So why isn’t there more in marketing?
That’s right, business is really a collection of stories. Think about it. Therefore, its probably the most effective way of marketing your product or service, but many marketing materials are lacking in stories and storytelling. Why is this?
Where I work, I’ve been beating the drum on making more stories out of our successes, mainly doing more case studies on customers who had a problem, and how we fixed that problem with a solution we provided. Its a difficult process, but something I plan on focusing on in the future.
Founding of the company
There is always a story to be told about the founders, the need they saw, and how they developed a product or service to meet that need. If you are in search of capital or funding, what really gets the company funded isn’t your made projections of revenue 5 years out, what really sells the bankers/VCs/friends and family is a compelling story more than anything else.
The prevalence of stories in business literature
Go through your Inc. magazine, Fast Company, Forbes, etc. and what do you see? Although there are a number of charts, graphs and figures throughout the company, they really are filled with stories. Stories of companies, stories of founders, stories of business challenges, stories of customers, stories of success.
The same goes for where I’m working on my MBA at the University of St. Thomas – Opus School of Business. The Harvard Business Case Studies are stories, and even the textbooks are smattered with a number of stories, how the particular concepts outlined in the text can be related to what happened with a specific business.
Face it marketers, prospects don’t care about your product
I think something all marketers need to realize is that potential customers almost always could care less about your product or service. Are they buying what you’re selling? If they are, they have already identified a need and probably already have a consideration set in mind. In many cases, if you are lucky enough to find a consumer who is actually buying what you are selling, you are already behind, because someone else, through their marketing and sales, have set the rules of the game, and set them to their advantage.
Prospects don’t care about your features or functions
They don’t. I think marketers know this, but we continue to jam our marketing materials full of them, because its easy, and we want to depend on salespeople to turn these features and functions into benefits for the particular prospects they are in discussions with.
Features and functions have a place
They do, but its oftentimes well into the engagement. As marketers, I believe we need to develop more compelling stories for prospects. What do customers read in their free time for the most part? Stories, fiction, novels, things they can relate to. The laundry list of features and functionality that we as marketers put out is so opposite of what they oftentimes consume in their free time, how can we put all this effort into creating these materials and this content, knowing that it will probably never get written?
Writers of textbooks for schools, including college textbooks, have seen the writing on the wall for some time now, and choose to use bolded words and bullet points for important concepts and principles.
Why is it so hard?
Although I’ve been pushing hard to do many more case studies, its been difficult. Looking at other marketers, it appears that they have some customer case studies, but its far from a focus. Many of the case studies appear to be glorified product brochures. I believe to increase the effectiveness of these case studies, we need to make them stories, with a setup, confrontation, and resolution.
Pushing the story beyond customer case studies
We can apply this concept of storytelling well beyond our standard customer case studies, can’t we? Marketers can work on developing a story piece that outlines how and why the company was founded, more about the founders, what meets did they see were unmet, and what did they do about it? Extend this beyond the founding of the company, and think about new products and services that are developed, think about companies that are acquired, and other major events. Don’t these deserve their own stories?
