Office Hours: B2B Storytelling: How to Make Your Brand Their Favorite

I’ve tried to remember when I first, you know, when I first stumbled upon Jay’s work, I think this was probably three or four probably four years ago at this point. And it was at a phase in my career where I was I had just taken the reins of running my then company’s podcast. This is at Growth Machine. We had the Growth Machine Marketing podcast. And someone told well, not someone. Several people told me, you need to follow Jay Acunzo’s work. He is the person to listen to for storytelling, for podcasting, for starting a new show, and actually doing it right. And from there, I was off to the races. I read a bunch of Jay’s essays, jaykunzo dot com has beautiful essays on creating content, creating content that is meaningful, and how to create shows around this meaningful content. And from there, that was when I learned all about premises, like just having an effective premise for a show. I learned about podcast positioning statements. I really just learned better frameworks for how to create content that is more meaningful, that resonates with people, that attracts the people you want to attract. And Jay is a notable showrunner. He’s launched shows for other brands like HubSpot, Help Scout. He runs his own show. Right now, his newest podcast is called How Stories Happen. SparkToro happens to be the launch sponsor. It’s a great show on just sort of breaking down existing stories. Like he he talks with other business owners, marketers, show hosts on their sort of trademark stories. And they talk through what goes into an effective story, what’s good about it, what’s notable. So I’m really excited for Jay to talk to us today about, you know, B2B storytelling, like storytelling from that business perspective. And so with that, please welcome our good friend, Jay Acunzo, x c x. Thank you. I appreciate that. So I’ve prepared to talk today. Please feel free to drop questions. If there’s not time at the end, then I can either stay long if Rand and Amanda give us permission to stick around live, or you can find me afterwards. So that’s my commitment to you all. You will get your questions answered anywhere you can reach me. Please do if needed. Alright. I wanna start with what seems like a silly question today for our efforts in b two b, but I promise you, if we look harder at it, reveals most of what we need to know to stand out online today. So the silly question that I’m gonna ask you sounds like this. What’s the best Disney film of all time? I actually would love some answers in the chat. If you could place them there now, that would be great. What is your answer to the question, what’s the best Disney film of all time? Alright. Great. Chana says, Coco, Wally, Inside Out, Toy Story three, Tangled. They’re coming in fast and furious here. Lion King by far, Finding Nemo, Lion King again, Aladdin, Bambi, Rand. I oh oh my god. It’s so it’s so fast. I can’t even keep up. Toy Story again. Coco again. Okay. Great. Wow. Alright. This is you always put together such a great group of people, you two, who communicate so well with each other and uplift each other. Oh my goodness, this is like no answer or response I’ve ever seen to this question. Finding Nemo, Cinderella, so hard to argue with any of these. I really appreciate your conversation in the chat, your participation around this question. It means a lot to me. Unfortunately, you’re all wrong. There is one correct and objectively so right answer to the question, and it’s a goofy movie. Oh my gosh. I love goofy movies. If you know, you know, Powerline, the pop star in the film, like, legit good music, and I am personally still waiting on the album. Let’s get going. My gosh. I too I did not have to go that hard, but it did, and I love it. Now this is this is a silly question to be asking. What’s the best Disney film of all time? Right? And it’s silly, not least of all, because you can’t really answer it, right? There is no objective or academic correct answer, no matter how much we would debate in the chat or on this talk that there is an objective right answer. There’s not. But we spend so much time in our work as marketers trying to project to others that we are the objective right pick, the academically sound correct answer for anything through our content or our overall brands with whatever products and services we sell. We are number one, we are the best, we are objectively the correct pick. We spend so much time trying to project that and be that, but that is not how people make choices about anything. We are not rational creatures. We’re subjective first, then we rationalize what we did later. And I think something very revealing just happened when I asked you this question. You didn’t answer it. I said, what’s the best Disney film of all time? How did you hear it? How did you respond to it? What’s my favorite? That, my friends, is how people make choices. And there’s nothing objective about that. We compete in this world full of content overload with not just the people in our space who sell competitive products or services, but with literally everybody making content today. That’s who we’re competing with to get enrolled into the finite number of hours in our audience’s days. So I’m a podcaster. How do I get on the finite list of podcasts that my listeners will enroll into their lives when I’m up against the biggest and the best names, not just in marketing or business, but everywhere? But the thing is to compete against the biggest and the best, you don’t need to be the biggest or the best, you need to be their favorite, their personal preferred pick for a specific