If You Tell The Whole Story You Tell No Story

There are many components to successful marketing.  There are many skills required.  The one that gets the least attention and is often the least understood is storytelling.  Marketing, among other things, is the act of storytelling.  Big powerful brands find ways to tell big powerful stories.  Marginal brands tell marginal stories.
What's the difference between the two?  A couple of things:

• Powerful stories talk to their audience as whole and complete humans. They speak to the logical and the emotional.
• Powerful stories don't tell the whole story.  They leave space for imagination, passion and most importantly participation.  

Errors in storytelling happen at both ends of the spectrum.  Some marketing campaigns rely completely on only communicating to the emotional and leave so many holes in the story that the audience dies off due to a lack of relevance.  Other marketing campaigns follow the belief that facts and information are what people want.  I'm sure they get this feedback when they conduct focus groups...which are hardly an accurate representation of how people truly behave.  (I think focus groups are a very accurate representation of focus group behavior.)
Telling your whole story in a detailed and completely logical fashion quite simply takes all the magic out of your message.  There is no moment of discovery for the audience and therefore no "Wow" moment.
By telling the whole story you tell no story.
In the age of social media, the need to allow your audience a "moment of discovery" is even more important than ever.  They desire the ability to explore and discover elements of your story and then they want to pass their discovery along to others.
Without question, the ability to leave your story with just the right amount of "unfinishedness" is hard.  But it's what makes good stories.  And, we must all strive to be better at it.  Unfinishedness is what makes this photograph tell a story worth exploring.

And, it is the things this MAGICAL spot doesn't say that makes it such an engaging commercial.

The Value Of Not Knowing

Are you a forest person or a tree person? Now, your immediate reaction might be "I beg your pardon?", but all organizations are made of tree people and forest people.  Tree people are the folks who really know your products inside and out.  They know the spec sheets and they know how many grams and gigahertz go into making a widget.  Tree people also know, in great detail, how your company works.  They know how the CEO thinks and what type of idea can get approval and which ones can't.
These people can see and catalogue every tree in the forest that your company exists in.  And, that's not a bad thing.  You need them.  But they can't see the forest because they are always looking at the trees.
Acknowledging that most organizations have an abundance of tree people, I think marketing should be populated with forest people.  Forest people can view things with a broader perspective and see how the whole forest works because they don't know much about individual trees.  In other words they don't really know how many grams or gigahertz are in your products and they probably don't care.  And that is a good thing, because your customers probably don't know or care either.  What forest people do care about is how to make your customers care.
Seeing the forest instead of just trees means taking the same perspective as your customer - "I don't know, I don't care and unless you meet a need of mine I don't have to care".
There is tremendous value in not knowing.  Not knowing is the world customers live in and if you know too much you can never fully embrace the customer's point of view.
So, if you are a forest person, rejoice. Embrace not knowing everything because you know the most important thing...the perspective of the customer.

Your Defining Moment

Let's forget standard business terms such as vision, positioning and even the term brand.  Just for a moment.  What does your company do?  It seems like such a basic question but how that question is answered has everything to do with how successful you will be in future years.
If your answer revolves around the thing you build or doesn't include a need held by your customer, your days could be numbered.
A good example may be Yahoo.  They focused on building a central portal for content, but when central portals fell out of fashion due to Social Media, Yahoo could not adapt.  They might have, had they really acted like a company who creates information vehicles for digital audiences.  Instead they acted like a company who makes a central portal.
On the other side the equation is a company like Cuisinart.  You could say "they make pots and pans" but I seriously doubt they would say that is what they do.  Clearly their definition of what they do is broad enough and consumer focused enough to include everything from wine cellars to can openers.  I suspect they may say they help people enjoy the world of making and savoring cuisine...Cuisinart is an affordable luxury.  Anything for the kitchen or back deck, including recipes is part of what Cuisinart does.
Consider how you define what you do.  Are you like a buggy maker or a company who helps people experience more of life by finding ways to help them travel?  The former could improve buggies all they wanted - they are now extinct.  The latter became automobile manufacturers.

THINGS TO LOOK OUT FOR WHEN DEFINING WHAT YOU DO:
1.  Don't define what you do by a detailed description of what you make.
2.  Don't forget to include your customer's needs in your description of what you do.  Without meeting a customer need (that can alter and change) you are out of business.

It's that simple...and that hard.

