple test that we called “The T-shirt Test.” We put two stacks of identical gray T-shirts on a folding table on a Manhattan sidewalk. The only difference between the two stacks was the logo on the shirts: the Nike logo was on one stack, Reebok the other. We put a sign on the table, “Free T-shirts, One Per Customer,” and retreated to a safe distance to film the result. One by one, as pedestrians saw the sign, stopped, and examined the T-shirts, they went for the Nike stack. When those were all gone, the Reebok shirts went, too.
People didn’t hate Reebok. But when given a choice, they were quick to show their allegiance to Nike because its story was clearer, and therefore more useful for helping people express themselves and their beliefs. A Nike T-shirt signaled membership in the Nike tribe — a tribe that believed in something bigger than shoes or apparel. Nike was fast becoming a religion. Reebok was just a shoe company.”
Was it Nike’s story the key factor in its growth? No, certainly not, but to have this example repeated on a huge scale across the consumer universe is a huge advantage to Nike. These principles never operate in isolation, but it possible to be great at one and horrible at another.