This book was a hard read because of the subject. We all have a story about the clothes we buy, the shoes we want, and the car we drive because of the way it makes us feel. There is a story. In this book, Seth Godin implies that storytelling is the new marketing. The consumers are now not interested In just the facts they want a story instead.
As a marketer, it’s now more important than ever to tell a great story for the idea to spread or become irrelevant. Marketing in essence is all about spreading of ideas, and stories are the best way to spread an idea. Marketers didn’t invent storytelling, they just perfected it.
Marketers aren’t liars they are just storytellers. It’s the consumers who are liars. Successful Marketers are just the providers of stories that consumers choose to believe.
Georg Riedel was a glass manufacturer from Austria. He sold a story where wine tastes better when served in the proper Riedel glass. According to Riedel’s website, it is the responsibility of a glass to convey the wine’s message in the best manner to the human senses. Wine tastes better in an expensive Riedel Glass.
The skepticism didn’t last long, though people don’t buy facts people buy the story and in this case; they didn’t.
When scientific tests were done, there was absolutely no difference. The Reason the story worked was people believed it should because they wanted to. Georg Riedel makes your wine taste better by telling you a story.
What a good Marketer does is tell you a story, a story that makes you want to make a purchase, because of the way it would make you feel.
The authenticity of the story will determine if it survives in the long run. Marketers now have an additional job of teaching customers why they need to try their product.
The money lies where you turn customers may or may not into a definite want. A worldview is what the customer believes in right now. It’s important to understand an audience’s worldview and go from there.
Tell a story that matches the customer’s worldview and reinforce it, but don’t try to change it. It is at the edges and not in the middle where you will find people with an unfulfilled worldview.
Marketing and advertising were virtually the same twenty years ago. Now Marketing equals storytelling.
We all have preconceived notions and superstitions. Will Sushi taste better if the chef is Japanese? Expectations are the engines of our perceptions.
“Organic Food is better,” Really?
Does Organic food really taste better than other food? The word Organic is a cheap way to satisfy the customer. Most of the money goes to Marketers and Processors, not the farmers who toil so hard to grow it.
It’s a complex lie we’ve told ourselves. What people want is a story, a lie they can tell themselves and their friends. Organic Food sells well because it makes people feel a certain way, not because of what the food actually does.
Storytelling works better when the story actually makes the product or service better. Authenticity is more important than getting noticed.
A Fibber is an honest liar like Georg Riedel. A Fraud is marketing with side effects. Frauds are inauthentic. Decades ago, Nestle contributed to the death of more than a million babies. They encouraged mothers to stop breastfeeding and start using their powdered Nestle formula.
Nestle’s powdered formula often got diluted by families who couldn’t afford to buy more formula, and sometimes they mixed dirty water in impoverished countries which resulted in many babies getting sick.
Never Tell stories to trick people into doing things they regret later. This is the ultimate marketing sin. Belief in the product must not hurt the consumer because if it does, you’ll run out of consumers and credibility far too soon.
Once a customer is fooled, he will never repeat your story to anybody else, so the best stories have to always be transparent and authentic.
All Marketers have to do today is tell a great story and get people to buy it. We can’t all tell stories, it has to be remarkable. A story worth making a remark about is a remarkable story. Only a remarkable, authentic story has a chance of spreading in today’s world.
