Portigal Consulting | steve@portigal.com
David Gartner
In a 2005 New York Times Magazine article, “Watching TV Makes You Smarter,” adapted from his book Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter, Steven Johnson identi-fies the increasingly complex narrative structures that we’ve become accustomed to in series television. Compare the density of plot and character in “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” “The Wire,” “The Shield,” or “Lost” with “The Rockford Files,” “Adam- 12,” or “Gunsmoke.” Pop culture reveals a maturing in our appetite for stories. This voraciousness continues to grow, with social media emerging to deliver us stories in all shapes and sizes. We get big stories from blogs; miniature stories via Twitter; multimedia stories on Flickr and You Tube. All of them are equipped with handles to make it easy for us to retell the narrative to others (something we’ve dubbed “viral”).
Procter & Gamble is selling stories, too, with products like Febreze Scentstories. Positioned as more than a traditional air freshener, the product offers “a variety of scents from an assortment of scent-themed fragrance discs” such as “farmer’s market,” “spa day,” or “world treasures.” In 2004 Nissan advertised heavily around “Tell Better Stories,” suggesting that the end result of using their products was the story a driver and passengers
would tell. And screenwriting guru Robert McKee coaches corporations on how to be better storytellers, while author Steve Denning has analyzed what types of stories can be used by business leaders across a range of situations.
While this commercialization of stories is all lovely, the emphasis is unfortunately placed on the telling of stories, rather than the act of listening to stories.
Let me tell a story about that. Recently, we worked with a company that sold a niche B2B software product. They had wonderful relationships with their small set of customers, thanks to the account executives, who were essentially salespeople. The account executives did a great job of advocating for the company and touting the benefits of their software. That inevitably created a conflict when their customers offered feedback. A sales channel isn’t necessarily the best way of getting information back from customers, and it certainly shouldn’t be the only way. At our recommendation, the client instituted a “listening channel,” and we began training product managers and developers on the basics of having an open-minded and open-ended conversation with customers.
Skip ahead a few years. Our client has been acquired by a larger company that has developed a crucial software product
enthusiastically derided by users. Yet when these new corporate masters are introduced to The Listening Channel, the reaction is instantly negative— “I don’t want The Listening Channel. I want The Telling Channel.” As in, “We’ll tell you why our product is the best. And we aren’t interested in listening to your problems with our product.” Meanwhile, it’s proving difficult for them to hold on to their spot in a tightly competitive market.
We can find more common examples of telling over listening in the marketing rhetoric of “educating the customer,” commonly used when companies realize that the public isn’t doing what they want them to be doing. By labeling their customer as “uneducated,” they place responsibility on someone else’s shoulders. No need to look at the solution being offered if you can marginalize those who haven’t adopted it. The recent fluorescent-bulb hype is a timely example; California, like Australia, has introduced legislation to mandate the use of fluorescents in the home, while companies such as Wal-Mart are putting a lot of money into marketing these products. Wal-Mart is trying to persuade us to use these new bulbs, even as people express frustration over the poor quality of light they produce. Instead of investing this money and effort in refining the
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