purpose. There’s nothing objectively correct about that, no matter how much we wish there was. And to prove my point, I want you to think about your favorite things. Think of your favorite teams, restaurants, food, clothing items, anything. They’re like parts of our identity. So if I say that’s my favorite city, or that’s my favorite podcast, it’s like I’m telling you something about myself even more than those things. And there’s nothing academically number one or the best about them. Like my favorite shirt is not objectively the best made shirt that either exists or even that I own, but it is still my favorite. It feels irreplaceable to me, and that’s how we wanna feel to others, irreplaceable. My favorite sports team, the New York Knicks. And if you know anything about sports, you know that until very recently and for decades of my life, they were among the objective worst picks. But they got my time, attention, money, and love. Does that sound like rational decision making to you? No. But it is human decision making. And guess what your audience is full of. When your audience makes choices, they play favorites. So the actual question we have to ask, are you one of them? Don’t be the best. Be their favorite. Now most of the content we create actively undermines this objective because our shared enemy today is the commodity content we create, you know, written in comics, sans, and everything. It’s created from that place of being on the hamster wheel. Right? Maybe you’ve all heard that, the marketing hamster wheel. Maybe you’ve heard that phrase before. Maybe your left eye just started to twitch a little bit. Like, we want off that thing. So my questions today are, well, what if we could? What if we could get off it? What if more of our work worked? What if we could stop competing on volume and learn to compete on impact? Well, impact of any idea, of any content, is directly proportional to two traits, its value and its originality. And we can visualize how we’re doing in our work using this visual framework, the idea impact matrix. Let’s start with value. The least valuable content we can possibly create is merely informational. The most valuable is insightful. So informational is like, what is AI? The backstory of my favorite storyteller, Anthony Bourdain. Right? The six fastest growing brands in this industry. Insightful is why are they growing so quickly? What made that storyteller so gripping and inspiring? Information is like handing someone a map of North America. Here, you have it now. Insights, that’s like handing them a compass. You’re not creating a direction follower. You’re not just giving them facts. You’re giving them power. You’re empowering those people. You’ve created a navigator where they can waltz into any scenario, get their bearings, and figure it out. It is much more useful, for example, not knowing what works, but knowing why something works. That’s insightful. So frame it like this. Informational content updates people, but insightful content empowers them to increase the value of your content. If you wanna be more valuable as a brand or as a participant in their lives, make your work more insightful. Likewise, we can plot our originality on a spectrum from general to personal. Could anybody in your space have said it or done it that way? Or could it have only come from you or your team’s unique and personal perspective? So yeah, I can give you six tips, as Amanda was saying, to develop a stronger podcast, to tell a better, more effective story in B2B, or I can open that same piece by telling you a time about, I don’t know, back to Bourdain, when I was feeling disillusioned by marketing and I binged his show. And being storytellers, I think we under appreciate how much intentionality goes into work that inspires us. But I was like, wow, these people have a plan. They’re doing this to me intentionally, proactively. It’s a skill. And then I can give you my six tips for being a better storyteller, creating a better podcast. It’s the same underlying content, but one could only come from me. So think of it like this. AI is trained on internet content, but you are trained on the content of your life, and nobody else has access to that. What a gift! But we’re not really using it. Even though our personal perspectives are the biggest advantages we have, we rarely use it, especially in B2B. But why are you here trusting Amanda, trusting Rand, maybe trusting me? Because we gratuitously use our personal perspectives. And most marketers don’t, most content creators don’t, most of us get caught in the commodity cage where nothing we do works all that well, so we’re forced to create a lot of it. It is low value and low on originality. And we look like everybody else. We’re like crammed into this cage with eight thousand of our peers furiously running on the marketing hamster wheel. And we’re like, I’m gonna repurpose my content so hard right now. I’m gonna rank number one on search. I’m gonna go viral. Sir, this is a hamster wheel. You’re gonna go nowhere. And then, instead of escape that trap and try to solve our problems, we try to work harder in the place causing the problems. So for example, I’m gonna post on LinkedIn. LinkedIn’s very important to my business. Somehow it’s become the good place. Never thought I’d say that. LinkedIn was always like, how did this place happen? That was LinkedIn. It still kind of is, but the rest are like, woah, how did those places out? This is weird. We had really So okay, we care about LinkedIn more than ever before. We’re gonna post at the best possible time. Well, report says nine am. Great, I’m gonna post at nine am. Except guess