The Love Of Labour

Labour Day Weekend.  Its a bit cliche to talk about work etc., but that is where my mind goes none the less.
A few weeks back I started a new blog called "ART UNDER US" .  It was a chance to show some of my photography and to dabble further in social media.  An experiment.  But it soon became a passion for me as I crafted my skills as an observer and sharpened the focus of what I wanted to say through photography.  It is labour and I love it.
Art Under Us quickly went from my discovery of wonderful manhole cover designs to attempting to create art through my vision of those designs, and then to challenging us all to "look differently at the things we never see".  The latter is the most important part of all.  It's the skill every marketer needs to forever be developing.  It's the ability to be "new" and turn "not knowing" into the most important point of view a company can have.  But like everything in life, it doesn't just happen.  It takes practice.
I'm actually toying with the idea of creating a workshop series where I help participants to:
A).  observe something unique yet overlooked in our world.
B).  find a special point of view for their observation
C).  craft a form of art that allows the participant to communicate their point of view

Looking differently at the things we never see is labour of love we all need to maintain.  Without it we lose our most important marketing skill - the ability to look from outside into our brands.
A recent submission to my blog is a perfect metaphor. Alan sat on his dock and rather than taking a standard lake picture that has been done a million times on every lake in the world, he noticed that which we overlook and then proceeded to create art and beauty. In the process he sharpened his observational eye.

While this is all metaphorical in nature, it is still the core labour all marketers must love doing.

The Elegance Of Steve Jobs

I'd really like to talk about something other than Steve Jobs this week, but its kind of the only thing everyone is talking about so, here goes...

I once read a book about elegance in design.  One theme stuck with me - the idea of how nature repeats patterns.  The veins in a leaf are the same pattern as a branch on a tree. The whole tree is really that same pattern as the branch repeated over and over...even down into its root system.  Repeating patterns is how nature works. It is what creates elegance.
Humans are part of nature and companies are made up of humans.  So it's "natural" that this pattern could show up in the world of business as well.  I've always thought Apple was a good example of this pattern and its one of the reasons they have elegance in what they do.
From what I've been told, Mr. Jobs may be difficult to work with etc., but he is also a singularly focused individual.  That singular focus repeats itself in the simplicity of Apple hardware design, user interface, retail store design and even product offerings - one choice of iPhone (for now). The sum of that repeated pattern is what creates Apple's elegance.  And, since the company is such a personality driven organization, the genesis of the pattern starts in Steve Jobs' mind.
The opposite therefore is also true.  Schizophrenic thought leadership leads to schizophrenic decision making which leads to schizophrenic product design, product offerings, retail presentation, etc., etc.
It is so simple yet so true.  And, that too is the elegance of nature at work.
So for me, the question about Apple's future is not about their ability to innovate.  The question is: can they continue the pattern that has led to their elegance now that the seed of that pattern has stepped aside?

Be Your Own Disruption

August 15-19th.  Wow, what a week.  Google enters the hardware business and HP exists.  And, there are rumors that BlackBerry will get into the music business in coming months.  I always knew it was hard to see into the future, but its getting just as hard to see the present.
In a previous blog entry I questioned if there actually is a tablet market or just a iPad market. "Is There Really A Tablet Market?"  Well, with HP's quick exist out of the tablet game the carcasses are starting to pile up pretty deep outside the walls of Fortress iPad.  With nine million iPads being purchased every quarter, the competition has put a scratch on the iPad's empire.  Now, with HP's exit out of the hardware business, perhaps there is validity in Steve Job's musings about the "post PC" era.
How did we get here?
The Harvard Business Review offers up some interesting thoughts: HP's Decade-Long Departure. It goes something like this - HP, and many other PC makers, were at the top of their game and started "consolidating" and "leveraging" which is what you do when you occupy the throne of status quo.  Meanwhile Apple was paying serious attention to "mobility".  Rather than creating off the shelf patchwork mobile products and leaning on the equity of its strong brand, Apple created a real complete solution.  Enter the iPod and enter the beginning of the end of the world as we knew it.  Rather than improving and maximizing the current category they disrupted and created a new space.
The best thought in the article is when it is suggested that right now you can be sure that Apple is contemplating the "Post iPhone" era.
We should all be contemplating the demise of our own products and brands.  The best hedge against the unpredictable future is to be your own disruption.  The disruption is coming...it might as well be you.
As Dwight D Eisenhower said, "Plans are worthless.  Planning is everything."

Looking Differently At The Things We Never See.

I've stated it before - one of the most important things a marketer should do is always look around and try and figure out "what's going on".  In fact it should be a natural ability.  Marketers are observers.
The other thing marketers need to be is brave.  Look at things differently.  Do things differently. And, openly embrace experimentation.  Without these traits it's difficult to create bold ideas and bold ideas is what we do...hopefully.  As Lee Clow said in a recent tweet,  "A passive message only invites people to pass you by".  
Recently I decided to exercise my inner observe, explore and experiment.  
In my recent travels I've had time on my hands and rather than looking up or forward like everyone else, I allowed myself to look down at artwork that most of us never have the time to see.  Manhole covers.  There are some brilliant designs below us.  Worthy of our attention.  I began photographing them in a way that might make art out of the art.  And now, I've created a new blog in an effort to experiment with the idea of creating a movement around something as insignificant as a manhole cover.  Art Under Us.
But this is what we do.  We look differently at the things most people never see.  
Visit Art Under Us.  Pass it on.  Go off and observe something small and amazing and submit your own photo.  
This is what we do.