Which is slightly inconvenient if you work in marketing.
Marketing departments are very good at telling stories.
We write campaigns. Create videos. Develop case studies. Carefully craft brand messages and spend unreasonable amounts of time deciding whether “transform” sounds more impressive than “improve.”
But some of the best marketing stories aren’t created by marketers at all.
Customers create them, and usually, they weren’t supposed to be marketing in the first place.
The Stories People Actually Tell
Imagine two messages.
Your advertising says: “We deliver exceptional customer service.”
Your customer says: “We had a problem on Friday afternoon. They stayed late, sorted everything and called on Monday to make sure we were okay.”
Which one do you believe?
Exactly.
The first is a claim.
The second is a story.
And stories have something marketing departments spend enormous amounts trying to manufacture: Credibility.
Customers Don’t Tell Stories About Your Strategy
Nobody goes home and says: “You’ll never believe what happened today. I encountered a company with exceptionally coherent brand positioning.”
They talk about experiences.
The receptionist who remembered their name.
The engineer who took extra time to explain something.
The delivery that arrived early.
The person who admitted a mistake and fixed it immediately.
The business that made something complicated unexpectedly easy.
These moments seem small.
But small moments become stories.
Stories become recommendations, and recommendations become reputation.
That’s something we explore in Episode 14 of The Overthinker’s Guide to Modern Marketing: customers increasingly shape a business’s public story through reviews, recommendations, and everyday conversations.
You Can’t Script Genuine Advocacy
This is where marketing gets awkward.
We like control.
Campaign plans have schedules.
Content calendars have dates.
Brand guidelines have rules about precisely how much space should surround the logo, presumably in case it becomes anxious.
Customer advocacy doesn’t work like that.
You can’t schedule someone genuinely recommending you to a colleague at 10:30 on Thursday.
You have to earn it.
By being helpful.
By keeping promises.
By making things easy.
By occasionally doing slightly more than expected.
That’s why customer experience can be such powerful marketing. As Episode 14 explores, advertising creates expectations; experience determines whether those expectations were justified.
Give Customers the Better Story
So perhaps businesses should spend slightly less time asking: “What story should we tell about ourselves?”
And more time asking: “What story are we giving customers to tell?”
Because your marketing department can produce the cleverest campaign imaginable.
But it will struggle to beat one customer saying: “You should use these people. They’re brilliant.”
If you’d like to explore that idea further, listen to Episode 14: Customer Experience Is the New Advertising: Why Your Customers Have Become Your Marketing Department.
Because perhaps the best marketing story your business will ever tell is the one you didn’t write.