what happens now that that’s out there? That is no longer the best time to post. But we don’t have time to do anything smarter than that because we also care about every other social network, like we’re thinking about Facebook, but then Facebook rebranded as Meta and we all panicked temporarily. Is that a new social network? No. It’s a holding company containing all their apps, like Instagram. So we’re on Instagram. Do you all remember when Snapchat was challenging Instagram? And it was kind of the same place in both apps, right? So we did the same thing in both places. Yeah, I guess that’s now kind of TikTok, right? It’s like same thing here, same thing there, same thing everywhere. I also have a podcast, but the podcast can’t just be audio anymore. Oh no, it has to be video. So I’m also gonna syndicate the video of that podcast over to YouTube, and I’m gonna create standalone videos, both on YouTube and on my website and on social media. And I’m gonna send everything I create through email, because email is such a defensible way to build our businesses and our brands. But why are there always experts out there saying email marketing is dead? That makes no sense to me, but I have time to spend with those words because along come all these trends, like everything has to go live now. All of sudden, Facebook Live and YouTube Live and Instagram Live and LinkedIn Live, and then along comes voice marketing. Remember that era? Voice marketing, no more logos, no more brands. It’s all about Amazon Alexa. Right? And then there’s, like, Web three and NFTs and AI and ChatGPT and OMG Alexa, please punch me in the face. This is our job? Are you kidding me? Oh my goodness. I called this talk playing favorites. I could have called it something else. Free the hamsters. That’s how we feel. Way too much as marketers. So let’s free some hamsters. Opposite the commodity cage, where nothing we’re doing works all that well, is the place we wanna be, the place where more of our work actually works. I call that place the field of favorites. And there’s not eight thousand competitors there. There’s, like, two other people. It’s Sunny. There’s butterflies and rainbows. A unicorn trots by, pulling a wagon full of refreshments served in golden cups. Is this marketer heaven? No. This is just what we thought the job was gonna be the whole time when we’re running free in the field of favorites. And the best part is what happens when people discover your work when you create from that place. They wander in off the Internet all haggard and disheveled, and they’re like, it’s terrible out there. All this content giving me advice is all the same. And then all these business podcasters started creating video clips from their podcast, and they had, like, gorgeous animated captions, but the video content itself said nothing useful at all. It’s terrible out there. Thank you for doing what you do. I needed this. Like, imagine if that’s how people responded to your work. A little less manic would be nice, but let’s be real. That’s kinda how I feel. Lurk looking for anything of value on the Internet today. We want that gratitude. We want that emotional bias in our favor. When you’re trapped in the commodity cage, you’re forced to compete on volume. But when you’re in the field of favorites, when more of your work is both valuable and original because it’s more insightful and more personal, you can compete on impact. Create as much or as little content as you want because more of it actually works. There’s a difference between volume and power, followers and influence, and we’re losing the script. So how do we do this? How do we make this change? I think it starts in a very simple place for all of us. I think we need to start telling more small stories with big meaning. Every day, everywhere we go. We’re surrounded by inspiration for that stuff, observations, conversations, memories, moments, anything we experience can be used to become more effective storytellers. We don’t need to launch a billion dollar company or be featured in the news media. It’s all around us every day. I think of it like this, AI and people both rely on LLMs as their foundations. AI has large language models, but people have little life moments. I know. I’m proud of me too. I like that line. That was a good one. I know. I know. I know it when I see it. We need to tell You know, don’t call out how awesome you are in the webinar. That’s just, no, that’s Listen. You had there’s no energy to virtual, so I need to I am a normal ten out of ten energy, so I’m a fifteen out of ten virtual. Look. The comments arguing for, my friend. You would The comments section is eleven out of ten. So That’s good. Oh, it is. I can’t keep up with the comments. I’ve been trying to screenshot them to share with you later. I can’t. I just can’t. No. Let’s keep it going. Oh, I love it. Oh, I love this. Alright. So so, like, how what does this look like? Right? Let me show you what this looks like when a communicator does this to build their business. Let me show you the story of Michelle Warner. Michelle is a business consultant and strategist who specializes in helping small business owners and entrepreneurs design better business models and marketing strategies. She’s a commodity. There’s a lot of people who do what she does. You can’t really compete on price, you can’t stand out all that easy. And her content reflected that commodity stance at first. Like this very old blog post I found, how to be intentional with your business connections. I talk a lot about how intentionally building your relationships and connections and keeping it a consistent priority, and anyone could say