Let me say that a different way: Many things that are true are true because you believe them. The ideas here work because they are simple tools to understand what human beings do when they encounter you and your organization.
Once we move beyond the simple satisfaction of needs, we move into the complex satisfaction of wants. Which makes marketing the fascinating exercise it is.
This sort of storytelling used to work pretty well. There are small businesses that are so focused on what they do that they forget to take the time to describe the story of why they do it. And on and on. The irony is that I did a lousy job of telling a story about this book. The original jacket seemed to be about lying and seemed to imply that my readers marketers were bad people. A story was already told. I had failed. So, go tell a story.
All marketers are storytellers. Only the losers are liars. Make no mistake. This is not about tactics or spin or little things that might matter. This is a whole new way of doing business. We noticed things. We noticed that the sun rose every morning and we invented a story about Helios and his chariot.
People got sick and we made up stories about humors and bloodletting and we sent them to the barber to get well. Stories make it easier to understand the world. Stories are the only way we know to spread an idea. Everyone is a liar. We tell stories about products, services, friends, job seekers, the New York Yankees and sometimes even the weather. We tell stories to our spouses, our friends, our bosses, our employees and our customers. Most of all, we tell stories to ourselves.
Marketers are a special kind of liar. Marketers tell the stories, and consumers believe them. Some marketers do it well. Others are pretty bad at it. Sometimes the stories help people get more done, enjoy life more and even live longer. The reason all successful marketers tell stories is that consumers insist on it.
His company makes wine glasses and scotch glasses, whiskey glasses, espresso glasses and even water glasses. He and his staff fervently believe that there is a perfect and different shape for every beverage. I did. Robert Parker, Jr. I cannot emphasize enough what a difference they make. Tests done in Europe and the United States have shown that wine experts have no trouble discovering just how much better wine tastes in the correct glass. This makes sense, of course.
Taste is subjective. If you think the pancakes at the IHOP taste better, then they do. Because you want them to. He sells glasses to intelligent, well-off wine lovers who then proceed to enjoy their wine more than they did before. Marketing, apparently, makes wine taste better. Marketing, in the form of an expensive glass and the story that goes with it, has more impact on the taste of wine than oak casks or fancy corks or the rain in June. Georg Riedel makes your wine taste better by telling you a story.
Arthur sells real estate in my little town north of New York City. Anyone can tell you the specs of a house or talk to you about the taxes. Instead, Arthur does something very different. He takes you and your spouse for a drive. He tells you who lives in that house and what they do and how they found the house and the name of their dog and what their kids are up to and how much they paid.
Then, and only then, does Arthur show you a house. Bonnie Siegler and Emily Obermann tell stories too. And they claim their success is accidental. Their Web site is exactly one page long and some people think it has a typo on it. Nobody buys pure design from Number They buy the way the process makes them feel. So what do real estate, graphic design and wine glasses have in common? Not a lot. Not price point or frequency of purchase or advertising channels or even consumer sales.
The only thing they have in common is that no one buys facts. They buy a story. Why do consumers pay extra for eggs marketed as being antibiotic free—when all egg-laying chickens are raised without antibiotics, even the kind of chickens that lay cheap eggs? The facts are irrelevant. Today, of course, the rules are different. Plenty of people can make something cheaper than you can, and offering a product or service that is measurably better for the same money is a hard edge to sustain.
Of course, your product must really satisfy those wants, not just pretend to! In the coming pages, I will explain why people lie to themselves and how necessary stories are to deal with the deluge of information all consumers face every day. People believe stories because they are compelling. Consumers covet things that they believe will save them time or make them prettier or richer.
And consumers know their own hot buttons better than any marketer can. So the consumer tells herself a story, an involved tale that explains how this new purchase will surely answer her deepest needs. Of course not. She was visualizing her dramatically improved life once other people saw how cool she was.
She was embracing the idea that she was a grown-up, a professional who could buy a ridiculously priced pair of sneakers if she wanted to.
