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Articles filed in: Storytelling
Motivating People To Buy
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
Imagine you have taken your children on a day trip to the seaside. It’s the perfect day, the sun is shining, the waves are lapping the shore and you’re having a day that you’ll never forget. There is a new gelato shop across the street selling home made ices at $5 a scoop. Clearly as a day-tripper you are already motivated and probably have the ability to pay $20 for a family treat on a day out. There’s nothing to stop you crossing the street, but you don’t.
Buying is often mistakenly seen as an act—something done in the moment or in isolation. Buying is actually a behaviour that is something that’s done in response to either internal or external stimuli. The job of the marketer then is to encourage or induce that behaviour. Marketers mostly focus on trying to increase peoples’ motivation to buy. That’s what the creative directors and copywriters of the Mad Men era were employed to do. To make people want things.
As BJ Fogg points out in the Fogg Behaviour Model— behaviour is driven by three factors and motivation is just one of them. Motivation in isolation without the ability and trigger cannot change behaviour.
THE FOGG BEHAVIOUR MODEL
Back to the beach…..the guy who makes the amazing gelato opens the shop door at 11am.
He hopes that customers will be tempted inside by the heat of the midday sun. Thirty minutes later the tinny sound of ‘Greensleeves’ playing in the distance, signals the arrival of the Mr Whippy van on the street corner. Suddenly children who were happily digging in the sand stop and ask for an ice cream. All along the beach a small, synchronized ripple of movement begins as people react, reaching for wallets and covering up with towels as they head over to line up at the ice cream van.
It isn’t necessarily the person with the best idea who wins, it’s the person with the greatest understanding about what matters to people and how that translates to an opportunity to serve and delight them.
Image by Sheree Kozel-La Ha.
Where A Sale Begins
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
The sale of the first GoPro camera didn’t begin when the customer walked through the retailer’s door. It didn’t even begin with the huddle of engineers in the tiny innovation department at the factory. The first sale began in the lineup, as the surfers waited to catch a wave.
A marketer’s story typically starts with her idea—with the thing she has to sell. But if you look at any business that has taken off, you will notice that there is a step before the creation of a remarkable product, which lies at the intersection of what the potential customer really wants and what the market doesn’t offer.
Sales and marketing are less about persuasion and more about understanding. The trick is to know who is in your lineup and what they care about.
It’s far easier to succeed at making things people want, than it is to make people want things.
Image by Steven Worster.
How Deep Does Your Story Go?
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
It seems like a step in the right direction when the giant multinational supermarket starts selling organic vegetables. But the story begins to unravel when the organic broccoli comes shirk-wrapped in cling film, on a polystyrene tray. The customer who the story is aimed at, feels the disconnect between what’s on the surface and the truth.
The best marketing is neither contrived nor created. It is not broadcast or hung on giant billboards for all to see. The best marketing is embedded, sensed and experienced in a dozen moments of truth, that make it resonate viscerally with the person it was designed to speak to.
Telling ‘the what’ is the easy part. Showing ‘the why’ is where the magic happens.
Image by Suzie’s Farm.
The New Story Of Value
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
Jen is a passionate entrepreneur who has been working on her project for over three years.
This project is Jen’s baby—she lives and breathes it. You know the feeling.
Jen was finally at the stage of trademarking her company internationally, and because she wanted to do things right she engaged a lawyer to file the application. As often happens when you are filing in multiple classes an adverse report was returned, meaning she might not be able to register the trademark in some of the classes without a appeal. The lawyer sent through a note which outlined Jen’s options, mostly copied and pasted from the GOV.UK response and recommendations (with one important and repeated addition).
She could proceed, appeal, limit the classes or withdraw her application. The email reminded her repeatedly that any decision and next steps would “incur further legal costs”.
The result was a very deflated Jen, not because of what the email said, but because of how it was communicated.
What if the lawyer had picked up the phone and walked Jen through everything? What if she had explained the possibilities to Jen without using jargon or putting the issue of fees front and centre?
In a world where information is freely available, when domain knowledge becomes less scarce and the cost of doing business with anyone, anywhere becomes cheaper and cheaper, all of the value we provide will be in the humanity with which we do business. The ability to walk in our customers’ shoes, to feel what they feel and then to respond in the way we’d like to be treated, is what matters now and into the future.
Yes, the law is law and legal professionals are obliged to dot the i’s and cross the t’s AND to be compensated for it. Every professional is—but not at the expense of humanity.
What Jen wants more than the facts, which she can get with two clicks of her trackpad, is empathy.
Image by Brook Novak.
10 Brand Storytelling Lessons In 2 Minutes
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
Take two minutes to watch this advert from IKEA. Those two minutes are guaranteed to change how you think about marketing your business. This video is more than just advertising designed to sell something—it’s a home run in brand storytelling.
Ten things IKEA did to make their story great
1. Understood their customer’s worldview.
They have clearly asked and answered this question a thousand times.
“Why do/will people shop at IKEA?”
2. Made the customer the hero.
The product always plays the supporting role. Always.
3. Started with the customer’s story.
Most marketing tells the story of the product or service. It screams… “we need to shift more stuff”.
This story whispers….”look what you could become”.
4. Changed how the customer felt and acted in the presence of their product.
His belief about what’s possible for him changes. The same story resonates with a college student who is kitting out her first home with flat-pack furniture and expectant parents furnishing a nursery.
5. Understood what they are really selling.
It’s not chairs or bookcases.
