I started Zander Media because I wish I had done more storytelling in my previous businesses.
We quickly realized that people wanted video but didn’t know what to create their videos about. They didn’t know how to tell their company’s story.
I came up with a process which we jokingly called “Brand Therapy,” which entailed conducting dozens of interviews with clients, employees, and colleagues, distilling the learnings from across those interviews, and then bringing what we learned back with the client to distill a new organizing idea.
The process took me about 40 hours.
I was telling a venture capitalist about this process recently, and found myself suggesting she do it through a more painless process of using data she already had. Saydeah is a co-founder of Cherryrock Capital, a fund focused on backing founders who’ve largely been overlooked by traditional venture. She’d been thinking about how AI could help with sourcing and portfolio support – but hadn’t considered applying it to her own brand strategy. She needed a new tagline for the firm.
It works like this:
- Most of us who work on our computers now record our Zoom calls by default. (If you don’t, you should.)
- All of the recording tools keep full written transcripts of those recordings.
- Download transcripts of your recent calls – or if you prefer, just the ones where you met someone new and told them about your work.
- Upload those raw transcripts into Claude, OpenAI, or your LLM of choice.
- Ask the LLM to write a few paragraphs describing your organization. Then get specific: ask it to give you 5-10 different organizing ideas or slogans that describe your work and make you distinct. Something like: “What are the through-threads here? Give me 10 different ideas that might become a tagline.”
In less than forty minutes you’ve done the work of at least a few dozen hours of distillation. And the more transcripts of pitches you add, the better.
This LLM-enabled process is missing the facilitation – the very human and hard work of sitting down with the leadership at a company and hammering out the new narrative. While that is something anyone can do for themselves, in practice it is harder to do it yourself than to work with someone who has an outside perspective.
I know this from personal experience. I built and sold Robin’s Cafe – without ever capturing what made it special. I still think about the videos I wish I’d made: pulling my nephew soft serve; the camaraderie the team had behind the counter. Those stories happened; we just didn’t capture them.
While I developed this narrative process for companies, it is at least as useful to anyone who wants to improve their story. Upload your pitches to an LLM. Have a chat about them. You’ll be surprised what comes back.
