Marketing Archive - Page 4 of 11 - The Art of Communicating

The misuse of stories

Stories are powerful.

Which is why they are often misused. The more emotional, the greater the potential for misuse.

A couple of years back, at a conference, I listened to a speech about water problems in mega cities. The speaker started with a story about a poor family who suffered some severe diseases due to contaminated water. It was a touching experience. She really made us feel the pain.

Which earned her harsh criticism during the coffee break.

Because it turned out that she had been misleading us. The problem: The story wasn’t representative of the situation. Not at all.

It was a story that was meant to evoke emotions (which it did). But it was a dishonest story in the sense that the speaker had picked a very specific, very special situation that painted an unusually dark picture. One that wasn’t representative of the situation at all. It was purely there to evoke emotions while not making the proper point.

That’s a crucial difference: The best stories are such that they are representative of the whole picture despite highlighting only a specific part of the picture.

Skilled communicators pick stories that paint a vivid picture.

Great communicators pick representative stories that paint a vivd picture. A story that is powerful because it evokes emotions and captures the essence of the complete picture.

“We have never needed to do marketing.”

I’ve met quite a number of businesses who told me that they have never needed to do marketing, all of their business would come from doing great work and being recognized and recommended for it.

Which means that most of these businesses are actually doing quite a lot of marketing. They make useful things that beautifully solve people’s struggles and they make it easy to spread the word.

That’s the foundation of any good marketing.

Advertisements and other forms of communication are amplifiers. They work best (and are way easier) if the foundation is great. But it’s not all of marketing. It’s the topping.

What does it look like?

If you’ve ever played Monopoly, you know what it feels like to play the game.

Which is the point of this brilliant new campaign by KesselsKramer. They want us to be reminded of what it feels like to play Monopoly by showing us what playing the game looks like.

Yep, this is us. (Isn’t it?)

Most business communication is different. It stops at what but doesn’t show us what it looks like.

The business tells me about their latest innovation and why it works.

But is it for me?

Sure, they explain … and continue to tell me how elaborate their approach is.

But is it for me?

They let us figure this out ourselves.

As opposed to making us see what it looks like to struggle so that we can immediately identify as their customer.

Yep, this is us. This is exactly what we’re struggling with.

If you want to be seen by your customer, see them first. And tell them what you see … what does it look like?

When they recognize themselves, they will want to hear the details.

(PS: Speaking of board games, I enjoyed this video about “The Politics of Competitive Board Gaming Amongst Friends”)

The truth about cars

There was a time when cars didn’t have seat belts.

There was even a time when car makers hesitated to equip their cars with seat belts although they could. They feared bad publicity. After all, it would mean admitting that the cars were unsafe. Which could scare customers and keep them from buying.

So, they decided to not tell the whole story but rather hide the fact that cars do, as a matter of fact, crash sometimes … and hope that no-one notices it.

Today, we have way safer cars because people who cared surfaced the whole story. Obviously, the best way to deal with the truth was not to hide the problem but to face it, deal with it, and improve the product.

A good question to ask is this: If your customers knew what you know, would they buy?

Many companies don’t trust that their customers really would. And so, they bend the truth and maybe hide parts of it.

But some companies use this question as a motivation to improve the product. Not only will these companies end up with superior products, marketing will also be way easier.

All they need to do is tell a true story. Ultimately, it leads to customers who can – and do – trust you.

All amounts to something in the end

A golden rule in storytelling is that anything the author spends much time on will amount to something in the story.

If it didn’t, the editor would certainly have cut it out. It’s just bloat that makes the story longer but not better. It adds detail without adding meaning.

Now, look at your website. Does anything you spend much time on amount to something in your story? Or is there content that makes the page longer but not better, information that adds detail without adding meaning?

A good editor would cut it out.

Adding features

Clarity is an infinite game.

When new ideas pop up or new features get added to the product, we need to adapt the story we tell.

The default approach is to just add the news to the existing story.

If we do this multiple times, we end up with a confusing mess.

A better approach is to evolve the story. Don’t merely add to the story but refine it. Don’t merely append but re-think how it all relates to each other.

Of course, this will be so much easier if you keep that in mind when you develop the new feature.

What selfish marketers overlook

Some marketers treat us as kind of dumb.

For example in the way they try to persuade us by hiding their cons and exaggerating their pros (if not downright inventing some).

Let’s call them the “selfish marketers”.

The fascinating part is how much effort selfish marketers invest into this. They spend huge resources on inventing promises that sound irresistible or stories that create buzz – not to mention all the money they throw towards marketing agencies who give them more of that.

By doing that, they try to decorate a product they don’t trust in themselves to be good enough if they told us the truth.

In my experience, your effort is better spent in telling a true story and making it work. That involves refining your product so that you can actually trust it to be good. It also involves listening closely to what your customers actually want (and need). It doesn’t stop with the quest for clarity to find the words that make your customers see what you see.

The selfish marketer starts from building something and puts all their effort in crafting a story on top of that something.

The honest marketer starts with empathy, uncovers what matters to the customers, builds a special thing that delivers exactly that … And then they tell a true story about it … using words they trust in and believe, themselves.

The best products are those that customers love even more when they know the complete truth. They are not irresistible because the promise sounds irresistible but because it is. And so, your customers support you in creating the buzz.

What’s a product where that’s the case for you?

Inner clarity, outer confusion

Clarity is a tricky beast. We can feel inner clarity but sense outer confusion.

Confusion’s best mate is the Curse of Knowledge which reassures us that everything’s super clear. Which it is. To us. I mean, we just know it, right? But the Curse of Knowledge is brilliant at hiding the fact that for our audience it’s super hard to understand. They don’t know what we know, after all.

The more we know about something and the deeper we care about that thing, the harder it gets to speak about that thing in simple terms.

If you want a reality check to beat the Curse of Knowledge and put confusion back in its place, join us on September, 7th for a free Q&A. You’ll meet like minded people and get a chance to ask me anything, e.g. how to overcome the Curse of Knowledge in your case.

Clarity and complexity

Clarity doesn’t make complexity go away, it makes complexity accessible.

The purpose of clarity is to make the difficult feel easy. To give us an entry point to the rabbit hole. To light us a path through the mess that makes sense and is easy to follow. It makes the complex feel simple.

But of course when complexity is accessible, it can help to reduce complexity.

Making people fall in love with what you make

Marketing is widely considered to be the art of making people fall in love with what you make.

But what if you turned this around to make the things people will love. Let’s say: not build a course and make people love it but build a course that people love?

Or in a way that people love. Let’s say not build an app and educate people to love it but build it from the start in a way that people love to use?

This shift in perspective has a profound impact on the decisions you make during development. It has an even bigger impact on how you market your product. Because you can stop to decorate your product with fancy sounding slogans. You can just speak plain English and tell a true story.

What are you building?

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