Would You Like to Hear a Story?
What follows is based on (of all things) a recent horoscope from Jonathan Cainer. No, I’m not going all metaphysical in my old age, but Jonathan’s original post initiated an interesting view on the world of marketing.
Have you ever sat and told a child a bedtime story? If you have, no doubt you’ll be familiar with hearing little voices urge you to read the tale again and again.
The number of times you tell the tale is not the point, you can tell a child the same story over and again and every time the child will be transfixed by the tale because they have the uncanny ability to find something new in it every time they hear it.
I remember being told stories as a child I every time I heard the tale again, there’d be some new figment in my imagination, some point of interest or fun; some element of note with which to build some new aspect to imagine with.
The odd thing is, when it comes to repeated stories, adults tend to do the same thing. But unlike their younger versions, adults kid themselves that they are NOT finding new things and they do this by draping elements of the tale in intrigue and suspense, in meaning and message, or in its finest clothes, almost as it the tale were getting dressed for a night at the opera.
Adults do this because although they’re keen on the theory of some new thought, some new element or idea, the reality is that they much prefer that the thing in question reminds them of something known; some element of comfortable familiarity.
The point here is that this could be seen as dull.
In other people’s marketing, when you see or hear the same thing over and over again, even when it’s draped in a little intrigue, do you begin to think “I’ve heard this before”? If that’s the case, what do you think your clients hear when they read your message or when they read messages from other people in your market?
Could it be that your messages say the same thing about your business, service, or products without you realizing it? The point here is that when it comes to creating a new, bold, and fresh message, most business people cannot do it, they simply can’t express something new because to do so goes too much against the grain, it clashes too much with their view of the norm in their category.
While businesses want to stand out, they often feel that messages that stand out too much are more of a gamble.
Which is precisely the point! So the question you need to ask is this: as you paint the picture of your brave new world, are you going to be content with reinventing the same old thing over and over again? Or will you say something new and finally stand out?
Thanks for reading. Have a great week.
