Brand Story Consultancy
Clarify Your Brand and
Unique Value Proposition
Does Your Brand Tell Your Story?
A brand story assessment and workshop to empower you with the brand story to enchant funders, grow repeat business from ideal clients, and build brand fans.
We’ll clarify your brand statement, brand and customer archetypes and goals, and unique value proposition.
A brand is the set of expectations, memories, stories & relationships that … account for a consumer’s decision to choose one product or service over another.
Do you lack the compelling, coherent brand story your ideal customers seek?
Brands that win tell many great stories and connect them all.
- Does your marketing focus on you instead of your key customers’ challenges and transformations?
- Might your brand stories feel inauthentic, unrelatable, or lack crucial conflict?
- Are you telling instead of showing, or trying to control your customers’ stories?
Answered “Yes”? Brand story gaps may be undermining your mission.
3 Benefits of Refining Your Brand Story
- Enchant funders, clients with your purpose and backstory
- Grow repeat business from ideal clients by embracing your brand archetypes and story
- Build brand fans by weaving personal journeys of clients, supporters, and staff with your brand story, growing your relevance and resonance
Before refining Align to Shine’s own brand story, I targeted all kinds of educator and didn’t resonate with any one niche. Now I can attract my ideal clients and screen out everyone else!
Align to Shine helps education entrepreneurs grow impact for their clients, using effective copywriting, brand storytelling, and marketing
Who I Help To Shine
Typical clients include founders, leaders, and marketing managers of:
Social enterprises
… transforming education for human flourishing
Education settings
… pioneering democratic and nature-based learning
Mentors
… of nature connection and rites of passage experiences
How You Can Shine
Align to Shine can scale your impact, influence, and income, with brand story assessments, workshops, and support.
Learn to align your brand strategy and storytelling with effective practice, so the true value of your work can shine through your marketing.
Will We Align?
We’ll likely be a great fit if you have a growth mindset and resonate with:
- Courageous and holistic education, supporting autonomy, agency, and acceptance
- Nurturing compassionate, collaborative, and creative learning communities
- Playful experimentation, with curiosity and humility
We’ll likely be a poor fit if you:
- Have a fixed or fearful mindset
- Value conformity, status, and power over caring for people and nature, curiosity, and humility
- Aren’t committed to continuous improvement
My Underpinning Experience
Laurie Walmsley
Founder, Align to Shine
Since pivoting from politics to empowering educators, I’ve provided marketing, branding, and copywriting support to educators such as Embercombe, the University of Exeter, and The Visionaries.
I’ve also designed and facilitated story-strategy workshops to form Transition Town Totnes’ latest 10-year vision.
Through Align to Shine, I empower clients using my experience, knowledge, and skills from:
- 15 years’ comms success in business, government, and education marketing
- Training in storytelling and creative facilitation for educators
- Combining values theory and communications psychology with effective digital marketing strategy and tactics
When clients need additional skills (e.g., web design, graphic design), I collaborate with creatives who are leaders in their field.
Transform Your Comms
Transform your comms with my brand story assessment + workshop.
I offer a combination of DIY, ‘done with you’, and ‘done for you’ brand story strategy support to clarify your:
- Brand statement and brand rituals (how you’ll connect to keep your best customers coming back for more, while doing your marketing for you!)
- Founding story, speciality, and brand values
- Archetypes and goals for your brand, and top-3 customers
- Unique value proposition: how you use your brand gifts to create unique value
- Customer interactions, mapping how your brand empowers customers to overcome obstacles, embrace their genius, and achieve transformation
Storytelling is the most powerful way to put ideas into the world
Your Questions
- Will my investment be worth it?
We'll take action in the order likely to yield the most impact and return on your investment. Across this site you can see the value I’ve created for clients. - Will I be sold to?
No — I seek to best help you fulfil your mission. I may ask you to apply certain resources before investing in my support. - How can I find the time?
We've all felt overstretched, yet each have 24-hour days. This Manager Tools guide can help you clarify and schedule what matters most, freeing up energy and attention for us to collaborate.
Hone your brand story to attract your ideal clients
Case Study
Lewis Winks at the University of Exeter needed help to create inclusive, compelling, and clear narratives for three impact case studies in humanities. Lewis explained how working with Align to Shine improved the case studies:
Impact case studies require a careful balance of detail and plain language. This can leave the author feeling unable to tell a compelling story about their research.
What stood out about the work you did with Align to Shine?
Align to Shine helped us create clear, strong narratives for three impact case studies in humanities. Laurie's careful and thorough copyediting and copywriting resulted in greatly improved impact case studies. We're very grateful for his help.
University of Exeter
I’m in - what’s next?
Find out how we can best enhance your impact, influence, and income with proven brand story techniques. Let’s talk about how we can:
- Give you an actionable plan for making the most of your brand story, whether you want further help from Align to Shine or choose to go it alone
- Reveal where we can best add value to your brand story strategy
- Find out if we’ll be a good fit
What will you have missed a year from now, if you keep telling your ideal customers a brand story that doesn’t speak to their pain, support the transformation they seek, or differentiate you from competitors?
The most powerful person in the world is the storyteller. The storyteller sets the vision, values, and agenda of an entire generation that is to come.
Unsure How to Start?
Book a call to discover how to best to invest in the marketing you need to grow recurring revenue from your ideal clients.