In other words, she was busy lying to herself, telling herself a story. She could have bought adequate footwear for a fraction of what the Pumas cost.
What the marketers sold her was a story, a story that made her feel special. Make no mistake—this was not an accident. Puma works hard to tell a story. A great story is true. When the Longaberger Corporation built its headquarters to look like a giant basket, it was living its obsession with the product—a key part of its story. Great stories make a promise.
They promise fun or money, safety or a shortcut. Phish offered its legions of fans a completely different concert experience. Phish made a promise, and even better, kept that promise.
Great stories are trusted. No one trusts anyone. Great stories are subtle. Great stories happen fast. They engage the consumer the moment the story clicks into place. First impressions are far more powerful than we give them credit for.
People decide if they like someone after just a sniff. Great stories are rarely aimed at everyone. Average people are good at ignoring you. If you need to water down your story to appeal to everyone, it will appeal to no one.
Runaway hits like the LiveStrong fund-raising bracelets take off because they match the worldview of a tiny audience—and then that tiny audience spreads the story.
If your art gallery carries the right artists but your staff is rejects from a used car lot, you lose. If your subdivision has lovely wooded grounds but ticky-tacky McMansions, you lose. And most of all, great stories agree with our world- view. The phone rings. I remind myself that even answering the phone puts my number on a list of names worth selling to someone else.
Still, I chance it. First I hear the telltale click of a dial-ahead computer-aided system passing me off to the next operator in line. Then I hear the unique bustle and background noise of a boiler room operation.
Before the operator even opens his mouth, the story is previewed, told and sold. For research purposes, I hang on instead of hanging up. The operator starts giving a prewritten speech. She explained that it had a special skin lotion she loved, and always eager to please, I volunteered to head a few blocks out of my way one day to pick some up.
The message was loud and clear: this is the work of a person, a unique individual, not a corporation. Only a person would be so persnickety about the formulas and the labels and the making everything just right. Detailed narratives about animal testing and motorcycle racing, about the founders and about their customers. And just like a little family business, they insisted on giving me samples of other products to take home—for free.
Apparently many others have had a similar experience. The story is compelling. Well, if worth is measured in the price charged compared to the cost of the raw ingredients, of course not. Not yet. These people embrace the brand and tell the story to their friends as well.
This brand is the work of an idiosyncratic individual, and lucky for him, his story meshed with the worldview of the people who shopped there. Nor was it Quaker or Alpen. The facts of the case are simple: most granola is loaded with sugar and saturated fats.
But consumers decided it was a healthy, hippy, new-wave, nutritious, back-to-nature snack, the sort of thing you took with you on hikes in the woods or ate for breakfast at a spa.
They launched all sorts of boxes and brands and ads—the expensive kind of marketing. Consumers believe stories. Without this belief, there is no marketing. A marketer can spend plenty on promoting a product, but unless consumers are actively engaged in believing the story, nothing happens.
As consumers, we lie to ourselves every day. We lie to ourselves about what we wear, where we live, how we vote and what we do at work. Successful marketers are just the providers of stories that consumers choose to believe. This is a book about the psychology of satisfaction.
I believe that people tell themselves stories and then work hard to make them true. A good story either from the marketer or from the customer herself is where genuine customer satisfaction comes from.
The best stories marketers tell turn out to be true. Go to a product development meeting at Nike or sit in on a recording session at Blue Note or spend some time with Pat Robertson—none of these marketers are sitting around scheming up new plans on how to deceive the public. And with that power comes responsibility. We anyone with the ability to tell a story—online, in print or to the people in our communities have the ability to change things more dramatically than ever before in history.
Marketers have the leverage to generate huge impact in less time—and with less money—than ever before. The question you have to ask yourself is this: what are you going to do with that power?
