Marketing and the lost art of storytelling

My commute home is a great time for my mind wander to wander.  There isn’t much else to do while stuck in the sea of cars headed home.  Last night while my mind was wandering one of my favourite songs came on the radio - Hurt by Nine Inch Nails.  The song is a bit of a downer, but it gave me a chance to reflect on my younger days, and made me realize there may be a lesson in marketing hidden inside those memories.

One of my favourite albums ever is the one that the song comes from - The Downward Spiral.  I enjoy it immensely both for the music itself, but also for what it taught me about the art of storytelling.  There was a time when as a young music listener, I’d simply take the individual songs that I enjoyed the most and put them on repeat.  The Downward Spiral forced me to break that habit.  All 14 songs created a story arc, within which Trent Reznor took a listener through a multi-layered journey of a person trying to uncover all the layers of emotions that affect him and his mental well-being.

Very deep stuff; But it taught me that an album could be more than just a collection of individual songs.  The songs themselves can be written to speak to a common theme, and be structured in a way to take a listener through a much longer story arc, with defined acts that touch on various emotions at different points in the plot.

Without question content marketing and inbound marketing are the hottest topics in marketing circles today.  Armies of professionals seem to be pumping out great content components each and every day - Infographics, videos, blogs, eBooks, you name it.  In this community however, the lesson on storytelling that Trent taught me years ago is relevant again.

Every piece of content should tie back to a common theme.  Every piece of content is an opportunity to reinforce your core value proposition and positioning.  For products that require longer sales cycles this is particularly important.  In those cases, each piece of content should map to a particular stage in a longer customer education process.

Content and storytelling both need a defined arc, and plot. 

Without that, you’re just picking your favourite part and putting it on repeat…

Whhaatt! I learned about marketing from Lil John

This morning I was going through my old music collection to find some tunes to listen to.  Having something playing in the background really helps me get going on days when I need some extra motivation.

Since the summer weather has come in full force I decided I was in the mood to add some old hip hop tracks to my playlist.  A few songs in I have come to a realization.  I realized that marketing plays a similar role to that of one of the most unsung players in music.  The hip hop hype man.

For those of you unfamiliar with the term, this is what I quickly pulled from Wikipedia:

A hype man in hip hop music and rapping is a “backup rapper/singer who is also responsible for increasing an audience's excitement with call-and-response chants” according to author Grant Barrett.

Music writer Mickey Hess expands the term as follows: "a hype man is a figure who plays a central but supporting role within a group, making his or her own interventions, generally aimed at hyping up the crowd while also drawing attention to the words of the MC".

Ultimately hyping the crowd is what good marketing and effective content can help to do in priming a customer’s understanding and urgency to buy your solutions. 

When Sen Dog drops the line “How could I just kill a man?” or Lil John asks “Whhhaaaaaattt?” he isn’t just selling more energy drink, those simple lines serve to pump the crowd up and prep them for the MC to drop in to a main verse.  Hype men also help to give MC’s a second to take a breather in between verses as well

Effective marketing can serve both purposes also.  Hyping the crowd is widely understood.  TV shows like Mad Men talk about this, heck I talk about this too. 

Marketing can also help organizations take a breather.  There’s a great saying in product management “Just because we can do it doesn’t mean we should”, products can always be better, but good messaging helps to highlight the existing benefits, effectively giving engineering a bit of a breather in their race to catch up with Moore’s law.

Now I’m off to drink some crunk juice and market some software…

I am the crusher of dreams…

I had an interesting discussion with a colleague of mine who manages our support team. Each day he gets a firsthand view of something that my father likes to call reality. In his case he sees what happens when a customer's expectations are not sufficiently met. Usually those aren't the most pleasant conversations.

Clearly the product and what engineering delivers play a role in that. But we also discussed how and where marketing content also defines what those customer expectations ultimately should be. Specifically we talked about how the story told by marketing can help to temper a customer's wildest dreams.

