Marketing Archive - Page 7 of 12 - The Art of Communicating

Marketing stories that work

A great product solves a problem, resolves a struggle, or fulfills a desire.

It tastes delicious without me having to cook. It sounds awesome while being affordable. It’s efficient, sustainable, stylish. It gives me a feeling of mastery or pure joy. Or whatever it is for your product.

Great products transform me into a better person. One who eats healthier, takes better photos, works with more focus, or makes better decisions.

Essentially, it gets me from point A where I still have that struggle to point B where my struggle is resolved.

It’s that transformation that great marketing stories capture. They give us the feeling of being seen with our struggle and they light us the path to a better future where that struggle is resolved.

Marketing stories work when the struggle is real and the path to the future is accessible.

They keep working when the product delivers on the promise.

In one sentence

Many great products can be described in one sentence:

“The notebook for creative people.”
“The fastest acceleration of a production car ever.”
“The headphones that let you work in silence.”
“The blackest black paint.” (Black 3.0)

Here’s a simple test: Can a customer (not you) describe your product in one sentence?

PS: If not, then my new course “Crack the Clarity Code” might be for you. It’s launching today and you can get 10% off using code “IwantClarity” when you order in the first week.

Everything that can be automated, will be automated

When you visit McDonald’s, you don’t need much human interaction, anymore. Go to a terminal, place your order, pay, pick up your meal. No need to speak even a word.

It’s much more convenient for McDonald’s, too. Three terminals easily replace one human and so they can sell faster. Plus, there’s no need to speak with annoying customers.

Everything that can be automated, most likely will.

Which makes the leverage for non-automated interaction even greater.

The crucial aspect is this: Can you provide a better experience than the automation? Can you put a smile on your customer’s faces in a way machines cannot? Can you leverage emotional labor to delight a customer in a way machines cannot (yet)?

If you can’t, your business might be in trouble sooner or later.

If you can, however, your business might be better positioned than ever.

But our product is dry stuff

It’s not!

It solves a problem that businesses are willing to pay good money for.

It saves them a lot of hassle. Just imagine the trouble they would need to go through to solve the problem without you?

It’s a huge time saver form them. Knowing that they can rely on you provides them with peace of mind. Which in turn frees their mind to come up with better solutions for their customers.

It’s just not true that these things are dry. They are highly emotional. Because they are highly relevant.

It’s not the product that’s dry. It’s the story.

What makes a story dry is when the humans get written out of the story. When it’s only about features. And processes. Rather than what these features and processes enable the humans to do.

Businesses don’t lack sexy products.

They lack the courage to go beyond the features and see the humans who use their products. If it solves a real struggle, it’s almost guaranteed to be attractive (at least) or even sexy.

Taking responsibility for our work

Knives can kill people. Are the makers of the knives responsible?

How about the marketers?

Let’s assume X out of every 100,000 knives are used to do harm. When they do more effective marketing to sell more knives, does that affect their responsibility? After all, it increases the number of knives out there that can potentially do harm – and in extension it quite likely increases the number of knives that are used to actually do harm.

When you take ownership of your marketing success, do you take ownership of the side effects as well?

Just thinking out loud …

If marketing was a bakery

We would probably hate cake.

As a baker, when your cake doesn’t taste great, the best thing you can do is to learn to bake a better tasting cake.

The default approach of many marketers is different. They will take the cake and decorate it beautifully. Invent a story about how the recipe is an ancient and long forgotten secret of someone’s grandmother. Throw some incentives in so you can get three if you buy two (although you might not even want one). And have a celebrity, who never tasted the cake, tell us how delicious it is.

And then, when you’ve tricked the customer into buying that piece of cake, trust erodes as the experience falls short of the expectation.

The first bite is with the eye. But sooner or later, the customer gets to experience the actual taste. If the actual bite isn’t great, that first impression will quickly be forgotten.

The default approach to marketing is prone to deception: Give me what you have and I will make it appear attractive and find ways to persuade a customer to buy it.

Lighting the path is different because it starts with a great cake. You decorate a great cake not as a means to hide a weakness but because it makes a great cake even greater. You don’t invent a story about the recipe to make it appear cooler, you tell the actual story because it’s fascinating, let’s say due to the breathtaking attention to detail in making the cake.

Now, when the actual bite confirms the eye’s bite, it builds trust. And we might fall in love with the cake. And buy a second one even without any incentive.

Is it a product?

Is it a product? Or a bunch of features?

Can you say why it exists without saying how it does what it does?

Can your customers?

For great products, the features are there for a reason. They serve a cause. That cause sparks a story and that story can be told and retold.

For bad products it’s the other way around. The features are the reason the product exists. There is no clear and concise cause and therefore, there is no simple story to tell.

This is usually the point at which a marketing agency is hired to come up with a story. Which they do. And it might be a good story. Or it might not. In which case, it becomes really hard to sell the product.

I’d suggest starting with the cause so the story is built into your product. It simplifies the whole marketing.

Marketing in sync with the outcome

Great marketing is true to who you are.

Great marketing also delivers results.

The confusion occurs when our true story doesn’t deliver the results we’re looking for. It’s tempting to conclude that we must bend the truth a little bit. Because, well, we need to pay the bills, right? So, we need the results. Also, it’s just a teeny bit, so really no big deal, agreed? (Plus: others are cheating as well.)

Well, your call.

I feel a better approach is to change our perspective. It’s rather likely that the story we’re telling with our marketing is not the only story that’s true to who we are.

Quite the opposite. There are almost certainly ways to shift our story while remaining true. Maybe we just told it to the wrong people. Or we told our truth while neglecting theirs. It might also be that there’s a slight adaptation to our offer that’s still true to who we are but resonates much stronger than our current offer.

When you do work that matters, it’s almost inevitable that it finally resonates. Fix your product so that the true story is in service of your audience. Fix your story so that it’s told on behalf of your audience. To the right audience.

And the results will come.

The complete secret recipe

Here’s the complete guide to marketing success.

Ask yourself this question: “If they knew what you know, would they buy?”

Depending on the answer, do this:

If not, don’t even bother with your communication. Fix your product. Repeat.

If yes, all you need to do is tell a true story about your product.

Skip the bullshit. Speak with clarity. That’s all there is to it.

Kind of remarkable

The Blue Man Group is kind of remarkable. Actually, it’s two kinds of remarkable: “built in” and “on top”.

Built in remarkable is the way they play the drums. They are highly skilled to get fascinating sounds out of unusual musical items (mostly drums). It makes for a remarkable show that people speak about (read: “make remarks about”) long after.

I call it “built in” because there would be no show without these elements. You can’t make a drum music show without playing some kind of drums.

But there’s another remarkable component to the Blue Man Group, the kind that I call “on top” remarkable: the blue skin color. They could make the same show without the makeup. But they choose not to. It’s built on-top of the actual product to make it even more remarkable.

So remarkable, in fact, that you can’t speak about the Blue Man Group, without mentioning that they are, well, blue men.

And thus, just because it’s on top doesn’t mean that it’s not essential. In fact, the Blue Man Group came to be because the three founders drew the attention of MTV due to their blue masks. The blue faces helped spread the word much more easily. The group understood that there was no shortage of remarkable music shows but a shortage of blue men making remarkable music shows.

Here’s the best part: once established, on-top remarkable becomes something that others can’t copy. While there are a lot of great music shows, there is no second Blue Man Group (other than their own worldwide shows, of course).

What kind of remarkable is your product?

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