it this way. She was trapped in the commodity cage. And early on, she had the same kind of results. Not that effective, not that many results. And I think when our content isn’t yielding results, we all tend to have the same thought as marketers. When we want more results, we think, I gotta reach more people. Now, this never really made sense to me, because we can all reach some people now, five or five thousand. And when the people who already know us and trust us and like us give us signal that our work isn’t effective, why do we go, well, that’s interesting. I better put this in front of way more people. That makes no sense. We think we have a reach problem all the time when typically we have a resonance problem. Reach is how many see it, but resonance, that’s how much they care. If they don’t care, they don’t act. If they don’t act, we don’t see results. So it’s actually from resonance that we see results, not reach. When we want more results, don’t think reach more people. Think resonate deeper with them. To do so, combine those two key factors. Make your work more insightful, make your work more personal. And there are two things we need in our marketing to do so. First, more insightful stories. Everywhere we go in content and conversation, the little pockets of our marketing and the big moments and campaigns. And then a more personal message. Yes, our brand message, but also in a way that hits home emotionally to other people where they can declare that’s my favorite. Let’s start with more insightful stories. Michelle is telling beautifully insightful stories, and they have a lot of deep resonance with her audience. And it’s not because she’s doing commodity stuff like this anymore. Like, this was one of my favorite editions of her newsletter recently. Pop quiz. What’s the first thing you should do when you’re sitting on your couch late on a Saturday night and out of nowhere, a bat flies overhead? I don’t know, but I’d like to. Answer, not what I did. So what did I do? I googled, obviously. And she talks about how all the advice and strategies were mixed. It was overwhelming. There was too much. Sound like anything else we deal with? So she panicked, left out a window open, and slept at her friend’s house overnight. In the morning, she said the bat exited. Thank God. And she said she realized I’d fallen into my own trap, the trap she helps her clients avoid. I chased strategy, demanded immediate results instead of prioritizing sequence. I worried more about what to do instead of focusing on what order to do things, which is always the wrong choice, she asserts. You wanna think sequence over strategy, not strategy over sequence. Sequence first always. That is rather insightful. It’s a wonderful story arriving at an insight. And I asked her, Okay, how did this perform though, like for your business? And without hesitating, she goes, Oh, that was my best performing email in months. It was the same constraints as the ineffectual content before, but had a greater impact. She always writes a weekly newsletter. It’s always around five hundred words focused on practical teaching. And it’s always meant to connect with prospects and get them on a phone call with her. But it had a much greater impact compared to her average email in twenty twenty three, she saw a lift of six hundred percent in replies in that one instance, and a lift of one hundred and fifty percent in qualified leads compared to the average email sent. Leads who were passionate about what she was saying. I mean, in her responses, this woman in the front said thank you five times in six sentences. Thank you. How often are you getting thanked for your marketing? How often are you getting thanked for your content? Is it five times in six sentences? She even says the word resonant to describe Michelle. Now Michelle didn’t do anything radical. Again, same constraints, greater impact, but she did transform the order in which she said things. There’s a very simple storytelling structure we can use, and the third part of this is routinely missing, especially in b to b. The first is simple. This happened. It’s a personal memory or moment, your little life moment. The second, which made me realize some kind of idea sparked by that moment. And the third is this tipping point between talking about anything and talking about your thing. That’s the thing about this topic you wanna learn from me, this insight you now need from me. Let me give you a short example so you can see this in action, and then we’ll overlay it onto Michelle’s words. Let’s say that my brand existed to disseminate one message. You should try new things. I’m trying to help you take risks or innovate. You should try new things. Here’s a very commodified way to say that. In general, studies show that human beings are not actually afraid of the task in front of them, but rather the unknown. So now I’m kinda like the Nike slogan, right, my message, I’m just saying to you, just do it. It’s ineffectual, and worse, everybody can say it that way. But what if I said it to you slightly differently? What if I said, so for years I was afraid to make espresso in my kitchen. This is a totally true story. I have a beautiful machine just down the hall here. Embarrassing for me. I never made it for years. And I’m Italian. Can you not tell by the everything of me? I mean, gel, hands, volume, sweaty. Yeah. Some stereotypes in my case are true. But I would outsource it to my wife who’s not Italian. Babe, you making one for you? Can you make one for me, please? I would sit on my hands when she wasn’t home and not make my coffee. I would follow espresso influencers. I almost forked