Marketing, as Peter Drucker observed, was one of the two
functions that alone made money for a business - all else was a cost.
Thus it is PDI - Pretty Damned Important! It's a shame, therefore, that
it only does - usually - half the job. True, that half it may do
spectacularly well, but polished fake diamonds with all the branding
collateral imaginable are still... only fake.
One of the most
important things a business needs to do to sustain profits and ensure
longevity is to create a compelling narrative about itself. The 'story' -
or narrative - is the diamond (or diamonds) that the organisation owns
and which reflects on its own being. Stories can clearly convey the
value proposition more effectively than any other mechanism; they
differentiate your product or service from the competition; they can
justify premium pricing; and finally stories heal organisations (and
individuals) where damage has been done.
But generally speaking
what marketing companies and internal marketing functions do is polish,
present and beautifully brand a 'false' diamond. A fake diamond sounds
like this: 'committed to excellence' or 'quality first' or 'being the
best' or 'we care for... ' You get the idea: cliché piled on cliché,
based on a cliché-d mission statement that sounds just about like
everybody else's mission statement. All false.
Real diamonds are
found deep underground; for 'ground' here read 'subconscious'. And when
they are found they don't look like diamonds - more like raw lumps of
coal. Knowing where the diamonds are and how to dig for them is what
most marketing companies don't do. Why? Because this is to enter the
deep world of ambiguity and uncertainty - it's not part of the MBA
course and it can't be done by ticking boxes or by having too systematic
a process in place. And it can take time.
On the other hand, get a
compelling story and the world - the customers - love you. Take Apple:
their story - demonstrated in many ways - is that they are a philosophy
company! They study the philosophy of aesthetics, and more particularly,
the beauty of technology. Making profits is a by-product of their
obsession with this beauty.
(As a sidebar, incidentally, imagining
that making a profit is the primary purpose of a business is part of
the cliché-d thinking that also militates against digging for real
diamonds, and which leads to superficial, short-lived businesses that
add little value.)
Thus, finding and extracting diamonds -
stories/narratives - should be a primary function of marketing, since if
it isn't they polish and present their client well, but alas with an
artificial lustre.
Remember, narrative may be regarded as a
primary act of mind - which means it involves thinking and feeling and
knowing - it will come from the whole being and will be self-validating.
This is a tall order. But I think such a narrative will pass five tests
which - in a mad world - I call SANER. So ask yourself these five
questions about your own stories.
First, is your story Sincere?
Does it come from the heart or is it merely manufactured in the head?
Put negatively, are you trying to be a clever-clogs? Stories that speak
from the heart are the ones that convince, persuade and ultimately lead
people to buy into your product or your proposition.
Second, is
your story Authentic? By which I mean, is it genuine, or is it, like the
diamonds we discussed earlier, fake? An authentic story has what JB
Phillips in another context called the 'ring of truth' about it and one
surprising aspect of this is that it often seems incredible; but the
very incredibleness of it testifies to its validity. As GK Chesterton
put it: "The difference between reality and fiction is that fiction has
to be credible".
Third, is your story Noteworthy? And this means
the opposite of trivial; but one point of clarification here might be:
do not confuse 'small' with 'trivial' - sometimes the smallest incidents
or effects can be hugely revealing in a story and add significantly to
it.
Fourth, is your story Experiential? Another way of saying this
might be: is it real, is it based on experience? The experiential
quality of a story means more and more people can identify with it and
identify with the mission. To my mind it is no accident that the
greatest and most popular of all the Greek myths that have come down to
is the one of Odysseus: he may not have been as great a hero as Herakles
and Theseus, who were all demi-gods in fact, but that means his story
is more human, more available to us, and so we identify with him. It is
no accident that everyone's journey is now termed an 'odyssey' after
that great and experiential (if in places legendary!) story.
Finally,
is your story Relevant? This is a key criteria for storytelling and it
depends on our understanding the audience for whom we are telling the
story. We may tell two very different stories, one for a business
audience and one for our family and friends; each may be perfect for
that audience, but completely inappropriate if told to the other
audience. For this we need to develop empathy with people and with the
'tribes' we wish to persuade.
In business, then, or in life, how
good are your stories and what do you need to do to find the real
diamonds? Rest assured: we all have diamonds, but very few get to polish
them to their true outstanding brightness.
Cross Currency Table
Gold Spot $/oz. and 100, 200 and 465 Day SMAs– September 2011 To Today
