By Leo Valiquette
“True trumps clever any day of the week … It’s far more important to tell a true story even if it’s not perfect in all the details than to make up a clever lie.”
Character actor and memoirist Stephen Tobolowsky spoke these words during a September 2012 interview with National Public Radio. MarketingProfs contributor Jay Pinkert quoted Tobolowsky last week in an article about the value of using honest customer stories to create truly powerful content marketing material.
I’ve written more than once about the power of endorsements willingly provided by those precious entities who validate your existence by giving you money for your product or service. I’ve also emphasized the value of truth and sincerity in advertising, where real people sharing their real stories is far more potent than some paid actor posing as a happy customer, working from a script that has been derived from a variety of customer experiences.
But that article by Pinkert and that quote from Tobolowsky got me thinking about something else, a discharge of clever verbiage that can distort, distend and otherwise bloat marketing copy until it has a poor chance of hooking its intended audience.
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By Leo Valiquette
Every Friday, we round up some of the best articles we’ve come across in the past week and share them with our readers. Front and centre this time around are MarketingProfs, Ventureburn, Search Engine Journal, Fast Company and Convince and Convert.
Make content marketing authentic: The case of customer stories
Although many see content marketing as just that — marketing — smart marketers know that what they’re delivering is a great story. At the heart of that is truth, education, and personality — however imperfect it all may be. Jay Pinkert talks about the power of the customer story.
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By Francis Moran
The chief technology officer of a company for which I occasionally do some work dug into his archives this past week and came up with a customer survey that was administered when this company was developing its first major product about 20 years ago. I regularly express concern that this company does an inadequate job of properly figuring out what its market really needs. As a result, it frequently falls into the trap of listening to a single prospect’s requirements and building products that ultimately prove to have a market of just one. So the CTO was pretty chuffed with his survey and was keen to show it to me and gain my affirmation that they had done the right thing.
Unfortunately, I had to burst his bubble.
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This is the next entry in our “Best of” series, in which we venture deep into the vault to replay blog opinion and insight that has withstood the test of time. Today’s post hails from February 2011. We welcome your feedback.
By Francis Moran
One day last week, I tweeted the message you see to the lower right because I was tickled by the email that came in. In my haste, however, I added a snappy hashtag and thereby made the same common mistake I often accuse marketers — even branding experts — of making.
The prospect who sent me that email remembered how I look. I will be the first to admit that a red — okay, rapidly greying — pony tail, full-but-tidy beard and what used to be a curly moustache do tend to set me apart from the average corporate consultant, even in the less-buttoned-down realm of marketing. Based on how I look, he was able to easily remember who I am.
He wasn’t, however, looking for a pony-tailed, bearded guy; he was, in fact, looking for a PR firm. And, because of whatever impression about my abilities as a PR guy that I had left with him during a past engagement, he immediately thought of me.
In that nutshell, then, you have the difference between branding and visual identity, something that, as I said at the opening, many marketers and not a few so-called branding experts often confuse.
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By Leo Valiquette
I recently worked on a client’s blog post that discussed how an IT project can easily stray far from its original problem statement as it moves through an RFP process and the creation of a statement of work to the point where it finally reaches the implementation stage. What seemed obvious at the outset sometimes gets lost in process and procedure and in the desire of any external vendor to protect its own interests.
Does this sound familiar?
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