Marketing's New Rules
Successful Marketing Today
Marketing today is like a system of levers and pulleys, all supporting the same goals and objectives. It takes one team, operating from the same playbook. Sometimes, we have to create an entirely new playbook — with new skills and new organizations — that integrate disparate departments like advertising, public relations, direct response, social media and digital.
Long-standing brands and publishers are in a similar place. If they can’t find a way to use this new playbook, they’ll lose their audience to companies like Tesla and Buzzfeed — organizations that eagerly embrace new approaches.
To break down long-standing business and marketing silos, marketers today need a unifying principle — something that knits their channels and resources together in a orchestrated way.
That unifying principle is the use of narrative — it's the layer that can connect brand, marketing, and direct response in a way that consumers can identify and empathize with. Adding this layer unites new platforms, content providers and brand communications with relevant story themes that help motivate people toward business goals.
When enterprises use narratives to thread their efforts together, they’ll find that achieving their business objectives suddenly becomes easier. They’re able to look forward, predict the themes that will resonate and the channels in which they make the most sense. Perhaps most importantly, it’ll give them critical insight into the types of content they must create in order to see their businesses truly thrive.
The predictive capability that narrative brings with it will increase companies’ marketing effectiveness towards business goals. What’s more, it can save time and money by focusing creative, operational and financial resources on the right things.
Like many marketing departments, our world today is fragmented. For that reason, brand stories must be told in bite-sized chunks of digital content — shaping consumer opinions over time with the stories brands tell AND the stories others tell about them.
