Marketing is not a department—it's the story of how you create difference for your customers.

As a business owner who cares about doing meaningful work, you know deep down that you're different, yet you still have a hard time communicating that difference to your customers. You are not alone.
One of the biggest challenges facing every entrepreneur, innovator and global brand is understanding how to make ideas resonate with colleagues, customers and clients. We have no shortage of ideas, products and services, but we often struggle to pinpoint exactly how and why they will matter to people.
The difference between a good idea and a commercial success is context—the understanding about who the product or service is for, what they really want deep down and why they will care about this, more than that. We spend most of our time trying to make people love things, when we should be simply making things people love.
It turns out that marketing and sales are less about persuasion and more about understanding.
If you don't understand your potential customer's worldview how can you craft a brand story that matches it?
I’m Bernadette Jiwa, and I show great businesses how to become meaningful brands. I'm here to help you tap into the essence of your idea, to uncover your unique ability and tell the story of how that translates to value for people in a marketplace.
Whether you make chocolate bars, or sell consulting services, are a tech startup, a non-profit or incumbent global brand—you've got a brand story to tell. My job is to work with you and your company to unlock the value in your story and translate that into marketing people love. I'll help you to understand the difference you create and show you how to shine a light on that so that your brand becomes more meaningful to the people you serve.
Marketing and brand storytelling comes down to this.

Product - Meaning = Commodity

Product + Meaning = Brand

Good marketing tells the story. Great marketing is the story.
You get to choose the story you want to tell.
I work with clients who want to stay relevant to their customers—the kind of people who care enough to create ideas, innovations and businesses that people want and believe in.
If you are a purpose driven entrepreneur, passionate company or visionary business leader I can help you to make your brand more than just a replaceable commodity.
Together we're going to give your customers a reason to care and a story to tell.
I am a freelance brand story strategist, marketing keynote speaker and the author of four
#1 Amazon Bestsellers Difference, Marketing: A Love Story,
The Fortune Cookie Principle and Make Your Idea Matter.
My blog was voted Best Australian Business Blog: 2012.
Smart Company named it one of Australia's 20 Best Business Blogs: 2014.
Seth Godin listed it as one of the marketing blogs he reads.
I created the new marketing model for the 21st century complete with the Difference Map
the one-page method that will help you to reimagine your business and reinvent your marketing.
I spoke about the secret to spreading ideas at TEDxPerth.
I've been named as one of
The Top 100 Branding Experts To Follow On Twitter .
In my first job I was a bean counter for supermarket giant Tesco. Seriously....I spent Saturdays, clipboard in hand, crawling over pallets in the warehouse counting how many tins were in stock. I began working in hospitality, sales and business management at the age of 18. When you're the person unlocking the door at 7am—the first to greet both staff and customers, you get real, hands on, relationship building business experience. I went on to launch and sell my own successful businesses in the UK. The most valuable business lesson I have learned over three decades is how to look people in the eye and to really see them.
I now advise, consult with and speak to global companies, startups, entrepreneurs and business leaders from around the world, helping them to build their brands and business visions around a story-centric marketing strategy—one that helps them to matter to their customers, gain traction in their market and get funding from investors. I've created brand names, communication and innovation strategies and brand stories to launch and evolve amazing, bold ideas; from football boots to a medical journal, businesses to blogs, books to Kickstarter projects, non-profits and more.
I believe that great businesses are founded on the truth and that marketing is the art of telling a story that moves people to act. Marketing is no longer a tactic used to sell stuff. It's about finding ways to create meaning and making people feel something, rather than making them do what you want them to do in the short term.
You could spend your time working out how to make people act in the moment. Or you could think about how you would like to make them feel about your brand in the long run.
My fascination with brand storytelling and marketing began at the age of 10 in my little brother's Action Man days, when we figured out that the collectible stars on the packaging, were just as valuable as the khaki outfits and grenades inside.
I grew up in Dublin, the storytelling capital of the world, a place where nobody needs an excuse to start telling a story. It's in the blood. Now I live in the world’s most liveable city, Melbourne Australia, with a cafe on every corner and surrounded by brand storytelling inspiration at every turn.
People often ask me how I get to do the work that I do? The answer is that I make my work about understanding people first and I have trained myself to see how the little things we fail to notice impact the big things we care about.

How we can work together

If you are launching a new idea, growing your business or need to connect the dots that enable you to stay relevant in a shifting marketplace get in touch.
Here are some of the ways we can work together.

• COACHING & CONSULTING~ Launch, evolve and differentiate your brand. Connect your idea to a business strategy, generate momentum & see results with 1 on 1 sessions or a month of intensive consultation.
• BRAND NAMING ~ You've got 9 seconds to convince them. Elevate your brand with an unforgettable business name and brand story.
• BRAND STORY ~ Don't be the brand that people buy. Be the one they 'buy in' to. Change how people feel and differentiate your brand with a unique position and a compelling story.

