Another Recommended Book: All Marketers Are Liars
Another Recommended Book: All Marketers Are Liars, by Seth Godin (Penguin Portfolio, 2005).
Seth Godin, author of such classics as Permission Marketing, Purple Cow, and Unleashing the Idea Virus (and founder of the social networking site Squidoo), continues to display his chops as one of the freshest and most visionary marketing minds in the English-speaking part of the planet.
In this book, he looks deeply at the power of story in marketing–with some insights I haven’t seen elsewhere.
Why does wine actually taste better in a $20 glass than in a $1 glass? The wine is no different–but the story makes it feel different–and people buy the story (and the glass).
The trick, says Godin, is to tell a new story, often to a new audience. Look for a market segment that feels ignored, that its worldview isn’t being heard–and tell a story that reaches them. Don’t try to bang your head against the wall telling a modified familiar story to the same old familiar audience that’s already been buying from someone else. While your story should not contradict facts, the facts are much less relevant to the marketing than the narrative you weave around it.
Specific examples?
The rock band Wilco rejected the classic record-industry story that illegal music downloads are a destructive force. The band released its repertoire for free download and watched CD and concert ticket sales shoot through the roof.
Cereal maker General Mills responded to the Atkins low-carb diet craze of several years ago with a rapid switch to 100% whole grain for all its cereals–and was able to tell a story about health in a world where healthy foods had become relevant. Godin doesn’t mention this, but from a marketing/public perception point of view, that switch was relatively easy even for a giant conglomerate, because several of its most popular product lines (Cheerios, Wheaties, Total) had been telling a story about health for decades.
By contrast Interstate Bakeries, whose iconic brands like Wonder Bread and Hostess Twinkies were widely perceived as non-nutritive, was not able to be convincingly healthy in that market and went bankrupt. Which is especially interesting because Wonder has tried to tell a health story for over 50 years, with its “Helps build strong bodies 8 (later changed to 12) ways” tagline–but the product sure didn’t feel healthy, despite its added vitamins.
Yet Wonder is still trying to tell a health story to a skeptical world that has discovered in the meantime what real bread looks, tastes, and feels like. This is on the company’s website as of June 15, 2008:
Wonder has helped America build strong bodies for over 80 years. It provides essential vitamins and minerals, an important part of your family’s healthy diet. And today Wonder is more nutritious than ever before. Every slice is an excellent source of calcium and a good source of folic acid.
Back to Godin, speaking of health:
Marketers have a new kind of responsibility…If you make a fortune but end up killing people and needlessly draining our shared resources, that’s neither ethically nor commercially smart, is it? Nuclear weapons have killed a tiny fraction of the number of people that unethical marketing has…I refuse to accept that there’s a difference between a factory manager dumping sludge in the Hudson River (poisoning everyone downstream) and a marketing manager making up a story that ends up causing similar side effects.
Among many other examples, he comes down hard on food giant Nestle for telling a story in the 1970s that got mothers in desperately poor nations to switch from breastfeeding to infant formula, under conditions that made failure–and thus, dead babies–inevitable. In his words, there’s a difference between a harmless marketing fib that the consumer tells him/herself in order to believe the story, and an outright fraud with harmful consequences, and Nestle was guilty of the latter, until an international boycott made it hurt too much.
On a related note, Godin also points out the importance of making sure the customer experience delivers on the promise of your story. Cold Stone Creamery, the ice cream chain is one of many businesses he faults for breaking the promise:
Scoopers at Cold Stone Creamery occasionally break into song. They’ll sing for tips and they’ll sing about the joy of ice cream. At my neighborhood Cold Stone, though, they don’t sing. They sort of whine a funeral dirge. It’s obvious that someone ordered them to sing, and they don’t understand why and they certainly don’t care…They are in the business of telling a story. And the song and the smiles and the staff are a much bigger part of that than the ice cream…Soon the hordes will stop coming when they find that the experience leaves them hollow.
Final advice from Godin:
- Marketing must take responsibility to be authentic and have integrity (something I talk about at great length in my own book Principled Profit: Marketing that Puts People First)
- When people shift their pre-existing worldview, they’re ready to hear a story that reinforces the change
- Powerful stories can often be found at the junctions of apparent oxymorons like “socially conscious investing,” “adventure cruise line” or even “compassionate conservative”
