Recently came across three similar blog postings about storytelling in marketing and thought I would pretend the authors were having a conversation. Thus, sort of a made-up story with these bloggers as characters.
McLellan Creative (no individual blogger identified) begins the conversation by asking, “When was the last time you were drawn into a white paper by language that compelled you to read more? How many case studies have you found impossible to put down?”*
Joe Pulizzi writing at Chief Marketer notes that not only are white papers dull, but that “the majority of brands continue to use ‘interruption’ style strategies…” Yet even in the face of persistence of “interruption style,” Pulizzi says, “some are turning to “storytelling” instead of overt advertising.” Pulizzi explains:
Storytelling, sometimes referred to as content marketing or custom media, consists of delivering the brand product message as relevant and compelling information. Instead of marketers following a playbook, storytelling requires much the same mixture of rational and emotional messaging that you’d find in a New York Times feature, or even on primetime television drama.
McLellan Creative nods excitedly: “… if you want to build a brand or launch a new product or service, a great story will differentiate you faster than an array of colorful bar graphs. … the best technicians create new platforms, the best storytellers bring them to life.”
Indeed, Pulizzi agrees, “Smart marketers are realizing that they don’t have a choice anymore when it comes to reaching consumers. In today’s business environment, the 4 Ps of marketing can be copied verbatim by an outside competitor. The only separation is communication – how a marketer tells its story.”
Scott ‘Scotland’ Drummond of Marketing magazine chimes in with an example, Penguin Books, which I blogged about here. Penguin, Drummond says, “is leveraging the incredible power of word-of-mouth. In this sense, Penguin’s marketing is all about the conversations happening around it’s new product range. The We Tell Stories range are amazing social objects, objects around which great conversations are taking place. This is the best kind of marketing you can’t buy, and in that sense is a great move from Penguin.”
Continues Drummond: “And in a broader sense, stories are the ultimate viral. We love to hear them, the best ones have been adopted, retold, repackaged, extended, embellished, they are dynamic and change infinitely in the retelling, and in the end are founded on powerful conversations.”
Drummond’s blog posting, er, part of the conversation, was prompted by his reading the Cluetrain Manifesto, about which I’ve seen quite a bit in the blogosphere recently because it’s apparently having its 10th anniversary. So Drummond sums up the “conversation” with his “Cluetrain-esque proclamation (with apologies to the authors):”
If marketers don’t think they are in the business of telling great stories, and now of allowing great stories to be told around their products/services/brands, then they are still labouring under the misapprehension that they are in control. They aren’t.