When you think of marketing, do you think of Wisk, Super Bowl commercials or perhaps an annoying yet catchy slogan? Do images of used-car salesmen pop into your head? Or worse, do you think of relentless spam and clueless telemarketers? Hundreds of thousands of Sudanese have died because of bad marketing. Religions thrive or fade away because of the marketing choices they make.
These issues are too important not to be marketed. Key fact: in pharmaceutical companies spent more on marketing and sales than they did on research and development. Companies made commodities— things that people needed. And the local barber cut hair. During the golden age, if you had enough money, you could buy a ton of television commercials and magazine ads and tell the story of your choice to each and every consumer.
But you had to market to all the consumers at once—there were only three channels, after all. You had sixty seconds to tell a simple story, and if you did a good job, you could create demand. It enabled companies with money to effortlessly create more money. Consumers would gladly pay extra for Tony the Tiger or would wait in line to see the new Chevrolet. To grow your company, all you had to do was create a commercial that generated demand—and then make something to sell. Businesses quickly recalibrated and fell in love with what they thought was marketing—using commercials to sell more stuff.
Marketers had a great run. Entire industries were born, stores were invented the supermarket just to sell the things that were now in demand because of commercials. The best brands told stories, but all products with decent ads made money. Then it all fell apart.
In a heartbeat, television commercials ceased to be the one-stop shop for all marketers. At the same time, though, marketing now is more powerful than it has ever been. This is a book about the new kind of marketing. Marketing is the story marketers tell to consumers, and then maybe, if the marketer has done a good job, the lie consumers tell themselves and their friends.
Those stories are no longer reserved for television commercials or junk mail. They are everywhere. Marketers can no longer use commercials to tell their stories. Instead they have to live them. Yes, marketing matters. It matters so much that we have an obligation to do it right. Marketing has become more powerful than it has ever been before. But still. Until you notice that the waitresses are actually men. Then everything changes. Not the bar, not the drinks, not the patrons.
What changes is the way you look at the place, because you know the trick—you know how they did it. Once you know the secret, every successful company will look different. We all tell stories, every day, and this book is about your story too. I want to show you what marketing is like when it works. Here are the steps that people go through when they encounter successful marketing. I have control over the conversation, over the airwaves, over your attention and over retailers.
You are not in charge of attention or the conversations or even the stories you tell. Until marketers of all stripes realize this, marketing will never come near its potential to change things.
There are more and more competitors blocking you from getting your voice heard, allowing you to increase your share of consumer attention. And there are more and more media alternatives keeping you from telling your story to the masses. As a result, people pick and choose. Everyone will not listen to everything.
Other people will ignore that part and instead focus on the way your logo makes them feel. And a third group will ignore all that and just look at the price. That John Kerry gets to decide what people will hear and learn about him, that Dell or Allstate or Mini or Maytag are somehow in control of everything that gets received by the ultimate consumer of the product. In the business-to-business marketing world and medicine too this conceit is even worse.
They are neither. Positioning by Jack Trout and Al Ries is one of the most important marketing books ever. They are fast, we are slow, and so on. Yes, you must choose a position. Or it will be chosen for you. Most learning about products and services and politicians goes on outside of existing paid marketing channels.
Every message changes the marketplace. Just as in evolutionary biology, the game is always changing. The evolutionary paradox called the curse of the Red Queen states that what worked yesterday is unlikely to work today.
The same thing occurs in our marketing wonderland. One competitor makes a change and suddenly the entire competitive landscape is different. Bending metal. Filling out forms. Creating spreadsheets.
Managers will tell you how well they manage the day-to-day crises that cross their desks. The old power curve is on the next page. Make good stuff for cheap, that was the motto. The unsung heroes were the factory foremen and the quality control guys. Very few organizations can now grow and thrive by creating a new kind of commodity and producing it cheaply.
I call this the Talerman curve after my friend Elizabeth. There are only two things that separate success from failure in most organizations today: 1. Invent stuff worth talking about. Make up great stories. This is urgent. Easier than ever to ensure quality and durability. It does. Instead the new way of marketing will separate winners from losers.
