Tag / all marketers are liars

by Nathan Coumbe

Stories sell

No one cares about the features of anything. What they want to know is how it helps them.

“What do these features do for me?”

A friend of mine was asking about the internet provider we use in our home. Naturally, I wanted to sell him on the service that we use because I think it’s the best.

So I told him, “You get up to one gig upload and download speeds.’

Then I thought about it for a second and realized this: most people don’t know what that means. More importantly, they don’t care. 

So I changed up my approach and told a story instead.

I told him that some of the projects I do each week for work have to be uploaded to Vimeo. “With our old Internet provider, I explained, “it would take me between 15 and 20 minutes to upload a single video. Now, with this new provider, it only takes me about 20 to 30 seconds to do the same thing.”

He was sold, right then and there.

Stories are how we humans make sense of the world. Stories are also what sells—anything and everything.

No matter what you’re trying to persuade someone to do, find a way to tell them a story about it.

by Nathan Coumbe

We Are All Liars

I was flipping through books in a bookstore the other day on an Artist Date. While there, I came across one by my favorite marketing teacher Seth Godin.

Seth boldly claims that all marketers are liars because their jobs are to tell stories. As I thought about it, I realized we’re all liars.

Stories are how humans make sense of the world. It’s been that way since we were sitting around campfires, boasting about the Mastodon we brought down on the plains.

Our stories are never accurate. Our memories are fleeting, piecemeal images we try to put together into coherent statements. It’s why you can ask multiple eyewitnesses what happened at the scene of an accident and get four versions of the same crash

This does not mean there are no true stories, no facts. It just means the stories we tell ourselves and others are never the whole truth.

Fish Stories

How many times have you heard the same fish story from a relative? Did the fish get bigger with every telling?

I remember as a child sitting in the living room with my older brothers, sides splitting from tales of their recent exploits and the ridiculous shenanigans they got up to.

And I remember feeling a sense of jealousy afterwards. “Why couldn’t I tell stories like that?” Stories that were as humorous, grandiose, and absolutely ridiculous.

One reason was I had not mastered telling stories (read: changing details ever so slightly to make the stories better). Another reason was I had not lived long enough to collect interesting stories.

Of course, as I got older and my contact with other strange characters in this world increased, I collected my own fair share of comedies. And now, each time I retell one, I find myself questioning the details.

Did that really happen? Did I add that tiny detail to make the story more cohesive? More enjoyable? Am I remembering it the way it really happened?

The answer, of course, is no. We never do.

We humans like stories, but the stories we tell ourselves change. They’re imprints of what actually happened, not what actually happened.

I guess that makes us all liars.

But it also makes story time much funnier.

Get more daily insights into the human condition. Subscribe below!