This is my second post, in a matter of days, at least tangentially about ice cream.

Imagine you’re in a restaurant and you’ve just finished your entrée. The waiter comes up and asks if you’d like dessert. You say, “well, what do you have?”

The waiter says, “vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry ice cream.”

At this point you’d probably be thinking to yourself, “Eh, I can get vanilla, chocolate, or strawberry ice cream anywhere”, and you’d pass. And that’s the point: you can get vanilla, chocolate, or strawberry ice cream anywhere.

Let’s change the scenario. When you asked the waiter what he has, this time he says, “I have Tahitian vanilla bean ice cream. The vanilla beans are harvested near a few miles from where Paul Gauguin painted his last masterpiece.” I don’t know about you, but I would want to try this ice cream. It’s not common. It’s worth the extra calories.

The same is true in any business. The more of a story you tell with your products or services, the more successful you will be. And it doesn’t have to be fine dining or selling dessert for this to work.

Are you a dentist? When patients come to see you with the story you tell them? Do you paint a picture why you became a dentist? Do you tell why your way of being a dentist is better than others?

Think about the most boring thing that you buy at a grocery store. Let’s say soda. Not much of interest there.  Seems like a commodity, right? Not to this guy…

Wouldn’t you buy a soda from him? Wouldn’t you go out of your way to see him?

What is your story? What adjectives can you use to sell your service or product? For more on this, i recommend  Seth Godin’s amazing book, All Marketers Are Liars.