Nothing working for your brand? Try telling a story.

I had a client grumble that the marketing wasn’t working. After years of doing this, I have come to understand that that statement is shorthand for the sales numbers are down.

It’s a funny thing. When sales numbers are up, it’s rare to hear, “The marketing must be working!” But when those numbers dip, salespeople can be quite vocal about marketing’s effectiveness.

But I digress.

What my client was experiencing was not the abject failure of marketing. It was an unrealistic expectation of marketing’s ability to quickly deliver results for an offering that:

Of course, this led them to lots of monkeying with the message. Highlighting this feature. Then trashing that and switching to another. None of which had any real impact.

If anything, it pointed to the fact that if you can’t find a way to make it easy for your prospects to understand how you bring value to their lives, everything else you do is only going to generate small gains at best. And, most likely, a lot of frustration along the way.

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The answer is a story.

When faced with this situation, I counsel to start telling a story. A simple way to start is to…