We all want to have enough money to buy whatever we want. We all want friends and fun and a clean world to enjoy them in. But if we all want the same thing, why do we take so many opposite tacks to get there? The great failure of marketing theory is its inability to explain variety. As a result, the whole thing feels like a crapshoot. The explanation for this variety lies in the worldview all consumers carry around.
If Jason got completely screwed the last time he bought a car from a used-car salesman, the worldview he has when visiting a dealership four years later is a little different than that of someone who is buying her third car in four years from the same place.
Different people, different worldviews. People can see the same data and make a totally different decision. Frames are elements of a story painted to leverage the worldview a consumer already has. Krispy Kreme did it with the phrase Hot Donuts. Hot means fresh and sensual and decadent. Today Krispy Kreme is losing money, shutting stores and facing government inquiries—all because of a change in worldview. Different world- views, different frames.
Nuts are something that squirrels need, the same way people need water and food. But once we start talking about more sophisticated products, things that people want instead of need, the discussion gets complicated.
Even extremely poor consumers in the developing world will prioritize their purchases to get what they want, often ignoring the opportunity to take what they need. But there is no monolith of want. But of course there is. In the presidential election, million people all had access to the same data. We all had the same look at the same two candidates.
Yet about half of us were sure that one guy was better and the other half disagreed. Can million people be wrong? Instead I believe that there are dozens or even hundreds of world- views among voters. These views were entrenched long before the campaigning even started. A vote is a statement about the voter, not the candidate. But what about changing a worldview? Sometimes a marketer is particularly fortunate and skillful and she actually causes a big chunk of the marketplace to change its worldview.
Steve Jobs did this with the Macintosh and then with the iPod. Shawn Fanning, founder of Napster, taught an entire generation of kids to believe that music is supposed to be free. We are not all the same. The mass market is dead. Instead we are faced with collections of individuals. We may all be created equal, but our worldviews are different. A worldview is not who you are.
A worldview is not forever. That worldview affects three things: 1. Bias: everyone carries around a list of grudges and wishes. When a new product or service appears on your horizon, those predispositions instantly color all the information that comes in.
Vernacular: consumers care just as much about how something is said as what is said. They care about the choice of media, the tone of voice, the words that are used—even the way things smell. Talk to me about inner values, quality and life. It does to me. Not just a potential customer, but a potential customer who is just like all the other potential customers out there. They bought the story, believed the lie and shared the story with anyone else who would listen to their word of mouth about teaching infants with videotapes.
The people who buy the Baby Einstein videos are complicit in the storytelling that the company does. You do it because your neighbors expect you to. When premium tea came to the United States, there appeared to be no market for it. It took brands like the Republic of Tea and Tazo to prove the experts wrong. They framed the tea story like the detailed stories so many people believe about wine and convinced a substantial portion of the tea and coffee markets to believe the story.
Not all ignored worldviews are markets in waiting. But there are countless groups that are so far being ignored, mainly because conventional wisdom has always ignored them.
Some of these groups may be small, but they can take your story and run with it. Frames go to the heart of what marketing is today.
File sharing is different from stealing. Firearm safety is different from banning handguns, but both phrases are used to advance political agendas. Frames are the words and images and interactions that reinforce a bias someone is already feeling. The media uses frames all the time when telling us stories.
Far from it. In European countries, this segment of the population is usually able to elect a few members to parliament. In the United States, though, this group of disaffected but slightly involved voters almost never gets the chance to elect the candidate of their choice as president.
Howard Dean saw this group as an opportunity. The word spread. It was an easy story to share. They swamped meetup. They raised money and mailed letters. The bet that Dean and his people were making was risky but straightforward. This is precisely the same chasm that Geoffrey Moore talks about in Crossing the Chasm: moving from the early adopters to the mass market. Dean failed. The story that wiped out Dean?
