Everybody’s Talkin’ at Me
Steve Portigal
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