6. Helped us to see reflections of ourselves in the hero.
His story is our story. We are all on a quest to be the better versions of ourselves.
7. Tapped into our emotions, creating a visceral connection with the brand.
There is not a fact in sight—no product name, price, store location. Nothing.
8. Created advertising that aligns with the company’s vision and brand personality.
Did the advert make you feel good?
9. Backed up the story with the experience delivered in-store and across all touchpoints with the brand.
Consistency is key.
10. Gave potential customers something to believe in.
Helping us not just to buy products, but to buy into the brand story.
It’s so much easier to adopt default thinking and lead by telling people what we do—which is why most businesses do it. But you are not most businesses.
Your customers are waiting for you to give them something to believe in and to take them where they want to go.
Image by Linda.
The Battle For Your Customer’s Mind
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
You have no doubt seen the adverts for the Microsoft Surface Pro3….the tablet that’s a laptop.
Microsoft goes ‘head to head’ with Apple again in this campaign and that’s the problem.
Once you start asking the competition’s customers to rationalise choosing your product over theirs, you’ve misunderstood why people buy. Time and again advertising tries to convince rather than move us, to give us reasons to choose rather than a desire to belong.
Notice how the Mac owner in the advert keeps referring to “my Mac” while Surface dude goes on about the device having a this and a that. Deep down even Microsoft’s marketing department understands the Apple advantage, the sense of connection with the product and belonging to the brand that Mac users have. How do you out-rationalise that?
We buy with our hearts not with our heads. From a cup of coffee to a penthouse suite, what’s more important than what the product does, is how it makes us feel.
The products that we feel an emotional connection to, the services we recommend to friends and the brands that make us feel better for having experienced them have one thing in common. They feel like they are beyond compare.
The answer to increasing sales isn’t to work harder to convince people of your advantages, it’s to help them to understand who they could become in the presence of your product.
Image by Ed Yourdon.
The Story Behind Your Metrics
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
Lines out the door. An email list that is growing at breakneck speed. Dozens of five star reviews on Yelp. More users, subscribers or members all adding to the value of your platform.
These are the stuff entrepreneurial dreams are made of.
Measuring growth and how it happens feels important. But ‘more’ isn’t the only metric of a good business, and it’s not the only thing that defines success.
There is usually a way to find data that supports a worldview and nobody is immune to using data to confirm previously held assumptions. Qualitative data measures the things that align with the values we care about, those we want our employees to embrace and our customers to sense. When we measure in this way we take into account the story behind the data. The number of meals sent back to the kitchen, staff retention, customer referrals and on and on.
Questions that will set you on the path to measuring what matters
1. How do you track how business is doing? Make a list of everything you measure.
2. Which numbers do you want to go up? Why?
3. Which numbers need to go down? Why?
4. Why are each of these particular metrics important? Create a rationale for each one.
5. What story do the numbers tell you about how your customers and colleagues feel?
6. What story do you want them to tell?
It’s tempting to want to scale, that’s what businesses do after all. As you grow it’s equally important to understand what metrics are sacred and why they matter.
Image by Gwenael Piaser.
What’s Your Customer’s Narrative?
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
Why do thousands of people line up outside department stores waiting for the doors to open on Boxing Day? The stock is the same as it was two days before, after all— what’s changed is the story the buyer gets to tell himself.
You are in the story selling business, as much as you are in the product selling business.
We all are, no matter how much we resist admitting it.
It’s as important to understand your customer’s narrative, as it is to communicate your advantages.
Start here.
Who exactly do you want your story to matter to, could you pick him out in a crowd?
What story are you asking him to believe about your product?
What actions are you taking to make that story resonate with him?
The product is always just part of the story.
Image by Anthony Abbott.
6 Brand Storytelling Lessons From Santa Claus
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
I will never forget the day that the illusion of Santa was destroyed for my children. We were at a local tourist attraction in the UK during school holidays, a visit to Santa was included in the ticket.
We joined the queue just after 1pm to discover that Santa had gone to lunch and would be back in thirty minutes. The boys waited patiently, the older ones wondering how Santa made it through a whole night of delivering presents around the world on Christmas Eve without stopping for dinner. Minutes before he was due back on duty a door to the side of Santa’s grotto opened and one of the elves slipped out leaving it ajar and Santa in full view. There sat the very slim, thirty year old man himself, complete with jet black hair and two dimensional cotton wool beard pulled down around his neck slurping from a pot of two minute noodles. The magic shattered on the spot like a delicate bauble.
6 Brand Storytelling Lessons From Santa Claus
1. Be consistent.
2. Listen to your customers.
3. Keep your promises.
4. Change how people feel, before trying to change what they think and do.
5. Don’t aim to matter to everyone.
6. Give the right people something to believe in.
Happy holidays!
Image by John Niedermeyer.
Who Will This Matter To?
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
Conventional innovation and marketing wisdom reminds us not to come up with good ideas for products or services to sell, but to solve problems instead. People need to eat, but don’t have time to cook, so open a cafe or design a new food processor with an extra chopping function. The result is six ‘me too’ cafes clustered in the same area, and a dozen food processors that don’t help people to do anything more than the last one did—all competing to solve what the business owner believes is the problem.
Behind every problem is the story of the person with that problem, which is more nuanced than the problem itself. Great solutions address specific parts of a problem that a particular person has. And so meaningful products and services not only work, they make customers feel understood.
Opening the doors or making the motor work is the easy part.
The hard part is understanding who is going to care that you did it.
Image by Stacy Anderson.