By their very nature new technology and new software are supposed to be magical. Innovation allows for new tools that will help do something better, easier, faster, or even unlock the ability to do something they has never been done before. The problem with magic and tools that are depicted as such is that some users' wildest dreams set the bar of expectation far out of reach of even the best technology.

Some might blame this on Moore's law setting modern day users' expectation that engineers will always deliver something bigger, faster, and stronger. But part of this (or perhaps most of this) also falls in the hands of marketing. It's not the engineer's fault that the product cannot live up to customers' wildest dreams, that's marketing fault.

Content gives you the ability to control and set realistic expectations. If you built a car with a 60 mile per hour limit in a world where no car went faster than 50, there is no harm in setting the bar at 60. That will still get you where you need to go much faster than the alternative. However a promise of "the world's fastest car" could lead to expectations far beyond the 60 limit. This also leads to broken cars and hours spent with support departments.

Done well content can also turn reality in to a differentiator. Looking at it from a different perspective, knowing that nobody else can yet go 50 miles per hour, why not shape the market to set a 60 mile per hour limit as the must have within the category.

Create content, tell a story that sets a realistic expectation. After all that reality should still be far beyond what customers are able to do otherwise, but can also serve to keep those expectations in check…

I sell bad breath

I have a bad habit of accumulating seemingly random information. My wife believes that my lifelong dream must be appearing on a game show someday to take advantage of this valuable knowledge.

One story that I've picked up that I particularly like is the story behind Listerine. Listerine has a fascinating history that not only helps bring me one step closer to game show supremacy but also serves as a nice little marketing lesson.

Listerine was originally formulated in 1879 as a surgical antiseptic. Apparently some folks even used it as a treatment for gonorrhea… It wasn't until the 1920s that sales of Listerine really took off. No there wasn't an epidemic of gonorrhea (well at least I hope there wasn't, I wasn't around back then) sales took off once the product began being marketed as a cure for 'chronic halitosis' or bad breath. That strategy brought with it a new challenge though. Every day folks had no idea their breath was even a problem.

That's where marketing stepped in to help educate the masses. Ad campaigns for Listerine began to focus on the scourge of bad breath and how bad breath was in fact ruining the lives of every day Americans without their knowledge. If you think about it, this marketing strategy was brilliant. Rather than marketing the product itself, they were in fact educating their audience about a problem that most didn't have much knowledge of. The folks behind Listerine ended up selling bad breath, not mouth wash. The end result of this however was a whole lot of mouthwash sales by people who no longer wanted to have their lives ruined by bad breath.

The hottest trend in marketing today is content marketing or inbound marketing. It's a strategy built around creating and making available a wealth of content for your audience with the goal of educating them. Building trust with your audience by helping them learn more about the various challenges that they face, before trying to sell them any products. As it turns out this isn't a new idea.

After all, I woke up this morning and rinsed my mouth out with Listerine…

Hey marketing, why should I care?

My son recently entered a particularly interesting new phase of life. He has decided that the standard response to everything that I ask him to do will now be "Why?" Go to bed – Why? Eat your dinner – Why? Clean up your toys – Why? And so it goes.

I've heard some parents describe this as the "the most terrible phase of life". As a parent I might agree. But as a marketing person, my two year old has taught me a valuable lesson (whilst simultaneously causing my hair loss to accelerate).

One of the needs of all people is simply a better understanding of Why?

The world of technology marketing however hasn't always understood this. If you think about it you can probably think of endless streams of marketing messages that answer a different question – How? More gigabytes, more megahertz, more bandwidth, less bandwidth, less megahertz, less gigabytes, or maybe even a patented algorithm… all this serves to tell and audience is How something works. If the joys of parenthood have taught me anything it's that nobody cares (or at least little boys) about How something works until they first understand Why it's important.

