Storytelling is the interactive art of using words and actions to reveal the elements and images of a story while encouraging the listener’s imagination.

– National Storytelling Network

Marketing is a very broad discipline. Product marketers (what I do) are closely aligned with a product manager. We get the first reading of the story from our PMs, they help us understand what a product will do and how it should be positioned in the market. Product Marketers:

• Develop the messaging for the product.
• Perform market analysis to determine where to focus the storytelling efforts, so we get the story in front of people who want to hear a story that can solve their problems.
  Think about it:  if we can tell a story that makes people imagine their problems being solved by installing our product installed in their datacenter….that’s pretty powerful.
• Train internal folks on the product’s story, so that they can sell, market, or write training on the product.

Back to storytelling terminology. In fiction, “canon is the material accepted as part of the story in an individual … universe” (Wikipedia).  If we apply this to product marketing, the messaging we create is the canon. Product marketers know the market, the product, the competition….they develop and maintain the integrity of the canon.

We share the canon with our downstream audiences, and they write the scripts. Training takes it, and puts a technical twist on it, explaining how it’s possible for this story to be real. Think how things like the exhaust ports making the Death Star vulnerable were explained so we could believe that the Rebel forces actually had a chance.

PMMs also share the canon with campaign marketers. They take the message and run campaigns, webinars, etc to get people interested in the story. Little teasers, getting people interested enough to hear the entire story. Kind of like the opening of Episode I:

If we keep with the Star Wars theme, this is a story that has rabid fans. They imagine themselves in the story so much that they literally become part of it by expanding it with fan fiction, pictures, cosplay…for example this post from a Death Star architect on that vulnerable exhaust port. For PMMs, if we see our customers blogging about how they use our products in real life, especially if they are true to the canon, we have found our rabid fans that grow our story’s universe.

The thing I’m still struggling with is measurement. As I mentioned in a previous post, you cannot measure the true impact of story telling by  just using quantitative metrics, we need to develop a qualitative way to measure these. Is anyone doing that sort of measurement yet?

Also, I need to give my daughter credit for the blog post title.