The proliferation of digital publishing tools has made it possible for businesses to share messages with audiences across the globe. It also means customers spend increasing amounts of time trying to make sense of competing content from a vast number of sources. To get your message to ‘stick’ it is essential to master the art of storytelling.
When it comes to storytelling it is important to bring your company, your history, your products and who you are as people to life. Think about how you will convey your story to connect emotionally with your audience. If you want people to remember what you said, to follow you and tell others; you will need to persuade, inspire and motivate.
In Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, Chip Heath and Dan Heath write about six principles to make your ideas stick and help you get your point across. The six principles (Simplicity, Unexpectedness, Concreteness, Credibility, Emotions and Stories) provide an excellent starting point for learning how to craft a better narrative about your company.
The “six principles”
1. Simplicity – As we become experts in what we do, we lose the ability to communicate simply. Keep your messages short and simple, so they can be understood by those that are new to a subject. Ideas that are understood are more likely to be remembered.
2. Unexpectedness – Communicate things that are surprising or different about your company story. The unexpected will grab people’s attention.
3. Concreteness – Use real examples rather than theory; this could be research results, market statistics, client testimonials, product demonstrations, photographs and diagrams.
4. Credibility – Your content will be more credible if you use direct experience. This can be your experience, your supporters or customers. Use content to engage with your audience, ask for feedback and encourage questions so what you say can be put to the test. Organise seminars with industry pundits and produce content with examples that show why your beliefs are correct.
5. Emotions – We care about individuals that we can associate with and remember emotional experiences. Make sure your stories have human interest and connect to people’s lives.
6. Stories – Share information in a story form to make your message memorable. We all remember the fables, myths and legends told to us as children. While they are not true, they have stuck with us because they are about good and bad and are emotionally engaging. Great stories can inspire people to change their behaviour.
Stretching the truth?
Politicians have always been adept at telling stories that appeal to a particular tribe. The Brexit and Trump campaigns are great examples – they effectively rallied people to their cause. Since their success, everyone has been talking about the phenomena of post-truth politics – it seems tribe appeal is more important than facts in politics. Post-truth was even the Oxford Dictionary word of the year in 2016.
What is post-truth marketing?
Post-truth marketing is also a growing phenomenon. Instead of trying to educate the general market, brands are playing to a particular tribe of people. Marketers used to define their audience broadly and try to educate that audience. The problem with this approach is that you are outside the group, trying to get in. It is hard to convince an audience to favour your product if you are trying to change widely held opinions.
Marketing has always stretched the truth but this has tended to be based on product benefits. With post-truth marketing, the truth is stretched to conform to the views of your tribe. The audience is defined more narrowly – those that already believe in what you offer and those on the fringes that can be easily converted.
Content is used to bind the tribe together and enable you to become an authority within a particular group. The trick is to base your content marketing on already held beliefs and to reinforce these beliefs in a way that supports your commercial goals.
There are lots of examples of tribe marketing in business to consumer (B2C) industries where cultural aspects of storytelling are essential, bringing about virtue signalling where people say and do things to indicate their position on a particular issue. For example, if you buy a Tesla car you are likely to be environmentally conscious. Volvo owners are concerned about safety. Waitrose fans are middle-class ethical shoppers. John Lewis is attractive to those that want safe and reliable. Apple is for creative types, etc…
Tech businesses are tribal
Post-truth marketing is also relevant to business to business (B2B). Software developers tend to be very tribal and follow trends. In the late 90s, Sybase and Oracle were direct competitors. Sybase emphasised performance and sold to banks and telecommunications providers that valued this. Whereas, Oracle emphasised ease of application development because it was typically used by software engineers building new applications.
Salesforce defined a tribe that valued the cloud. The tribe grew because cloud computing was becoming easier to use and people were evangelising the concept of the cloud. Salesforce successfully reinforced these messages to grow their business.
SalesSeek’s CRM system is extremely visual and easy to integrate with other products – it is attractive to those that want to mashup different applications and value flexibility. A growing tribe!
At Vie Carratt we can help you to differentiate and bring your company’s story to life with ideas that resonate and grow your tribe. Whether or not you buy into the idea of post-truth marketing, content marketing can offer the best way to win new customers.