A simple example. If I was someone who had never driven a car, I wouldn't care about horsepower, in fact I probably wouldn't even understand what it was, I'd gotten where I need to go by walking and it was fine. To join the ranks of car owners I would need to first be educated on Why getting places faster would give me more time in the day, or Why owning a car could give me the freedom to go anywhere on my own schedule. I would need to first understand Why a car could help me, before I cared about about How it worked, or How one car was better than another car.

You might think that this behavior is exclusive to technology folks. But I've seen enough panty liner advertisements focusing on how much blue liquid can be absorbed to know that this behavior has less to do with technologist and simply more to do with marketers.

Understanding Why can educate and even inspire. Simon Sinek's golden circle describes this in a much more profound manner than I ever could and I encourage you to check it out. Sadly answering Why instead of How is difficult to do, but I think taking a step back to think about it is worthwhile for all marketers. I think my son would agree….

PS. You need to go to bed on time and finish your dinner to grow up big and strong.

Everything on the Food network looks easy…

I have found that one of the most difficult things to do is to take something complex and explain it in a simple way to teach someone. Perhaps I'm biased because my wife is a teacher. But my experience has been that it also takes a real subject matter expert to be able to take a complex concept and whittle it down to only the most important parts and make it sound simple and easy at the same time.

The Food network is a great example of this. Cooking may not be the hardest task but it does take some practice and it can be quite intimidating to a novice. Even the most difficult dishes however are made to look very easy to prepare if you ever watch the Food network. I suppose that when you're an Iron Chef you can make anything look as easy as making a grilled cheese sandwich.

Often times I get asked by both coworkers and friends "what exactly do you do?" I tell them that I am a product marketing manager, which inevitably leads to more questions about what product marketing is exactly. So a personal challenge I've undertaken is an attempt to create a simple explanation for what it is that product marketing does. By doing so perhaps I've taken a few baby steps towards becoming an Iron Chef of marketing if you will. I needed the explanation to be more than a job description and also more interesting than a list of the deliverables I get from my boss.

So I've come up with a simple analogy - I write the story that helps to fill the sales funnel. It's the story that, if written well, serves to both find prospects as well as helps those prospects convert to opportunities and sales.



When I was in elementary school I learned in English class that a good story goes through 3 phases: Introduction, Plot, and Conclusion.

In the marketing story I write I think of theses stages in terms of the desired outcomes for the content I create to support my narrative. So I have 3 outcomes or phases for my story as well: Eyeballs, Education, and Urgency.

• Eyeballs: The key to the beginning of the story is customer segmentation. The messaging and value of the solution needs to resonate with the "Tribe" (to borrow a term from Seth Godin) that best fits the user and buyer profile of my product. By fine tuning the story from the beginning to appeal to a particular audience that helps both to get eyeballs reading the story, while also ensuring I target the audience that is most likely to be converted through to opportunities.
  
   
• Education: This is the easiest part of the story to write. It can consist of product brochures and flyers, product websites, demos, and other types of collateral that educate the eyeballs I've captured as to what it is exactly that the product does, and the value or outcomes that will result. Again if done well more conversion and more movement down the sales funnel.
  
   
• Urgency: I find this the most difficult part of the story to write, as it requires the most depth of knowledge. Customer success stories, tools to help determine ROI or tools to quantify risk, vendor neutral educational content along with the expertise that I've enable my colleagues in sales with can be the key chapters of the story that drive real opportunities. This is when the story helps a reader understand how their world could be a better place. It tells them how others have benefitted from my solution and whenever possible ties this back to an economic impact. Put another way, this is when the story can really help close the gap between awareness and engagement.
  

Finally there is one last piece. If I've told my story correctly then this is when sales professionals take it to the finish line. I've tried to help them up to this point by writing a marketing story to help convert targets in to opportunities. They should now have a funnel of potential customers who are well educated on what we do, how we can help them and have a sense of urgency that now is a good time to make an investment.

So that's the explanation I'm going with the next time I get asked "what do you do?"