over three hundred bucks for a homemade espresso course. And then I decided to make it one time, and now make it every day. This happened, right? And that one time I made it really helped me realize, oh wow, I wasted a lot of time agonizing over doing that because turns out it wasn’t actually that hard and when you mess up you can clean it up pretty easily or your research becomes more effective because you have a very specific question you’re seeking to answer. That’s what it made me realize. Well, that’s the thing about trying new things. If, as studies suggest, what we fear is the unknown, not the task itself, rather than outsource, rather than agonize, rather than sit on your hands, just move faster to make the unknown known. Try it first. Just do it. I hope we can all agree that that is a more effective, more deeply resonant way of saying the exact same thing. It doesn’t require budget. It doesn’t require permission. It doesn’t require really any skill at all. It just requires you thinking through this order of operations. This happened, which made me realize, and that’s the thing about the topic I teach, the insight I’m giving you today. You can do this long form and short form. You can do this in content and conversation. It is not bound by any medium at all, merely your imagination. That’s what Michelle did. She applied that imagination and told a better story. This happened. A bat flew into her house out of nowhere. She panicked. She researched. It was terrible. She left. Then the next morning she realized she’d fallen into that same trap she helps her audience avoid. Well, that’s the thing about designing a sturdy business, the theme of her whole newsletter. You should think sequence over strategy, not strategy over sequence. Sequence first always. Look, all this content we create on the hamster wheel is nothing without connection. Most people you compete with are out there calling people to action. Call to action. What a terrible phrase. We should be able to whisper it, and they’ll act. Right? Most people are demanding that others care about their message. When you start using that’s the thing about, it prompts you to show them why they should. Why should they care? The second thing we need to resonate more deeply with our audience is a more personal brand message. Because when our words matter more to others, we need to beg for their attention less. Why should I care about you? Why should I care? What’s your brand message? How do you respond? To understand this, I wanna tell you the story of Amy Carrero. Or not really Amy. She’s an actress who voices a character on a Disney plus show, Elena of Avalor. Amanda, has Elena invaded your house yet? Because Elena has sort of taken over mine. Do you know a little bit? This this song mostly. My kid loves theme songs to all the shows, and so he likes this one a lot. Yeah. So I wanna apologize both to you and to anybody with kids who’s watching this because just saying the character’s name, you have the theme song in your head. Right? Elena. It’s it’s it’s catchy until you wanna kill yourself after that. So Elena of Avalor is just one of many shows that have become earworms for me, but it’s a new show. It’s not something I grew up with. And my daughter, who’s five, loves the character. So I thought, I’ll do some research. Who is this character? And I went to the Disney site, and the first thing you learn is that Elena’s story is universal. And I thought, wonderful. A role model, somebody relatable to my daughter. So what, pray tell, makes this character so universal? Elena is a young princess, okay, who was trapped for forty one years by an evil sorceress inside a magical amulet while her grandparents and sister were protected within a magical painting. You know, family stuff. I mean, who who hasn’t had if I had a nickel for every time that happened to my family. Now that she’s free, Elena must learn to rule as crown princess. That’s relatable? That’s universal? This is her house. I mean, I love my dog. You might have heard him earlier, but this is her pet. How in the world is she universal? Well, storytellers in the arts, in media, in journalism, basically everywhere but the business world understands something that allows them to connect with their audiences deeper than we do, because we work so tirelessly to forget this very simple lesson right here in marketing. It is not the topic or the action that makes something relatable. It is the lesson. That’s what Disney knows. The lesson Elena is learning is universal. How do you learn to be a good leader while learning how to be a good sister, good granddaughter, and a good friend? I wanna be a good leader. I also wanna be a good friend, husband, father, neighbor. Move over, sweetie. I’m watching Elena with you. A story is not relatable because of its emotional stakes. I mean, because of its topics or action. It is the emotional stakes itself. It is how somebody felt that makes it relatable. We get trapped doing the worst type of storytelling we can possibly do. It puts a ceiling on our power and our influence. I speak to this job title in b to b. I can only talk about that job title in my stories. That’s not true. You can talk about pretty much anything you want if you go further inward. It’s a paradox. The best storytellers connect deeper externally by turning deeper internally. They arrive at the emotional stakes and how something made them feel. I don’t know about you all. I really loved Ted Lasso. I’m pretty sure the people who made that weren’t like, hold on. A show about professional athletes, but our audience, they’re not professional athletes. We couldn’t possibly do this. Right? I