It was one word: unelectable. The story stopped spreading and stalled. Their current move against the devils in their business can help you understand why you need to be choosy in selecting where you tell your story. This audience relies on Best Buy for great service and a fun place to shop. The angels see the circular in the newspaper and dream about what to buy themselves as a treat.
The devils visit Web sites like SlickDeals. The cereal business had a great run. Then Atkins hit. The worldview of a big chunk of the audience changed, almost overnight. All of a sudden, the lies consumers told themselves about breakfast cereal and wholesomeness were under pressure. Jay Gouliard the guy who brought us Gogurt and his team at General Mills saw the change and decided to take action.
Less than one hundred days after they decided to change their story, every major cereal brand at General Mills was converted to percent whole grain. Second, the cereal still tastes great.
They told a story, we believed a lie and the word is spreading. Some choose to pay that attention to the stock market, making themselves aware of every tremor and ripple in the Dow. Others use that time to study Vogue, becoming experts in heels and hems. As a marketer, you can no longer force people to pay attention.
This is why permission marketing is so effective—you reach people who have a worldview that the messages you promise to send them are a valuable part of their lives.
But these are random interruptions, not the sort of predictable, scalable effects that marketers can depend on. BIAS My friend Lisa wrote a best seller a few years ago, and reading the reviews on Amazon is an astonishing experience. They talked about how poignant and well- written the book was. The other half? They gave it one star. How can one book generate such diametrically opposite points of view? All it did was give people a chance to express the biases they had before they even opened the book.
They like it, they embrace it and they want it to be reinforced. The vernacular is perfect for the story they intend to tell.
Elvis the early Elvis is on the stereo. The blackboards are hand-written and a guide dog in training is sitting under the table, softly whining. Why it matters how your sales force dresses and speaks. Committee creates a knee jerk, a quick decision about stasis and boredom. Task force at least for now has enough energy to it to allow us to listen to the rest of the sentence.
Same is true with nightclub. No one is going to book a bar mitzvah, no matter how edgy, at a nightclub. Early adopters are the techno geeks and nerds who go out and buy the latest gizmo. The mass market waits, sometimes for years, until a technology is much cheaper and totally proven.
The DVD followed this path. The mass market is in the center. Over and over, marketers focus at the center of every curve they encounter. In fact, more often than not, worldview affects the way we approach tiny issues. A worldview is the lens used to look at every decision a person is asked to make.
Instead, worldviews are clumpy. There are common memes that group strangers together. Doorbells in New Hampshire and health- food stores actually have a lot in common. Obviously, doorbell technology has been around a while, so these New Hampshire residents could have had a doorbell if they wanted one.
The reason that there are no doorbells? The vernacular of presentation ringing doorbells was not only a waste—it was actually counterproductive. So Tom told a story. A story about health food and responsible manufacturing and authenticity and voting with your toothbrush. By selling the toothpaste only through health-food stores, Tom was talking to a group of retailers and ultimately consumers that agreed with the way he framed his story and were happy to hear it. They crossed the chasm from health nuts to everyone else.
One user would tell a friend, then another. Not because it did anything for their teeth. Because it made them feel good. He: found a shared worldview; framed a story around that view; made it easy for the story to spread; created a new market, which he owns. The community of soccer moms in my town, for example, have similar but not identical biases about everything from politics to automobiles.
They share ideas and adjust their biases and choices based on what other members of the community do. It might be people who are open to messages about organic gasolines or plastics. You must look for it. You have no chance of successfully converting large numbers of people to your point of view if you try to do it directly. Call them thought leaders or bzzagents or sneezers or early adopters, this personality trait means that some consumers are worth far more than others to anyone interested in telling a story.
A lot of people want what everyone else is buying. In other words, people wait until they have a heart attack or get diabetes before they go on a diet. This is the most frustrating worldview a marketer can face. E-mail worked this way. Instead, these techniques work because they group together people with a similar worldview. When someone opts in to get e-mail from Dailycandy. What are you doing to reward people who have a worldview like this?
