How To Avoid Short-Selling Your Brand Story

Mark Di SommaJuly 17, 20141 min

I’m dismayed by how frequently the conversation around content seems to devolve to quantity and tactics. That’s hardly surprising in some ways because of course the two are quickly linked. When everyone’s using the same tactics, quantity starts to look like the only differentiator.

Too many brands are in love with frequency. But you don’t build a deep and storied brand purely by posting and retweeting with gusto. Roel De Vries, Corporate VP, Global Head of Marketing, Communications and Brand Strategy, at Nissan Motor Co. summed it up really well in an interview with Jennifer Rooney when he said that the biggest challenge facing marketers in his opinion was getting all the opportunities available to brands to drive up to something bigger. The risk, he says, is that brand managers go after shiny objects and measure them by things that are not important to customers.

Nissan’s countering that temptation, he continues, by setting its storylines, by deciding what it’s not going to talk about as much as what it is, and by adopting a longer term view. “If you go after clever ideas,” he says, “there’s a lot you can do, but it probably won’t lead to anything bigger.”

I agree completely. Story is more than random content. In a world replete with content, what really counts is the content that systematically and insightfully builds your long story.

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Mark Di Somma

One comment

  • Joe

    July 25, 2014 at 9:56 pm

    Hi Mark,

    This is so simple but delivers a power punch. I am at the very beginning stages of creating content for my users. However I am torn between the value of frequency and the value of GOOD content. I’m sure there’s a happy middle there somewhere, and that’s what I intend to find. Some crowds like the content filter-er. However to develop beloved readers that need their problems solved we as content creators should be doing just that, solving problems.

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