Marketing manager Chloe Uy looks at two books that have transformed her process and work.
Reading physical books isn’t something that you often come across in today's society. It’s taken a blow from the rise of the internet, people happily settle on tapping phones, our consumption of information has evolved a lot. But books still have a lot of lessons to teach, if you’re willing to stay still and not be distracted.
Which leads me to two of my most recent reads are “Marketers are Liars/ Tell Stories” and “The Tipping Point” by Seth Godin and Malcolm Gladwell respectively. They’re very different people, one a marketer and businessman, another a journalist passionate about social psychology, but their worlds are incredibly close knit, think consumer behaviour, their writings intertwine and leave us with cookie crumbs that make for great lessons in marketing.
“Marketers are Liars/Tell Stories”
I’m often a victim of “hey, marketers are liars!” A negative connotation that always seems to root it’s way into conversations. But am I? Nope. It’s more on being selective with the way I choose to tell and frame stories, it’s one of the ways to cut through to audiences in the deluge of information.
Here are 5 storytelling tips that I’ve learnt along the way that will help you glue this article together.
“The Tipping Point”
Everything has a tipping point – a dramatic moment brought about by series of little factors that are capable of propelling radical change. Malcolm Gladwell explains 3 factors that contribute to every tipping point:
- The law of the few: only a tiny fraction of people are capable of carrying a message through their eloquence and network.
- The stickiness factor: a message that is memorable and has an impact on the target audience.
- The power of context: people are much more susceptible to acknowledging a message in the environment that they’re comfortable in.
So how exactly do these relate to each other? The intersection point is the story, without which there would be no tipping point. Stories = stickiness factor, they have to be contextual and authentic. Once a sticky story is formulated, then the law of the few takes place where the people propagate it through their means. And if they’re smart enough, they’ll choose the right context to make the final push through. Done right, it’ll explode and go gangbust.