didn’t care about soccer or football. I still kinda don’t, but I love stories of clinging tight to your values as though as life starts lifeing. Right? So I love that show. I don’t read them, but Stephen King has passionate fans. Carrie is not really about Carrie. It’s about the feelings of isolation that, oh my goodness, we can all relate to. And how about this? Can you go thwipping through New York City with your spider powers? No? Then how in the world is Spider Man so influential, so epic? Because with great power comes great responsibility. Great stories don’t just optically reveal, oh, my job title is in that story. They make you feel something. And in doing so, they align with what you’re going through. And that gives the communicator permission to keep talking. Resonance, as the science suggests, starts with alignment. This is from the science of like sounds and wavelengths. When one frequency aligns with a second, they are considered resonant, and the second feels amplified. It’s that feeling of, yes, this, that we’ve all experienced. That’s what you wanna convey with our brand message. And we can do so with four beats to the story. Align, agitate, assert, invite. Let’s bring back Michelle Warner and use this as a template. Align, what are your audience’s goals and beliefs? You are this and you want that. So Michelle, you sell premium services, and you’re great at your thing, but nobody taught you to build a business, let alone do it your way. So you read some expert advice, maybe took some courses, and that helped for a time. But things never felt smooth and sustainable. Despite some initial traction, the work feels hard, and you’re questioning things and maybe feeling burnt out. I’m aligned with you. I have permission to keep going. If I’m pitching you a new idea and you’re my boss or a prospect or client, I need to align around your goals first before I can continue. Too many of us leap to our thing too soon. First, align with them. Second, agitate the problems they’re going through. This gives you the tension that storytellers know how to use to bring you to their resolution. So Michelle might say, worst, you’re blaming yourself for how you feel. But you were throwing spaghetti at the wall, introducing too many variables to know which to keep and repeat. And when things aren’t repeatable, the business isn’t sustainable. But aside from blowing it all up, what can you do now to build a growing healthy business? It is tempting to seek the perfect strategy or playbook, but that’s not what you need. Okay, we have some tension now. What mountain peak is she gonna lead us to as a leader? Some people wanna go there, she wants to go to that one instead. And that’s where she’s gonna level her assertion, her premise for her whole brand. She says this, you need to prioritize sequence over strategy. Stop throwing spaghetti against the wall. Stop seeking perfect blueprints and playbooks. Be the person who says, I don’t have all the answers, but I’m gonna move forward anyway. Ask, what’s the next right action to take so that over time, you develop the right strategy for you? Because in her estimation, knowing the right move matters more than knowing all the moves. She says you don’t need a strategy, you need a sequence. And she can defend that. And others would disagree. And that’s what makes it so powerful. That’s what makes it so her. And she uses it to inform her entire platform. It’s the name of her podcast. It’s in her newsletter welcome email. More than fifty percent of her writing last year, I did the painstaking work of checking this, said sequence over strategy, and I’d argue the other half implied it. And everywhere she shows up, like on podcasts as a guest, she is there not to teach you how to design a business model or marketing strategy. Yes, that stuff too. But more to the point, she’s there to evangelize her premise sequence over strategy. So what are you asserting? What is your premise? Now they have the urge to act, and you can almost tip them towards wherever you want them to go. What do I do next? You can inspire action instead of demand it. I’m Michelle Warner, and I design sturdy business models built to last, and teach you how to build the relationships to power them. Subscribe to my work as together, we rethink how to build a business based on a simple question. What’s the best thing to do next? Stop gathering up the answers you think you need to act. Act to find your answers. Think sequence over strategy. Why should I care about you? Because I help experts become storytellers. That’s not bad for me, but I need to do a better job of aligning and agitating before I assert what I really want to assert, which is you should care more about resonance than reach. So the missing piece we need is that assertion, that premise to inspire action, not demand it. It makes the results come easier. So your premise is the defensible assertion that you’re making based on your perspective, which informs your choices and your reputation. So for instance, if I assert that you don’t experience stories, you experience life, your LLM, then craft that into stories by doing the work, then which becomes my podcast. On how stories happen, experts and creatives dissect one signature story piece by piece. Storystars, it’s a fictional show. Storystars, legendary storytellers of our time in business and elsewhere, give their backstories in bio. Well, I should do the first one because of what I assert. Likewise, if I assert you should care more about resonance than reach to grow your business, what’s my next talk? The one I’m giving now, I would never give the one on the right, Follower