INTRODUCING THE WALL STREET JOURNAL EXERCISE

Given your blockbuster year, a WSJ reporter is in your lobby, right now, waiting to interview you for tomorrow's lead story. What will you tell her?

This one-day, facilitated workshop uses proven journalism techniques to  write your feature story, the way it might appear in the WSJ (or similar business publication). We use your story to derive your unique value proposition, elevator pitch, messaging, and customer success stories.  We'll also come up with a  list of potential tag lines. 

Together, let's go write your story.

A comprehensive feature story about your organization, the way you'd want it to read in the Marketplace section of the Wall Street Journal. Your feature story is typically 2,500-3000 words, hence longer than a typical WSJ feature story. Some of our clients use our long version to derive a shorter, 800 word version for internal consumption. 

• Brand position statement
• Value proposition & elevator pitch 
• Messaging 
• Three customer stories
• Potential tag lines

Senior leadership participation is critical, e.g., the CEO, CMO and COO

Other business leaders can participate from sales or customer service

High performance teams are small, so we recommend no more than five.

Use the workshop deliverables to inform your marketing brochures, investor pitches, web copy and social media marketing. Anywhere you need to tell your story. 

Take your story to your creative team (or agency) to develop your visual language including logo, corporate colors and imagery. Or, we can assume this next step with our design partner. 

The WSJ is used as a metaphor and framework to apply principles of journalism to your story. Our team (typically two people) asks reporter style questions about the company. We also include a scribe to take notes and to co-facilitate the session.

No. The Wall Street Journal is used as a metaphor to ask the type of outside-in questions a business reporter would pose (and, we had a WSJ reporter review and edit our  workshop questions).

If you are outside the San Diego area travel expenses will be charged at their actual cost (no markup).

Senior management, including the CEO, CMO (if we telling the corporate story). For product or division branding the relevant senior management should attend. Smaller teams (six participants max) are the highest performing.

Six to seven hours. Morning session, 9am-12noon covers an introduction to the storytelling framework and some value proposition exercises to get the team in the right frame of mind. The 1-4pm afternoon session is the Wall Street Journal exercise. 

Your feature story is typically delivered the next week for your review (three rounds of edits are provided). Your story is delivered along the secondary deliverables. Once everything is reviewed and accepted, we deliver a final presentation or conference call to review deliverables and discuss any next steps (e.g, the design phase if you need a visual language for your story).