People don’t respond as well to data as they do to stories, it’s been shown.
Take powerful data, put it into a story that creates an emotional response, and you’ll find that it has much more impact. That’s why companies prefer to have their products actually be part of the storyline in successful TV shows–going well beyond mere product placement. Take the top-rated sitcom Modern Family, in which an entire episode was built around the dad character, Phil, desiring an iPad for his birthday. The show aired 2 days before the iPad’s real-world release. The viewers all related to Phil’s pursuit of the uber-cool iPad, which surely became a contributing factor in the iPad becoming the “I’ve-got-to-have-it” product of the year. The company paid nothing and Apple got a very healthy amount of bites.
Note to Apple: Send Judy Carter an iPad and she’ll work you into her life story.
Stories are a powerful tool for marketing your products. And you need not be Apple to use them. As a motivational speaker, my Back of the Room (BOR) sales exploded when, rather than simply announcing that I would be SELLING my book, I told a STORY about my book.
Marketing Through Storytelling
Basic Story Structure is this — a hero starts with a MESS and ends in SUCCESS. It may not be the success he or she had in mind, but in all effective stories, our hero learns something and benefits.
The story of my first book, Stand-Up Comedy: The Book starts with how I lost my way after my mom died. I quit working comedy clubs and wrote a book on how to do stand-up. It was widely read – by 59 book agents, all of whom rejected it. The story got more miserable as I made one last attempt to get a role on a sitcom and found out at the airport that the flight I’d booked to get to the audition had been cancelled. Watching a long line of angry people mouthing off at the United Airlines agent, I made a choice to express compassion and appreciation. As I say in my speech on “Laughing Your Way out of Stress”:
“No one can MAKE you angry. Someone can MAKE you a Daiquiri. Someone can MAKE you pregnant… in that order. But, no one can MAKE you angry. You can MAKE a humor choice.”
Because I connected with the gate attendant and gave him the only laugh he probably had that day, he put me in First Class. As I was unfolding my linen napkin, I found out I was sitting next to a literary agent, one of the few who HADN’T rejected me. She offered to read my book. Random House liked it. So did Oprah. The rest is history. The sitcom I never auditioned for was Go Bananas. It didn’t go anywhere, but my career did. I became a best-selling author with a speaking career.
That’s when I hold up my book, and now it’s no longer just a book, but a success story that they want to be a part of.
What is the STORY of your book, your song, your last job? Get a handle on your story and make yourself memorable! Sorry, you can’t use the Apple logo; you’ll have to get your own.
Pipeliner CRM visually and intuitively keeps track of which stories to tell which prospects and customers. Get your free trial of Pipeliner CRM now.
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