I'm going to make myself a grilled cheese sandwich now…

Pork and a post about Apple...

That up there, that’s what I had for dinner a few weeks ago.  In case you’re wondering, this was before the New Year’s resolutions kicked in :)

Dinner consisted of several pints of German beer and the delicious roasted pork hock pictured above.  It was all quite delicious, and I knew it was what I wanted as soon as I read the description: “Succulent fall off the bone roasted pork” Mmmm nom nom.  For those of you who are less familiar with the world of butchery, in reality it’s the ankle of a pig and is made up of about 72% fat and gristle.  Lol.

I showed that grainy picture to a coworker just now.  Showing her that picture kicked off a wildly entertaining and informative conversation about her favourite foods, restaurants, and hidden gems near the office.  You see, she has passion, and because of this I’ve promised her that I’ll try out a few new foods, and some new restaurants.  Moreover I trust I will not be disappointed.

I’ve actually had similar conversations in the past, only about a different topic.  Last time it was about a funny phone made out of glass, or an extremely lightweight computer.

I hate using this example since it is a bit cliché but I think it is appropriate.   Apple is the rare technology company who is able to generate that level of passion in its' users.  They are just a computer company, but to their fan base they are so much more.  Apple even pioneered the concept of selling through product evangelists years ago.

In light of the recent news of Steve Job’s leave of absence it’s fascinating to see the flood of concern that’s taken hold online.  As an outside observer I think this deeply personal relationship Apple users have is core to their success, and the reason for their concern.  Apple is personified by their leader, whose future is now a bit in question.  

My own content strategy revolves around showing how my organization is made up of real people who have interesting opinions and are experts in a particular field.  Apple takes this to the extreme and to many the company seen as one man, in a black turtleneck and jeans.  The story of Apple is as much his story as much as it’s the story of a computer company.  An you know what?  It works.

People relate to Apple, and want to be cool like Apple.  They want to be Steve Jobs and tell the world his message.  

I wish Mr. Jobs all the best and hope his health returns.  After all the more successful he is, the more I have to write about…

Do you like me? Or do you “like me”, like me?

I read a great quote the other day about biggest challenge for marketers today - How to turn "like" in to "act"? At face value seems straightforward, how can I take customers who like what I do, and take them one step further and have them act on it by telling others. It's not a new idea, but with the emergence of social media, "liking" something on the surface has never been easier, but because of this, convincing someone to act has never been more difficult. I believe this becomes a question of how to create passion in your user base.

As a teenager I had dreams of becoming a musician, an artist. I am lucky since what I do for a living still allows me some creative freedom. Sometimes at a dinner party I'll default to telling people that I'm a writer when asked the dreaded "what do you do?" question. This is kind of true, and much easier to explain than telling them I work in product marketing. I do write as part of my job and it does allow me a bit of artistic expression. And that's the key - Art creates passion, both for the creator and the audience.

I think in my line of work there is an opportunity to inspire greater passion and engagement in a user community. The content that you build your marketing around - the story you tell the world, and how you tell that story.

Pablo Picasso said "Art is the elimination of the unnecessary". I love that quote and I think it can be applied to content marketing.

It takes a lot of courage to take the unnecessary away in marketing content and just tell people in few words what it is that you do. Buzzwords, extra syllables, and extra adjectives all serve to shield the core message away from an audience. I think it shows a tremendous respect for your audience if you simply get to the point. As Picasso said, this is the way to elevate what you do to art. Art, and respect, a combination to build passion, and action.

Here is one of my favourite writing tools. It's fantastic for a sanity check on anything that I write. Overuse of buzzwords. Words that are too long. Too many words. All flagged. There are other similar tools out there, and in the online world there is even a metric called the Gunning fog index to measure this. So with the problem recognized and tools available, why don't more writers use them?

At the end of the day, do you like me or do you "like me" like me? Perhaps by being honest with you, it can be the latter, and maybe you'll even be inspired to do something about it…