Tell Us Your Authentic Stories and Thrive

Seth Godin show how authentic stories hold the key to your marketing breakthroughs.

Sometimes you have no other option than to tell people just what they wanted to hear. This does not mean that you are a liar — deliberate or otherwise. Case in point is when you are job hunting. You quickly learn that experienced recruiters have knacks for seeing through the lies of prospective employees.

Experience has shown that, often, recruiters and interviewers want to hear from their prospects, stories that fit in with their perceptions even if those stories are doctored-truths, half truths or outright exaggerations. Woe awaits the naïve interviewee who believe that truthfulness alone will grant him a placement in his dream company. Truth is that even if your last boss is a jerk from the pits of hell, you dare not recount your past misfortunes before the panel of interviewers on the other side of the table.

In the book, All Marketers Are Liars — The Power of Telling Authentic Stories In A Low Trust World, author Seth Godin points out, “people can’t handle the truth.” But good marketing can improve the perception people have of your products, because “No one buys facts. They buy a story.” According to Seth, thriving marketers are authentic story tellers. Throughout the book, the author abounds with stories about how you can make your marketing (and sales) pitches resonate with your target customers.

It doesn’t matter if you are trying to persuade people to join your party, vote for your preferred party candidate, or sell yourself to a recruiter. All of us are marketers now.

Many of us blame our lack lustre performance on our intrinsic inability. from this book, you learn our failures are often because of our inability to tell authentic stories about what we are offering to our prospects. You come to realize the utility of your product is not what moves the customer to patronize you but the authentic story behind what you are offering.

Growth starts with better questions. Questions about storytelling, not about commodities.

Effective marketers are those who tell stories that their target audience can believe. This is because, contrary to assumptions, consumers are not always rational about things they buy. They depend on the stories marketers tell them.

How then do you tell these authentic stories? You start your story with the early adopters. These are the ones at the edges. By first tapping into and meeting the dissatisfaction of their worldviews, your stories stand a better chance of reaching to the masses at the centre. Why is this so? As the author explained, “The desire to do what the people we admire are doing is the glue that keeps our society together. This is the secret ingredient in every successful marketing venture as well.”

If a consumer figures something out or discovers it on her own, she’s a thousand times more likely to believe it than if it’s just something you claim.

Contrary to how the author titled the book, he vigorously expects marketers to tell authentic stories that will enable their customers and prospects to make correct choices. According to him, to shirk this responsibility under the guise of offering options and leaving consumers to decide for themselves amount to fraudulent cowardice.

Furthermore,

I’m not letting you off the hook by encouraging you to tell stories. In fact, stories only magnify the need to have something remarkable (and honest) to say. All the more is this so because, even though, you can fool some people once or twice, the key lesson of the new marketing is: once fooled, a person will never repeat your story to someone else.

Key Takeaways

1. Consumers are all different, but ultimately they all want the same outcome. They want to be promoted, to be popular, to be healthy, wealthy and wise. They also “want to be pleasantly surprised and honestly flattered.”
2. Your first goal as a marketer is to tell an authentic, believable story that can spread from person to person. Identifying segments that are more likely to embrace this process is the primary key to sales and market growth.
3. The words and images you used to tell a story are powerful tools. When those words or images conflict, you’ve created incongruous, self-contradictory marketing messages.
4. If what you’re doing really matters, don’t just tell me the facts. Take the time to tell a remarkable, consistent, authentic, believable story that resonates and a story that can become true.
5. Be authentic. Live the story. Making promises you can’t keep or selling for the short term instead of the long term is a lousy trade-off. You have a powerful tool — will you use it to make people’s lives better?

SOURCE

Copyright by ©Seth Godin, All Marketers Are Liars, Penguin Group, 2005

Thank you for reading my review. I am not into any affiliate marketing relationship with the author or publisher. Connect with me here and share your insights. You can also check out my other stories below.