What's your name?
Marketing is nothing but storytelling. Therefore, effective marketing is nothing but telling believable stories.
Uncle Nearest 1820 is the name of a whiskey. By itself, this is completely unremarkable.
Now for context …
“Uncle Nearest” honors the slave who taught Jack Daniel to make whiskey
Nearest Green is ‘the godfather of Tennessee whiskey’ but few people know his name today. To the people in his hometown of Lynchburg, Tenn., Nathan Green was known as “Uncle Nearest.” He was the first African-American master distiller in the United States. He was also enslaved.
Hearing the backstory changed everything for me. Did someone say storytelling in marketing doesn’t matter?
Why Storytelling in Marketing Matters
The real power of storytelling is in how it impacts buyer psychology:
1: Stories are more memorable– 22 times more memorable than facts & figures alone.
2: They activate our brain’s visual cortex (Occipital Lobes). It’s impossible to hear the story about the fox and the sour grapes and not see a fox trying and failing to reach the grapes. The story is instantly converted into a visual narrative, and visual narratives embed more deeply in our brains.
3: Our brain waves start synchronizing with the storyteller as we’re digesting a story, says Uri Hasson, professor of psychology and neuroscience at Princeton University. We experience what the storyteller is experiencing.
Let’s now see how these 3 points relate to eCommerce.
How eCommerce Increased the Importance of Storytelling in Marketing
For hundreds of years, we bought stuff from a store local to our community. The store owner was the Google of his day, educating us on new products that promised to make our lives more convenient. We trusted this person because he was part of our community. Our kids went to the same school.
Then eCommerce came along and took something hyper-local but inefficient and made it efficient but global. It’s been transformative: The US alone has 1.8 million eCommerce sites according to etailinsights.
There is no questioning the overall good of eCommerce.
Here’s an example of the disruption eCommerce introduced:
Mycarpe.com makes creams for people with sweaty hands. There aren’t enough people in any local market for a product that solves the sweaty hands problem to be viable.
For every 10,000 people, there are maybe 20 willing to pay to solve this. That’s a 0.2% problem-to-solution relevance rate.
This math makes it impractical for a local store owner to go through the hassle of stocking it.
But, across the USA’s population radius of 329.5 million, 0.2% translates to 658,000 people who care enough to buy and continue paying for a solution like MyCarpe. That shift makes Mycarpe.com quite attractive as an eCommerce brand.
But online shopping has a disadvantage compared to offline buying, and it’s that it creates a barrier between the seller and the buyer. Humans have evolved to base trust on the ability to read facial cues. This is impossible to do online. And this makes it a challenge for both the buyer and the seller:
- Because there isn’t a human connection and the buyer can’t physically inspect the merchandise, they remain somewhat skeptical and that reduces the probability of them converting.
- In the absence of a human connection, the buyer defaults to focusing on price and this is a problem because it undervalues quality. To understand why see this article: Increase Conversions With Price Justification.
- A simple Google search leads to 50 companies vying for our attention:
Because the user has soooo many choices they tend to not care as much.
The only solution I know of– and I’ve been thinking about this for the last 13 years– is to differentiate yourself through storytelling in marketing. And the only path to constructing a story (a truthful story) is to build it using these 9 Truths About Online Shoppers.
Storytelling in Marketing Example
Significant Objects was a literary experiment devised by Rob Walker and Joshua Glenn where they purchased inexpensive objects for $1.25 apiece. They then constructed a fictitious story around the object and placed it on eBay for sale. Their total investment was $128.74 and the ‘experiment’ generated $3,612.51 in sales.
What this shows is the awesome power of storytelling. You may be thinking, “but these are made-up stories, I’m a serious eCommerce business”. In the next article, we’ll show how to construct a story-based sales pitch using nothing but facts: Marketing Ethics: Persuasion Vs Manipulation.