All Marketers Are Liars: The Power of Telling Authentic Stories in a Low-Trust World
Traffick has this book review of Seth Godin's latest entitled Why I Hope People Will Read Seth's Book: "We Refrain from Hyperbole and Make No False Claims".
"Liars" is a bit of a misnomer. Godin actually shows that the best companies tell a great story. The most successful people, period, have always told a great story. The backdrop of an evocative narrative is like the set for a feature film or Broadway comedy. I guess in showbiz they call this "production values." Without the backdrop, you're just a bunch of crazy kids doing improv. That won't work, unless that in itself is the story.
One of the things that inevitably happens in businesses that lose their founder's enthusiasm and entrepreneurial zeal is the loss of this authentic story. Richard Johnson had it at HotJobs. Steve Jobs had it once, then twice at Apple. Jeff Taylor had it Monster (and interestingly, the old boat seems to be doing OK surviving on Andy McKelvey's entrepreneurial zeal -- probably one of the few examples in corporate history of a zeal transplant). And Disney had it twice, once under old Walt and reinvigorated again under Michael Eisner in the mid-80s.
Telling a story -- having a compelling reason why you're in the business, why you like it, why it's enjoyable to do what you do, having a religious sense of duty to your customers -- combined with an awesome product that really changes people's lives for the better, is the best way to win in business.
What inevitably happens when the second or third generation are put in charge, and the zeal fades, and decisions are made in part rather than in whole, is that the different parts of your yarn, that worked so well together as a coheisve whole, begin to fray and tear apart as the different functions, the different silos, the eight blind men each describing the elephant as they see it rather than as it actually is, each make decisions that ever so slightly drift apart from each other and wander off in varying directions.
All of the "Built to Last" caliber businesses have this unifying myth, this cohesive narrative, the compelling story that makes sense. And it's what makes watching corporate reactions to entrepreneurs so much fun -- whether it's Richard Branson vs. British Airways, or Google vs. Microsoft (or, for that matter, Microsoft vs. IBM back in the day).
The corporation tries to sound hip, or glib, or energized, but it rings false in the ears of the customer. A purloined story always will.
