After reading The Nine Best Story Lines for Marketing, I knew I had to read Lois Kelly’s Beyond Buzz: The Next Generation of Word-of-Mouth Marketing. It didn’t disappoint.
Kelly suggests that to succeed with marketing in this millennium you need to “make meaning, not buzz.” Buzz lacks authenticity and truth. Meaning speaks to people’s need to understand and make sense of the world, then take action on that understanding and sense-making.
Making meaningful conversation isn’t easy. You need to tell stories but tell the truth at the same time. Stories encode meaning by highlighting the important and valuable details, by stringing together seemingly random events into cause-and-effect sequences, and by weaving wisdom out of facts. If you slavishly attend to truthfulness and accuracy, you have no meaning, because meaning distills what’s important from what’s true. But if you make meaning with too little regard for reality, you’re left with only fantasy or fairy tales.
Once you figure out what meaning you want to share, what then? Kelly offers bits of advice throughout the book, and these resonated with me as ways to go about sharing meaning:
- Have a point of view (or several)
- Give more advice
- Talk like you mean it
- Be brave
- Provoke conversation
None of those help you come up with the meaning though — the meaning is in your point (or points) of view.
3 Comments
My wife says: Tell the point. Then, when the listener asks you to elaborate, tell the story that illustrate the point.
The key is to get to the point immediately, so that the listener has the power to ask you whether they want you to elaborate. It also gets the point out of the way, so the story doesn’t have to rehash it.
She’s a Japanese-English interpreter/translator.
Hi Anne,
Thanks so much for the kind words! (And the slow cooker recipes on your other blog.)
Lois
This reminds me a bit of SG’s _All Marketers are Liars_, which I think is a fairly brilliant take on storytelling and persuasion. And also the great Joan Didion quote, “we tell ourselves stories in order to live.”
I have long believed that storytelling is the single thing (more than opposable thumbs, shared by opossums and koalas!) that makes us human beings and not another kind of critter.