She seems a poor prospect for this product, but if you can tell the right story, the market is yours for the taking. So you design the story. The chips will be made from soy, not potatoes. But moms are still moms, and moms talk to each other. Your target moms will start serving the chips at birthday parties and sending them into school with lunches.
They might even mention how much their kids like the chips at the next neighborhood get-together. So the story spreads. Step 1: Every consumer has a worldview that affects the product you want to sell. That worldview alters the way they interpret everything you say and do. Frame your story in terms of that worldview, and it will be heard.
Sometimes we tell stories with packaging or with advertising or with words. Sometimes we tell a story with a smile, or with a sign in front of a building. The best marketing techniques, then, are the simple stories that are the most likely to break through, the most likely to be understood and the most likely to spread. Marketers win when they understand the common threads that all successful stories share. I call an idea that spreads an ideavirus.
If everyone who matters knows your idea, you win. Ideas are worthless without a place to live. An idea in a book or on a whiteboard has no impact. Just like a virus, an idea needs a host, a brain, to live in. A virus spreads through a community by jumping from host to host. We instantly make up a rule or a theory about how this thing came to occur. We predict what will happen next in our world. If our prediction is right, then the external surprises will cease and our brain can settle back in and start ignoring things again.
About sixty times as much. A garden-variety small frog might have a brain weighing as little as ten grams. A surprisingly large chunk of your brain is reserved for your ability to use your eyes and to take action on what you see. Yet frogs do this every day.
A frog surrounded by recently killed bugs will starve to death, unaware that there is plenty of nutrition just inches away. It watches only for changes in the environment. Humans use the same strategy far more often than we realize. Walk into your house and within a heartbeat you know if something has changed. We notice changes most of all. These users knew for certain that something was wrong because their iPods appeared to keep playing certain songs over and over. Instead of being random, it appeared to these users that the iPod was favoring some songs over others.
They gave the machine a personality. Whenever a particular song came up again, they made a mental note of it. See, it does love Fatboy Slim. There he is again. In November Diana Duyser posted a grilled cheese sandwich for sale on eBay. If you look at a photo of the sandwich in just the right way, your mind may play tricks on you and you will see the face of the Virgin Mary burned into the Wonder Bread.
One person asked me if it was a fake. A fake? A fake what? In the face of random behavior, people make up their own lies. We like to be able to guess and we want our guess to be right. No doubt you have strong opinions about all three. All three did great, heroic deeds, and all three did things that are embarrassing or that hurt the United States. Because of an event or even their physical appearance, you made an assumption about each of these men. Research shows that consumers of goods and services act in precisely the same way.
Switch the contents of a Coke can and a Pepsi can and then do a taste test. Odds are that people will prefer the brand long before they prefer the contents.
We drink the can, not the beverage. Bad news for the gate attendant at an airline that has an employee who just mistreated a passenger on the phone or at curbside. We get what we expect because what we get is just a story in our heads. We expect something to occur and our brains make it so.
Authenticity is more important than getting noticed. And the moment they notice something new, they start making guesses about what to expect next. Humans are incapable of properly sorting every fact presented to them. The amazing thing is how quickly these stories get invented. And yet looking at just a tiny piece of it, you had no trouble imagining the trunk, the tusks, the huge feet and even the odor of the elephant. Try this one: All you see is parts of three letters. But the typeface is enough to tell you at a glance what to expect inside the store.
You could probably identify the store blindfolded. The only chance our ancestors had to survive in the jungle was to make accurate split-second assessments.
If you needed a week or even a day to decide if another Neanderthal was friend or foe, you were pretty dead. We inherited the ability to make accurate snap judgments. As creatures with egos, though, we need to defend our decisions. Sixty people show up at a bar. The women are organized into a circle of tables, and the men rotate, sitting with each prospect for about six minutes. Of course it is, but it accurately mimics the way we actually make decisions. This is how embezzlers get to keep their jobs for so long.
