• by Micheal P. Gumbert , Yesterday

Medtronic's Senior Paid Media Specialist writes, "As marketers, we spend a lot of time chasing technology, learning about platforms, or optimizing campaigns. Maybe we need to get back to basics, telling stories that engage audiences."

What do the best, and the worst, moments of our lives have in common with each other?  We tell stories during and about them. I can remember sitting in the living room of my best friend’s parents' living room in Atlanta crying. My friend Jamie, had survived combat only to pass away in his sleep back home in Georgia. The night before the funeral the pastor gathered us, his family and friends, to tell him stories about our friend. It was these stories that defined his life. Compare that to my wedding day where my best friend from high school as my Best Man and my wife’s best friend as her Matron of Honor also told stories about my wife and I and our relationship.

As people we tell stories, because stories help us to define who we are and explain where we have been and want to go. At the center of the beating heart of marketing is this, as marketers our most basic function and job is to tell a compelling story. That as marketers we tell stories goes to what marketing itself is and what its most basic function is, which is to find or create markets for the products and services that our organizations either make or offer. The biggest lie ever told in marketing is that there exists a product so good that it sells itself. There has NEVER been a product that required ZERO marketing in order to be sold, it needed some marketing to find its potential market. What we confuse is the really good products that needed very little marketing or the companies that have long histories of building and finding their markets so now they do not have to work as hard at it. Then of course, there is the fact that people often confuse and conflate marketing with advertising, advertising is only one part of our marketing efforts.

When I was still in the Army, when your unit was getting ready to deploy you did a training rotation at the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, California. At the end of my unit’s training rotation, I was part of the group that stayed behind and during that time I met a Special Forces officer. He asked a simple question that sticks with me to this day: what made Special Forces “special”? His answer was as simple as it was profound for this conversation, he told us that Special Forces soldiers understood that you could never be too good at the basics of being a soldier. As marketers we should pay heed to that statement. Right now, as marketers, we spend a lot of time chasing this technology, learning about that platform, or optimizing those campaigns. But maybe we need to get back to basics. Maybe we need to get back to telling stories, telling stories that engage our audiences that are made up of people.

At the end of it the platforms and channels are tools to help us do this basic job. They are not the job itself, and we should be examining our channels, platforms, and tools through this light. Do they help us tell good stories and then help us get those stories to the people we want them to hear them? In fact, as marketers that should be the standard we use for everything we do; does whatever we are doing at the moment serve that goal. If the answer is yes, it does help us tell a good story and deliver it to the people we want to hear it then we should double down on it. But if the answer is no then we should be asking if they are worth doing.

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