Frenzy, How to Predictably Go Viral to Win the Attention of Economy. Many of you might want that. That’s not how I see it. I’m making an assertion so everything follows from the assertion I make. In marketing, we’re making assertions all the time, but often they’re not effective. And that’s what we wanna be, is effective, not just present, right? So I see this a lot. On our podcast, we get practical. Yeah, that might be true, but no competitor’s gonna admit, Oh, we forgot that part. Or how about this? It’s, I don’t know, it’s HR software made simple. Great. Or accounting software that doesn’t suck. Okay, first of all, what a low bar to set for your brand. Second of all, I’m fairly certain that accounting software’s competitors aren’t going, phew, thank God you said it because, yeah, we really do suck. So these are assertions, but they’re not defensible. You cannot own these ideas any more than you can own the idea of b to b marketing. Right? SparkToro isn’t here to own the idea of audience research. They’re here to own their perspective, their assertion about what audience research should be. Hot Ones for marketers. I actually saw this. So some of you might know on YouTube, there’s a famous series, Hot Ones. It’s an interview series with celebrities where they ask the celebrities to eat spicier and spicier wings as the interview progresses. It’s a great show. Their channel is about the overlap of food and pop culture. Makes total sense. Hot Ones for Marketers, I saw a SaaS company do this many years ago. A video series with all the same people you’d expect, asked all the same questions you’ve heard them answer before, but they’re eating spicy wings. And part of me goes, that’s clever. That’s different. But I actually think it’s confetti on crap. You’ve heard of lipstick on a pig? That’s disrespectful to pigs. Pigs have value without the lipstick. Okay? Confetti on crap. The only value is really the confetti here. Right? I don’t need that crap. I get it a million other places. So you put a little gimmick over the top of a commodity show, that’s not serving anybody. Unless that brand said, you know, we exist as a company with our product and with our content to help marketers grapple with increasing pressures in their job. That’s our whole thing. That’s why we exist. So on our video show, we’re gonna increase the pressure on our guests. Now the wings make sense. Because the premise is not just for entertainment. It’s not just a gimmick. It’s not a social media hook. It’s a way to convey your perspective so they know something about you and care. Laura Eastburn gets this really well. Laura advises brands on how to run social media ads. Her specialty, Facebook and Instagram. Okay. She asserts, advertising comes with social, linguistic, and human responsibilities because marketing shapes culture. So what she says that some would disagree with, understanding words is understanding advertising. So if you wanna keep up with advertising, what’s the best way to do that? Well she’s not gonna talk about the latest changes to the tech. She’s gonna run her newsletter one word. Re examine the language of business and marketing one word at a time. Authentic. You keep saying that. What does it mean? Let’s rethink it. She believes that’s more important to you than you knowing what update came down the pipe from Facebook or Instagram. Dan Runcie is a media entrepreneur. He asserts that hip hop artists and producers are some of the world’s best business minds on par with tech and media moguls. You might disagree. No way is a rapper as intelligent in business as this billionaire. But that’s what he asserts. So what’s he gonna do? Well, he’s gonna start Trapital. Trapbeat, capital, Trapital. It’s a media company covering these individuals, not because of their art, but because of their business acumen and decision making and what we can learn. And when he tells his brand story, either on the website or as a guest on a podcast, he uses the premise to inform it. Because from the premise, everything flows. He’ll say, I started Trapital to change the narrative. Artists and entertainers have become some of our most successful business leaders. They deserve the publication that breaks down their moves in the same way other industries do. From the premise, everything follows. Or how about the training organization, Heroic Public Speaking? It teaches you to be a better public speaker. Your breakthrough moment is here. Okay. That doesn’t sound wholly ownable. They say elsewhere, it’s about transforming lives and changing the world. Others might say that too. Give life changing speeches and write bestselling books to build your sustainable creator career. Now again, you’re like, what? Is that it? It is in the space of public speaking. Take it from me, I’ve done the speaking thing for many, many years. Rand and Amanda, I’m sure you’ve encountered a lot of people. It’s a lot of charlatans. It’s a lot of overpromising. There’s a lot of hype with no substance behind it, and Heroic knows that. Here’s some of the phrases I found on their competitors’ websites. Ready to earn an exorbitant amount of money? Probably in six seconds by taking this training, right? Build confidence and charisma. That’s not really what heroic’s about. Get there faster. Okay, here’s a reputable competitor promising the speed element. Or how about this? This is my favorite. Get booked and paid to speak. Register a trademark because if we put legalese behind it, you will think we are original and own our ideas even though we say the same thing that everybody else says because we’re not very good marketers. Really? Really. Your premise is like this