Out telling stories and finding examples

After working with a company over the last couple of weeks to adjust their message in the marketplace, I continue to realize it is tough stuff no matter how many times I’ve done it.  Every engagement is a little different, but the story hurdle is present in just about every business.  I’ve typically been challenged by most clients to get their teams to understand that marketing is always about telling a story. Often it is a new story; most often it is a more simple story.

No matter what you are marketing, it represents some type of story which highlights a single theme or idea.  How to save money, how to improve your effectiveness, how to improve your quality of life – all them threads which position a product.  Thanks to ethos3 @ slideshare.net, I now have a pitch I can point people to that is engaging and an independent validation.  At least this covers the corporate capabilities part.

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: rockstar maverick)

One of the hardest things to do, as an independant contractor, is to convince the person with the check that some of their other stories are too complicated or least not connected.  Most of my clients have an inside-out view of the market and often suffer from the category killer disease (CKD).  CKD is when no matter what product category they are in, their revenues or what “rank” they have, their product is the best.  The reality is sometimes it comes down to that a product is the cheapest, the easiest to use, the highest quality or maybe actually the best. The trick is to connect these benefits to the story or single idea.

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2 Comments

  • Reply Val Workman February 23, 2009 at 10:10 am

    “The trick is to connect these benefits to the story or single idea.”

    I’m looking for marketing which consistently creates added social value.

    Marketing has always been the art of turning friends into customers and customers into friends, it is now the art of finding, befriending, and “activating” the like-minded for a common cause, for the common good, for profit.

    Think of it as “for-profit-activism”

    • Reply Jon Gatrell February 23, 2009 at 7:23 pm

      For profit activism…. hmmm… I prefer Capitalistic Marxism 😉

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