Having a meaningful rather than demeaning conversation with your customers is the key to a successful brand, product or campaign. A meaningful conversation is relatable/relevant, it is engaging, and as marketers we must know our role in this conversation.
When we touched on disempowerment marketing last month we revealed the conversation with the end-user to sound something like this: “You do not fit in, but if you buy X, Y and Z you will. Trust me on this.” If we dissect this conversation, we see that these brand messages were not relatable, the engagement was pushed out on the consumer, and the brand assumed the role of the hero in this story.
It is these fatal flaws that have caused the demise of brands that utilize disempowerment marketing.
In Jonah Sachs new book, Winning The Story Wars, he shows the correlation between the hero’s journey and successful brand conversations..
In the hero’s journey an ordinary person is called to do something bigger than themselves. In order to accomplish this journey they will need encouragement, a mentor, and of course be connecting with some higher meaning of themselves.
The hero’s journey is a great analogy for the role we all play as promotional marketers especially when it comes to the conversations we are helping our clients have with their customers. We have to help our clients create a conversation that motivates people to answer to their call to adventure, to accept the hero’s journey that is bestowed upon them.
The engagement of the conversation is where the promotional product comes in. In the hero’s journey, the mentor gives guidance through a magical gift. This magical gift lends a hand to completing the journey. The “magical gifts” in our context are promotional products.
The third piece is potentially the most important. We need to understand our role in the story. Are we the narrator, the hero, the mentor? While many of us may think we are the hero, we are in fact the mentor. We are helping the soon-to-be hero by empowering them and educating them to realize the true potential they had within them all along.
