Categories: Articles

What Makes Great Marketing… Great?

There are many words you can use to describe great Marketing.

Seth Godin asks brands to figure out their Purple Cow (or, to "be remarkable"). I’ve made the case (time and time again) for brands to be "interesting" and "relevant". Kevin Roberts asks brands to define themselves by creating Lovemarks (and with that comes "loyalty beyond reason"). In the end, it’s all about the stories that we tell (not about the channels we use or the content we create). And how authentic, real and connected those stories are to the people we’re trying to reach and engage with.

Marketing has always been about telling great stories. The problem is that telling great stories is not an easy thing to do.

The reason most Marketers struggle with telling great stories is because they have not spent enough time deconstructing what makes a great story. Ira Glass is here to help. Glass is a well-known radio personality with NPR. He is the producer and host of This American Life, and there is probably nobody more suited to explain the schematics behind brilliant storytelling than he is.

Watch this video: YouTube – Ira Glass On Storytelling #1.

Why is this not the first thing they show students studying Marketing 101?

(hat-tip Paul McEnany).

Mitch Joel

Mitch Joel lives at the intersection of technology, business transformation and consumer culture. He is the Executive Director of Next Era Institute, a strategic intelligence platform helping leaders understand the forces reshaping business, technology, culture and society. The Institute identifies which shifts matter, explores their wider significance and translates them into strategic direction and momentum. Mitch is also a globally recognized keynote speaker. He has delivered thousands of presentations across both B2B and B2C industries to organizations including Google, Walmart, LEGO, Shopify, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble and Unilever. Strategy Magazine has called him “one of North America’s leading visionaries.” Mitch built his career by working directly inside the waves of change that reshaped modern business. He founded and built a digital marketing agency that worked with some of the world’s largest brands and was later acquired by WPP, where he served as President of a firm operating in 25 countries with almost 3,000 employees. Mitch is the bestselling author of Six Pixels of Separation and CTRL ALT Delete, and the host of Thinking With Mitch Joel, one of the longest-running business podcasts in the world. His writing and commentary appear in outlets including Harvard Business Review, Fast Company and Inc. Magazine. He is a member of Dr. Marshall Goldsmith’s 100 Coaches and was named to the Thinkers50 Radar. Mitch also hosts Groove – The No Treble Podcast, documenting the oral history of electric bass players. Mitch is also Co-Founder of ThinkersOne, a platform that enables companies to bring personalized thought leadership from world-class experts into meetings, events and off-sites in focused 15-minute bursts.