How to make your audience care
Feelings do care about your facts
Have you ever heard that Coca Cola used to be made with cocaine?
Technically, both Coca Cola and cocaine were made with Coca leaves, so it wasn’t really drinkable cocaine. Also they stopped using actual Coca leaves in 1929.
Here we are 100+ years later though and people remember this fact. Why?
Facts are forgotten, stories are remembered
Psychologist Jerome Bruner is credited with saying, “facts are 20 times more likely to be remembered if they are part of a story.”
That’s an important fact, so to help you remember it here’s a story. Jerome Bruner was born blind in 1915 but had his vision restored through surgery at the age of two. He became a Psychologist, studied memory, and helped create the field of narrative psychology.
Good marketing is storytelling. It’s not just more compelling, it’s also more memorable. When someone starts looking for solutions to the problems you solve, you want to be the brand they remember.
That means telling more stories. Two formats I recommend using are:
Customer stories
If you get a chance to film a customer story, seize it. Start with their initial problem or pain points, explain the stakes (why the problem was important to solve), then transition into how your brand solved their problem.
Behind-the-scenes
On LinkedIn they call this “building in public.” Share the ups and downs that go on behind closed doors. This helps people connect to your brand.
Actually, it helps people connect to the people running your brand. B2B companies are often seen as these shadowy, faceless entities. Especially if you’re a SaaS company.
Behind the scenes content shows that you and your team are human, which makes you easier to root for.
In B2B marketing, features are important but forgettable.
Stories make customers care. They help viewers remember the facts.
Go tell some stories.
- Ademola
p.s. what topics should I explore in future editions of this newsletter to help you make buttloads of dough with video?
Hi Adem! As a toxicologist, I have to correct you, there was a small amount of cocaine in Coca Cola. And interestingly, they still use coca leaves, but the go through a process to de-cainize it. Here is a quote from, A Brief History of Cocaine: "The original Coca-Cola contained even less cocaine than Vin Mariani.
According to a formula held by the great-grandson of Frank Robinson, one
of Coca-Cola’s founders, 10 pounds of coca leaf was used to make 36 gallons
of syrup. Coca leaf from South America contains very little cocaine, probably
less than 0.5%, and not all of that can be extracted. So, Coca-Cola, in its
original form, would have contained about 22.5 mg of cocaine per gallon (10
Ibs = 4.5 kg; 0.5% x 4.5 kg = 22.5 mg), far less than the amount of cocaine
in Vin Mariani.
Such minute quantities would certainly not have been enough to produce
a detectable physiological response, and it is absurd to suggest that Coca-
Cola ever had addictive properties, or that its cocaine content was responsible
for its success. Coca-Cola was successful for the same reason that Vin Mariani
was successful: it was brilliantly promoted, and people liked drinking it."