In a heartbeat, people take in the way a person looks and talks and smells and stands and dresses. They examine packaging and pricing and uniforms and lighting and location and the Muzak in the background and instantly come to a conclusion. That data is ignored. The pieces of the story come together in an instant and the story is told. Remember, though, that the story that gets told is dependent on the worldview the consumer brings to the table.
Occasionally a product is so powerful it can change our worldview. You can spend a fortune on your advertising, but most people will ignore it. You can invest in your signage, your uniforms, your location, your pricing, your phone staff, the smell of your lobby—and virtually every prospect who interacts with you will walk away with no recollection at all of what just happened.
Snap judgments are incredibly powerful. They happen whether you want your prospects to make a quick judgment or not. One of the ways people support snap judgments is by telling other people. Authentic organizations and people are far more likely to discover that the story they wish to tell is heard and believed and repeated. On the other hand, if you can cover all the possible impressions and allow the consumer to make them into a coherent story, you win.
You can ignore that superstition or you can rail against it, but both strategies will cost you. The only solution? Powerful, authentic personal interaction is. In fact, in many cases, it actually costs more than it saves.
Why should people get so upset? People rebel because the facts about recycling are so opposed to the entrenched worldview. Recycling makes us feel good. It salves our guilty conscience. It makes us feel pure again. The recycling lie was subtle, multifaceted and deeply seated. Exactly the sort of story you need to tell if you want to build a brand that lasts. Step 3: Humans are able to make extremely sophisticated judgments in a fraction of a second.
I think you are. Every day all of us market. Some of us are really lousy at it, and worse, believe the reason for our failure is some sort of intrinsic inadequacy. What a weird business. People buy a car or a stove or a house after just a cursory run-through. Instead they rely on stories. Stories matter. Or it was recommended by a coworker. Or it was face out on the bookshelf and something about it caught your eye.
Or because the clerk glanced at you with awe and respect when you picked it up. You bought this book because of a story you were able to tell yourself. Even if the story is based on fact, all the stories people rely on to make decisions are blown out of proportion.
Pretty quickly, though, they discovered that if people could skip the ads, they would. Instead marketers can use the many dimensions of our media culture to tell more complex stories faster and more effectively than they ever could have using television commercials. So everyone is in the marketing department and a company either tells a story that people care about, or their story disappears. There was a lot of storytelling going on.
And Kerry failed to tell a story we wanted to believe. No, not a story in a speech, but living a story, consistently telling us the story in everything he did and said. Candidates sometimes want to manage response with a press release or a speech. Like him or not, George W. Bush did an extraordinary job of living the story of the strong, certain, infallible leader. Advice to the candidates for understand that half the voting population has a worldview that will cause a traditional partisan story to be ignored.
Same thing is true for John Ashcroft. He has no chance to tell his story to a large portion of the electorate—the worldview it holds about him has already been set. Conventional political wisdom says that either candidate, with a good enough organization and enough money, has a shot. When a person really needs something food, water, shelter he cares a great deal about the essence of the purchase.
But being really hungry in our society is fortunately pretty rare. Today the world is richer than it has ever been before. Even poor people in this country own a color television set. As a result, most everyone has what she needs with the exception of medicine. Alyssa is buying bottled water.
Thirst can be quenched for free anywhere in the United States. She buys bottled water because she wants it, not because she needs it. And the reason they buy stuff they want is because of the way it makes them feel. Even though Salesforce. Consumers care a lot about the buying process. They care a lot about packaging and peer approval and the out-of-the-box new product experience.
They care about the provenance of the item and the circumstances under which it was made. Sure, once something is purchased, people care about durability but they care far more about the way the staff at the company treats them when it breaks. Of course! He is excited to see a movie because the reviewer said it was good. Consumers are not so fashion conscious that all utility is irrelevant.
