It's A Lot Easier To Write A Story When You Know What It's About
LinkedIn is alive at the moment with posts about the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. I’ve never been but it certainly feels like I’m there when I scroll through my feed. If it’s not nauseous humblebrag, pictures of yachts and rosé wine, it’s the tangible sense of our profession drinking it’s own Kool-Aid.
Whilst I’m not rich enough to have trodden La Croisette, I have been to quite a few other industry events lately and it definitely seems like the same recurring theme is in the air - usually as part of the industry pondering the antidote to the feared AI armageddon. It’s all about “creativity”, darling... “Storytelling”.
It’s probably no coincidence and is just symptomatic of a natural, visceral human reaction to an uncertain and increasingly un-human world. Storytelling is the oldest form of human communication and connection. And we’re in the business of human connection, right?
I get it. And I totally agree with the sentiment.
This week I was lucky enough to attend The HMA Awards which are a brilliant celebration of genuinely talented hospitality marketers doing genuinely good work. There was also a great panel session with some amazing thinkers and great advice about creating stories that your audience can connect with… and I’m all for it!
But…
There’s always something missing from the conversation, and it nags at me every time I sit in one of those rooms.
The thing about a great story is this:
It's a lot easier to write when you know what it's about!
Writing a hundred stories hoping one of them is good
If you walk into most hospitality marketing departments and ask what they're working on, you'll get a list of tactical executions. A new social media campaign; a seasonal offer; a swanky new video for the website; a refresh of the email templates. They’re all perfectly reasonable activities and are all being executed by talented people who really care about their work.
But ask them why those things and the answer is usually much less clear. Often, it amounts to: because we need content; it's that time of year; the CEO asked for it; or even because someone saw something similar that looked good (yes, I’ve witnessed it many a time).
It’s usually a symptom of no clear strategy and an over-reliance on tactical execution. Short-term vanity metrics that hopefully keep the revenue and finance people quiet for a bit because the next few months’ revenue is looking ok.
It's guess work, not storytelling.
It's writing a hundred stories hoping one of them is good.
In an industry that's already stretched thin on time and margins, it's a really expensive way to find out you've been firing in the wrong direction.
The “creativity” isn't the problem. The missing part of the picture is knowing how to create the creativity.
The part of the picture nobody talks about at awards evenings
If you look at any of the world’s best brands – whether that’s hospitality or any other sector – they’re consistent at producing not more work, but more effective work. It’s always drenched in emotionally memorable creativity. But that creativity isn’t just mustered up from marketers with better imaginations than yours. It arrives from having a proper brief that’s been fashioned from a whole load of hard work that’s done long before anyone talks about “creativity”.
It starts with the uncomfortable admission that you are not your customer. That your instincts about what your guests want, what they value, what would make them choose you, are almost always wrong (or at best incomplete). It starts with research. Proper research. Qualitative conversations with real customers that uncover the why behind the behaviour, and quantitative surveys that tell you how far that behaviour extends across the whole market. It means making sense of what you find by properly segmenting the market - not by industry sector or lazy generational stereotypes, but by meaningful differences in how people actually behave.
Then it means making a choice. Not targeting everyone, because targeting everyone is a really expensive way of reaching no one! Choosing two or three segments where a small gain would make a meaningful difference and deliberately deprioritising the rest. It means figuring out what emotional territory you can own in the minds of those people - not your features or facilities, but the feeling they get from choosing you that they couldn't get as easily by choosing someone else.
Then - and only then - it means setting objectives that are specific enough to be commercially useful. Not woolly metrics like "increase social media engagement" but "increase consideration in this segment, from this percentage to this percentage, by this date". It means identifying leaks in your sales funnel, quantifying your commercial impact, and defining exactly what success looks like, long before you spend a penny on tactical execution.
After all of that, the product needs to deliver on the promise. The price needs to communicate the right value. The channels need to work together rather than independently. Long term brand building and short term sales activation, running simultaneously, because Field and Binet have been telling us for over a decade that doing both together is dramatically more effective than doing either alone.
After all of that, “Promotion” or communications (the creative storytelling bit that wins awards) is about eight percent of what we should be doing as marketers.
The 8% Elephant
Promotion is one of four tactical levers… and Tactics are one third of the marketing job… a quarter of a third. Which makes the creative execution roughly one twelfth of the whole thing. Or eight percent.
Eight percent!
Now to be absolutely clear, that eight percent matters enormously. Of course it does. Badly executed tactics will always undermine a brilliant strategy. Great creative execution amplifies everything underneath it.
But eight percent built on a shaky ninety-two is still a shaky and precarious house of cards.
Those passionate, talented marketers in our industry are by no means doing bad work. But all too often, they’re doing good work without the foundations that would make it great work.
It’s writing stories without knowing what they're about… and then wondering why most of them don’t land.
When you've done the diagnosis properly, when you know your market and your segments and your targets and your positioning and your objectives, the creative bit at the end almost writes itself. You're not staring at a blank page hoping inspiration arrives. You know who you're talking to, you know what matters to them, you know what emotional ground you're standing on, and you know what you're trying to get them to do. The only question left is how to express all of that in a way that's distinctive and memorably “you”. That's a much more interesting (and solvable) creative problem.
Do the diagnosis. Build the strategy. Know what the story is about. Then hand it to the creatives and watch what they do with it!
Want to understand how to build that foundation for your own business? That's exactly what you'll cover inside The Academy. Find out more here.