beacon you send out in this sea of sameness, and your true believers come running to you like, yes, finally, this. But best of all is they don’t just come to you, they reflect out to others the the same language and worldview that you’ve created for them. I love doing what I do. I love talking about resonance. I love saying things like don’t be the best, be their favorite. And I’m grateful that having done it for many years now, others are doing some of that work for me. I’m able to show up and do my thing and know that there are others out there who believe what I believe and use language I’ve helped them arrive at or even modify to their world of not just marketing, but product or HR or wherever they show up to believe and disseminate the same message. Look, I believe firmly that you can’t own your audience even though that’s an okay idea. Get off social, have an email list. You can’t own your audience, but you can own an idea in their minds. And you’re smart enough, you’re expert enough, but maybe your IP isn’t strong enough to differentiate and resonate. But a focused premise beats general expertise every day of the week. Everyone wants to be known. So you’re sharing general how tos, tips and tricks, etcetera. But you have to be known for something. You’re not gonna be known for the topic you cover. Get in line. You’re a commodity. You might be known for your perspective and how you articulate it. If you wanna increase your value, be more insightful. If you wanna increase your increase your originality, be more personal. Develop your premise, a defensible assertion pulled from your perspective, informing your choices and your reputation. I have one final and quick story for you all. Before I do, literally today, my cofounder and I just launched a course on all of these things. It’s called non grimy growth because, oh my lord, there’s too much huckstery behavior going on out there. How smart experts become trusted thought leaders. We’ve spent our careers basically being front facing business talent and speakers. There’s a lot of advantages those individuals have that business owners and marketers should also possess, and we’re trying to equip the good people with the good skills to combat all the grime out there. We’ll cover premise development, branding and modeling your ideas into frameworks, and we’ll send it both over email and have live access if you so choose. So you can go to that URL and I created a special code for SparkToro, fans and followers for one hundred dollars off. Okay. Last story. The other day, I was watching Elena with my daughter, as one does here in my household, and we decided to get out of the house and go to the New England Aquarium in Boston where we live. And we’ve been there a dozen times, and my favorite spot is the top of the tank because there’s something so, like, alluring about seeing open water in a building allegedly full of the stuff. You’re, like, closer to the wildlife. And I’ve been going there for years, and there’s always this person, the staffer, on the right side on a platform with a mic answering questions. You know, the tank has this many gallons, that’s this kind of turtle, that diver there is doing this, they do that twice a day for that reason. Right? And I always thought, like, who is this guy? Literally, there’s no reason it needs to be him standing there giving out this information. And in fact, the aquarium seems to know that, because the biggest difference between when I was younger and today is all around the tank, there are these little iPads where if he’s occupied, you can get your questions answered. Because he’s not doing anything that uniquely requires him. And when we do things that don’t uniquely require us, sooner or later, we might not be required. In other words, he’s not acting like whoever he is. He never really let me know that. He’s acting like a kiosk, and I didn’t want him to act like a kiosk. Here’s an easy example of how he could have done that. The oldest turtle in the tank is Myrtle. Myrtle the turtle. She is seventy five years old. She is old and graying. That is really her, and she is cranky AF. Every time they add a new fish to the aquarium, it wanders over to the top of the tank where she slumbers and whack learns a hard lesson. Like, get off my algae. Right? Why in the world couldn’t he help me see Myrtle for what she is? Myrtle is not a green turtle who is this amount in pounds and this many years old. No. Myrtle is this cranky old grandma in the tank. Was she sent here because her relatives in the ocean were worried about her behavior and she retired here? Does she chain smoke Marlboro greens? I don’t know. He coulda helped me feel. Like, facts are one thing. Emotions drive action. Why didn’t this gentleman pull from his own perspective to help me see Myrtle as she really is? Because that’s more original. It doesn’t mean he spent more resources on it. It means it’s more him. It’s right there in the name. The origin of the idea. Is it you or someone else? Look, the problem isn’t that bots will replace humans. The problem is too many humans are acting like bots. We all want off that hamster wheel. We wanna do things that have an impact, not that just get in front of people, but that ensure people love what we do and take an action as a result. And that’s the thing about marketing. It’s not about getting in front of people. It’s about ensuring they care. So think residents overreach. Don’t market more, matter more. Don’t be the best, be their favorite. And I gotta give a huge shout out to Amanda and Rand for being two of my favorite people in this entire industry and bringing me in today. That’s all I got.