But is the utility of the product the main way people shape their desires? No way! And that, in two words, is why you need the ideas in this book. We buy what we want. Step 4: Stories let us lie to ourselves. And those lies satisfy our desires. The competition spends billions on advertising. The folks at Banquet decided to tell a story instead.
Word of mouth caused the book to eventually sell more than , copies over the course of 23 printings. There are only two core ideas of the book:. If Purple Cow argued that building products for word-of-mouth was now a valid marketing technique in the age of democratised media, then All Marketers Are Liars refines that approach with the caveat that the Purple Cows can only thrive with authentic execution across all functions of the company.
This is, I think, a pragmatic approach; if word of mouth is what makes a company succeed, then the reverse is also true — you only need one horrible experience for a negative story to smear your reputation forever. To colour this in, Godin asks us to consider Puma shoes. The feeling of the purchase is the product. The reason this works is because most products satisfy a want, not a need. If you live in scarcity, functionality matters.
Godin notes that this even applies to something like enterprise software. But bad lies also exist. Nestle was responsible for the death of more than a million babies, when they ran a marketing campaign in the developing world telling mothers that bottle-feeding milk formula was better than breast-feeding.
The difference between good and bad lies are in its authenticity. In other words, good lies make the product better when the consumer believes in it. Overpriced Puma sneakers and fancy Riedel wine glasses pass this bar. There are a large number of downstream implications from this idea. Thankfully, Godin gives us a framework for thinking about this. A worldview is the rules, values, beliefs and biases that an individual consumer has.
A frame is the element of the story that is used to leverage an existing worldview. Instead, they look for good frames to tap into existing ones.
People may change their minds, but only if the idea spreads to them in a compelling way which means, more often than not, word-of-mouth. Second, worldview composition may change over time. The same consumer might have a different worldview in a decade or two! Several alternatives abound: first, tell a different story to appeal to a subset of your demographic.
After all, people hold more than one worldview at a time. Godin tells the story of Trek bicycles, which sold a balance of comfort and speed in a market that historically prized speed. As baby boomer cyclists grew older, Trek started to become successful.
It had tapped into a twin desire for speed and comfort that came as cyclists aged, and won because of it. Because people make snap judgments and then refuse to change them, getting your first impressions right really matter for the success of your business.
He points out that you have no idea when the first impression might happen. It might be when the customer first walks into your store. But it could also happen when the customer makes their first purchase online. Or it could be when the customer first encounters a problem and calls customer service. Here we get to the heart of the book: the randomness of first impressions is why authenticity matters.
Godin admits this was the aspect of storytelling that he overlooked in Purple Cow. Remarkable products may get initial traction, yes, but large companies require authenticity in order for their stories to spread effectively.
The benefits are powerful. This identity becomes a competitive advantage. It takes a long while before Amazon loses their halo. Godin needs a better editor. This section clarifies the relationship between the utility of a product with the way it makes a person feel, which is something he had already mentioned in the earlier sections.
To wit:. Because authenticity matters, this implies that you need to believe the story you tell first , in order to build an organisation around the delivery of that story.
Georg Riedel and his company believes that their wine glasses make wine taste better. Their entire business is built around this belief, and consumers lap it up, even though scientifically conducted blind tests fail to show any real benefit. Here Godin admits that the best marketing can no longer be delivered by marketers alone. Marketing, storytelling, and positioning are all facets of the same thing, and this thing has to come from the top-down.
This is much, much harder than simply hiring a marketing person and paying them to run ads for you. All Marketers Are Liars deals with the reality of marketing in a world of information overload. I think the four most valuable ideas here are:. For better or worse, this is the marketing playbook that works today. I wonder how things would change tomorrow. Perhaps Cowen is right — marketing matters, but only for businesses, marketers, and politicians — the ones who benefit most from the spread of their ideas.
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