Ever since I moved from sales to Recruitment marketing to strategic marketing I keep getting asked, how is it different? In India a lot of sales professionals call themselves Marketing professionals and therefore you can guess the deep-rooted confusion.
What does Marketing do? Isn’t it sales that actually brings in the money? In an IT services company what does branding do, what does marketing do? Are sales responsible or is marketing responsible for business growth? These and many more questions, often asked are as old as probably the egg and chicken story (notice I put the egg before the chicken). These arguments and discussions will never end.
Here is what I say- in any business there are the marketing people and there are also people doing marketing! What is marketing then? Simply put Marketing is storytelling to a market in order to lock in your target and lock out your competition. The result of this should be that your sales person could carry the story to an individual customer and make an exchange of value.
More compelling your storytelling, better your results will be. The channels through which you tell your stories, the ingredients that form your story are nothing but your marketing channels and your marketing mix. Do you tell a story that your targets/customers want to hear or do you tell a story you have? The answer to that would be- both. Say what you have, say it in a manner that your target wants to hear and which clearly answers their basic question-what’s in it for me?
If your story does not answer that, then it will be all glitz and glamour with no substance. In my 3rd paragraph I mentioned that there are marketing people and there are also people who do marketing. Believing that marketing is the job of only the marketing team is a mistake. Yes, anybody can do marketing. It is after all an application of common sense. But then, if everybody started doing marketing work, then who would do their work? Does this mean we shouldn’t bother at all? The answer is NO. The onus of how a brand, a product or an organization is represented is the responsibility of every employee of the company. After all, our personal brand is impacted by the brand we work for and would we want our personal brand to suffer?
Coming back to storytelling. We all love storytelling. Whether we are giving a job interview (where we are selling our story of why we should be hired) or an advertisement campaign (where we are selling the story of why our customer must buy the product) or any other business activity, it is all about storytelling. How does impact us marketers? This only means that we have to stick to the basics of storytelling. Be it a presentation we make, a advertisement we create, an event we conduct, a brochure we distribute or a film we show we need to tell a story, tell it simply keeping in mind whether our story gives the listener what the listener wants. We need to tell it with passion, we need to tell it in the right places and of course, to the right people.
Take a look at the movies you enjoy. Why did you enjoy them? They were big budget films or because they have the best of actors and actress. You could say one of these many reasons or all of these. Basically it gave us what we want, it sold us a story we wanted to hear. It made us laugh, cry, fear, rejoice, rage or any or made us feel the many feelings we paid the ticket for.
Whether it is a product, a service or an offering unless what we say is consistent, effective and sounds like a good story, it just will not sell.
Should our story be different? Yes. Would you watch your favorite movie if it is the same as the 5 movies you watched prior to it?
Should our story be honest? Yes. If a movie promised you horror, thrill and many other things and then gave you nothing close to it, would you trust that filmmaker again? Unlikely
Does storytelling apply everywhere? Yes. Look around. Whether it is a recruitment message, an employer branding campaign, a product campaign they all have a story to tell. Does your resume tell a story about you that are likely to attract your potential employer or is it one in a pile of many? Everything from your visiting card, your email signature, your presentations and every other customer touch point is telling a story about you. Have you found your story yet?
Take a look at the best campaigns, the best marketing plans, the best presentations and here is one thing you will find common to all of them – they all had a story to tell, they told it consistently and they answered the basic question you had-“what’s in it for me?” If your customer did not choose you, means your customer bought somebody else’s story. Look at all your collateral, creative’s, content? Do they tell a story that reflects what you and what you can do for your customer or do they tell nothing at all?
While I make many attempts to ensure my storytelling works well whether at work or in life, the journey of learning is worth the price of failure. What’s your story?
Nice article Ved, quite a story to tell. My view (in addition) there is another angle to it…as in apart from trying to sell what you have and selling what the customer wants you to sell, there is, in a large way, people trying to sell insecurities among people and this kind of marketing seems to be part of all our lives. For eg. people trying to tell us the skies are unsafe, thereby ensuring we watch primetime news spots. Sometimes, much closer; wearing protective masks in public and being glued to what the status of the spread is.
It’s sad that this is the way of ife now, but that’s the reality. Storytelling is getting as real as it can get.