Begin With the End: Reverse Engineering a More Personal Brand Experience

Speaking with a friend of mine who writes best-selling thriller novels, it occurred to me that there is a key similarity between writing mysteries and writing great marketing content. In both cases, creating a compelling narrative requires starting with the end in mind and working backwards from there. Spoiler alert: You never want to read the last chapter first. But as marketers, we know how the story must end—with people buying our product. It’s our job to craft a story arc that engages them until they reach that natural conclusion for themselves. By reverse engineering the conversation from the desired goal, we can weave a compelling customer journey while finding ways to speed up the path to conversion. So let’s start at the end, with the ultimate purchase. From Reactive to Holistic: Exploring the Various Levels of Personalization Conversion is not one-size-fits-all I always loved the Choose Your Own Adventure books, as they allow readers to take the path that most interests them to the end. Marketing should be like this, too; consumers should be able to experience a campaign narrative in a way that suits them, based on their unique tastes and interests. But instead of presenting consumers with multiple ways to engage, too many marketers simply optimize to the highest impact solution on an overall basis, seeking the best bang for their buck to drive the most volume. However, there’s an inherent limitation to this highest common denominator approach; what works best to optimize conversion for one customer is often different from what drives another. This automatically reduces the potential audience universe. If the goal is to broaden an audience as much as possible to maximize growth potential, we need to figure out how to convert just about any customer who could be interested in our brand. Put another way, every reason people convert is another potential purchase path. Leveraging this requires implementing and managing a sophisticated matrix of communication paths. This takes skill, but a team with the right tools and talent can do it well and efficiently. The goal is to create unique stories that resonate with each of the subgroups that make up a larger audience, while ensuring all communications stay on target. Take a marketer like Sweet Loren’s, a gourmet food company and the leading producer of natural, refrigerated cookie dough in the U.S. Their recent “Let’s Be Taste Buds” campaign started with a clear goal—to convert not only people who need allergen-free cookies but also to entice the much wider audience who would enjoy them for the taste and clean ingredients. Multiple landing pages, reached via a variety of nuanced advertising routes, invited all potential audiences to engage the brand on their own terms. Along the way, data was collected, providing the opportunity to expand and sweeten future efforts. When narrative meets data Data is as important to the creation and implementation of a good marketing narrative as the storylines which drive it. Data not only contributes to better targeting and increased growth, it also enables the creation of ever more compelling narratives over time. While consumers are engaged in consideration, we can engineer experiences that are valuable enough for them to share information about themselves. In this way, marketing works simultaneously as a customer experience and a data collection mechanism. Consider a recent augmented reality campaign by sunglasses and goggle manufacturer Bollé. The desired end result of the marketing narrative was defined upfront: Bollé wanted to create a personalized, visceral experience for consumers by letting them engage the brand’s new lenses virtually, in a way they couldn’t even in a store. A variety of messages were created, each inviting the audience to visit a landing page which leveraged augmented reality. Users could not just see what they looked like in the goggles, but more importantly, they were able to see what the world looks like through the lens. But more than just a compelling marketing narrative, the campaign was designed from the ground up to help capture data that could be used to improve future marketing efforts. In the end, it is bringing together these concepts—starting with the end in mind, leveraging the ability to speak with nuance to different audiences and always working to collect meaningful data—that results in genuinely engaging marketing. All of this leads to a natural conclusion as powerful as the end of a great thriller: Know the ending before you start. Use that information to engineer marketing communications that support both your brand and your campaign objectives. Along the way, provide compelling reasons for consumers to share data that helps you write even more compelling narratives for them in the future. As with any mystery, it all becomes obvious once you have the pieces in place. Just 2 Brands Have Sustained Global Growth for a Decade