Founders narrative: How Mailchimp won us over

What is a Founders narrative and how can it be used effectively? Find out in this blog and understand it's purpose to initiate early customer loyalty and build a marketable business:

We’ve been juggling this concept of personality within brands a lot. It’s a super relevant piece for start-ups that are carving their way into a market or industry and asking themselves questions about who they really are? Or perhaps more importantly who they want to be as a business? They’re huge questions to get right in the early days, but can often define how you move forward as a business, or at least help understand your direction of travel. More recently, however, it’s not just start ups that seek to develop a personality, it’s become more business-essential than ever.

‘Founders narrative’

In the same breath there is also the concept of ‘founders narrative’ that can be tied into the start-ups/small business (which will be somewhat present without even realising). It’s a useful and authentic way of storytelling through the founders POV to raise awareness about their business and support the early stages of building a community around your product/service. As we all know, storytelling is an effective form of marketing. Using this as a conscious strategy has some big pros, but be aware there are cons which can be hard to ignore - we’ll leave that for another day. 

On the subject of authenticity, we’ve discussed through other articles we’ve written: brand is a multifaceted topic that can be dug deeper and deeper depending on the organisational need, size, audience etc. right down to the granular details that need exploring. But, not wavering who you really and what you stand for as a business, is always a good idea. 

We had a live example of both founders narrative, and authenticity coming together in business recently. Most recently we signed up to Mailchimp to look at some campaigns and in no surprise, we received an email direct to our inbox to thank us for ‘joining their tribe’ or something catchy phrase like that. 

Image credit: Mailchimp.co.uk

Naturally thinking it’d be a verification email where you must ‘find the traffic lights’ amongst a picture of bicycles, but instead, it was a story. A super friendly, welcoming introduction from the founders of the business, and how it all started. Within just a few moments of reading what was a very digestible email, we felt connected to Ben & Dan, knew what their childhood was like, some pictures of their family, a brief intro to their parents life and the struggles of how the business grew in the early days and ultimately why Mailchimp even exists in the way it does. And we heard it right from the guys who took the leap. How powerful is that?

It was a super emotive form of content that drew hugely on storytelling and we left feeling so connected to the business, willing Ben & Dan to continue to do great things and ‘support the underdog’ as their ethos so clearly states. 

“Oh wow, they are human!”

And arguably the most important, the reason we felt connected? Because we gained an insight into the people behind the business. It’s so common to see multi-million dollar organisations, coming across with no real personality, feeling disconnected from consumers where in actual fact, business is people. They start it, run it, nurture it and grow it into what we all see as the brand. 

It may not be right for every business, nor should the story be told every day, but in those early touch-points, creating authentic moments between business and consumer, through sharing an honest insight, is a real winner to building customer loyalty - it sure worked for us. 

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