“If you want a speaker who truly engages and connects with your audience, Bernadette is the one.
Totally inspirational and on point!“
—Joe Pulizzi
Founder of The Content Marketing Institute

Bernadette was writing and speaking about the importance of brand storytelling, creating difference and understanding customers as alternatives to traditional marketing long before ‘story’ became the new marketing black. She is the author of three #1 Amazon Bestsellers on the subject. She was voted Australia’s Best Business Blogger in 2012 and Smart Company named her blog as one of the Top 20 Business Blogs in Australia in 2013 and 2014.
We spent $500 billion globally on advertising in 2013. Every year we’re spending more money, to interrupt more people, more often, with messages they don’t care about and don’t pay attention to. We’ve come to believe that the way to succeed is to have an advantage—by being different or better, more visible, or just plain louder.
What if, instead of finding ways to be one step ahead of your competition, you could build and market your business to give people a reason to choose you? What if you could learn to recognise opportunities to completely reinvent a category or experience? What if you could stop trying to beat the competition, and become the competition?
Fifty years ago the focus of business was dominance. More was the shortcut to becoming an unbeatable Goliath in the marketplace. Today the shortcut to more is to matter—not to be different, but to do something that creates difference.
There are many speakers in the field of entrepreneurship, business and marketing who can teach an audience about the tools and tactics. Bernadette invites and inspires audiences to reinvent their businesses and rethink their marketing by getting closer to their customers. She shows them how to recognise opportunities that create value, to develop products and services that people want, and to matter to their customers. Her job as your speaker is not to help you to think about ways to beat the competition. It’s to show you how you can become the competition.

“If Bernadette Jiwa’s talk didn’t move you.…you are soulless.“
—Phil Buckley
Marketing Director & Attendee at Authority 2015

Bernadette has spoken to audiences from Sydney to New York, at events from TEDx to Content Marketing World and for organisations from LinkedIn to Emyth.

Her Audiences Include

Marketing Professionals.
Business Leaders.
Entrepreneurs.
Creative Professionals.
Startups.
Small Business Owners.

Topics

Marketing Is Not A Department.
The Difference Marketing Model.
Brand Storytelling.
Doing Business In The Connection Economy.
Relevance Is The New Remarkable.

Book Bernadette To Speak

Bernadette is frequently booked several months in advance, especially for international events. You can get in touch to invite her to speak at your event.

Imagine your business mission and vision as a mountain in the distance.
Your strategy is the route map—the path you choose that’s going to take you to that mountain.
Tactics are the steps you take on the journey to advance your way along that chosen path towards the mountain—thus realising your vision.
MISSION AND VISION—Where you’re going and why.
STRATEGY—How you’re going to get there.
TACTICS—What you do along the way.
Let’s say your mission and vision is to create a cafe that builds a sense of community, one that becomes ‘a third place’ between work and home, inspiring and nurturing the human spirit.
The strategy is to open beautifully designed cafes that support this vision—serving great coffee in strategic neighbourhood locations. (You may not know in the beginning that this will eventually become 15,000 stores in 50 countries).
The tactics are many and varied. You need to source the best coffee beans, install comfortable seating and provide world-class training programs for your staff, in order to deliver the best customer experience.
When it comes to business we spend a lot of our time working on the tactics.
We agonise for weeks over perfect taglines, choosing logo designs and installing fixtures, often without fully understanding if and how those tactics (the things we spend most of our time doing), are helping us to get where we want to go.
You can’t start buying the ergonomic chairs until you know why you need them.

Image by David Nutter.

A more important question to ask and answer is:

“Why should they like us?”
You can’t ask people to believe in your story without giving them something to believe in.


Image by Andreas Ivarsson.

As anyone who has ever played chess will tell a beginner, every move must have a purpose.
You don’t move a piece unless you have a reason for doing so, or before you understand what the next move is likely to be, and the one after that (depending on how your opponent responds).
One single great move in isolation is not enough to keep you in the game.
And yet as business owners and leaders we make reactive moves all the time, often without linking those moves to our endgame.
Why exactly are you planning to expand your reach?
What’s the purpose of those scheduled tweets?
Why have you chosen to launch this product now?
If that works, where to next and why?
Everything you’ve done at your desk today and are going to do tomorrow, is a move with and end in mind—or it should be. Where are you hoping those moves you’re making will take you?

Do you remember playing musical chairs as a child? As with many games the same people who seemed to ‘have a knack’ or ‘get the hang of it’ always won. I was terrible at musical chairs. I was the kid who hedged her bets, tried to hold on, or scoot around the chairs half sitting, half standing, trying to maintain some kind of contact between buttock and seat.
It was the worst strategy!
In the end I started paying attention to the winners. They didn’t hedge their bets by half claiming each chair as they went past. They lolloped around confidently. They never won by trying to guess when the music would stop or by concentrating harder than everyone else, because that doesn’t work either. And they hardly paid attention at all to what the other kids might do next. No, the winners I discovered didn’t focus on the other competitors or even to the chairs in the middle. They kept their eyes firmly fixed on the mum who was in charge of the music and waited for her finger to come into contact with the pause button on the music player.
The winners watched what was going on around them. They paid attention to the context surrounding the game and not just the game itself.
Musical chairs was my first lesson in what it takes to win—it usually involves looking beyond what’s right under your nose.