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You're making the wrong choice

Why your brand's content is sooooo boring

Steve Bryant
Jun 22
2
Share this post
You're making the wrong choice
stevebryant.substack.com

Oh hello, oh good morning.

How are you. It’s me again, your pal and friend.

You may have noticed we changed the newsletter name. Just trying to make everything pretty and match matchy, to go with the pretty new web site I’m slowly making making.

The final part of the brand and content strategy workshop will drop this weekend.

Meanwhile I’m having a root canal today. Send flowers. Flowers made with novocaine.

Let’s get down to it while I’m still lucid.

Stay pretty,

-s.


You're making the wrong choice

Eventually, if you work with a lot of technology companies, where humans are referred to, clinically, as users.

Or you labor in the bloodless city-states of B2B brands, with their monuments to economic, logical, rational choice man.

If, in those places, you’re asked, again and again, to create content that is wildly mediocre, or as bland as a never-ending beige, you eventually develop a thesis.

That thesis is about why your clients insist on prose that is as rigorously organized as, but entertains no more reliably than, a spreadsheet.

As in, why do they choose to make dull articles, dull videos, dull stuff.

A monument to economic, logical, rational choice man

This thesis is that they—their marketers, their founder, or just someone in power, somewhere—have convinced themselves that they need to make a false choice.

That they need to choose between a binary that doesn’t exist.

And that binary, sitting glumly in an axonal intersection of their mind, goes like this:

We can either make <raises left hand> boring content that’s probably useful, or … <raises right hand> interesting content that probably isn't.

Ok, put your hands down.

This is, simply, not a choice you have to make.

Not a choice you have to make.

What is boring stuff

Boring stuff is voiceless stuff, turgid stuff, stuffy stuff. Stuff that looks or sounds or acts like all the stuff other companies make.

Stuff that confuses formats for meaning.

Stuff that assumes that people—customers, clients, buyers, users—only make logical, rational, computer-like decisions. As if we checked our feelings at the home office door.

It’s stuff that doesn’t build your brand.

Don’t mistake the format for the meaning

What is interesting stuff

Interesting stuff is voice-y stuff, delightful stuff.

Stuff that asks “how can we help our audience be themselves”, vs. “how can we get our audience to buy our things”.

Stuff that could only be uniquely created by a single brand with a singular voice. Stuff that inspires, empathizes, helps, builds trust.

The format never matters if what’s inside the format slaps

Why do people make boring stuff

People make boring stuff because boring stuff is legible.

That is, management understands all of its constituent parts.

They understand the strategy, because the strategy is to relate facts about a product. They understand the words because the words speak about that product’s features. They understand the voice because there is no voice. There is only sales.

This makes a certain kind of sense.

After all, a company is founded to sell a product.

The product is what is sold.

To the company, the product is the voice.

But that means that a lot of companies think people aspire to that product. They think their product is the customer’s goal.

But people don’t aspire to products.

People aspire to feelings that products give them.

This is true for everything from sports cars and yoga leggings to differential privacy algorithms and cloud-based document storage solutions.

People want a brand that gives them feelings.

People want something interesting.

Brands think people love products, but people want products that love them.

The problem with interesting stuff

Interesting stuff doesn’t get made because interesting stuff is illegible.

That is, management doesn’t understand all of its constituent parts.

They don’t value the strategy, because the strategy is to evoke feelings, not just facts.

They don’t value the words because the words speak about emotional benefits

They don’t value voice because the voice seems superfluous, unnecessary, maybe unpredictable.

And interesting content that empathizes and delights just seems harder to tie to sales.

Why not, they might say, just make content that sells—misunderstanding that unique and interesting content is part of a unique and interesting brand, and that unique and interesting brand can lift sales more than they can imagine.

That’s not me saying that.

That’s Binet and Fields.

Source: Les Binet and Peter Field: Media in Focus: Marketing Effectiveness in the Digital Era

You don’t need to make that choice

You don’t need to choose between boring content that works and interesting content that doesn’t.

It’s actually a false choice.

Your real choice looks like this:

The safe spot is Boring and Legible. At least, you say, the customers will know we’re serious.

The dangerous spots are Useless and Chaos. Content that’s illegible to management is like dancing about architecture. Maybe the content will work, but you’ll have no idea to replicate that success.

The powerful spot is Interesting and Legible. That’s the brand-building for sales growth spot.

It takes some work to get there. It takes investment in time and money. And if you choose to go there, you deserve a strategy that’s just as delightful to grok as its content is to consume.

So all of these doodles are just to say, you don’t need to choose between <raises left hand> boring content that’s probably useful, or … <raises right hand> interesting content that probably isn't.

You just need to stop settling for 💤.


New here? Maybe subscribe! I give away creative tools! Might be worth $5 I’m just sayin.


More delightful resources

12-Step Brand and Content Framework (in process)

Product Content Strategy 101

The Essential Guide to Frameworks

The Essential Laws of Creativity

The Creative Problem Solving Reading List

You don’t get it, you’re not the point

Make relationships, not things


How can I help? This is a 100% organic, free-range, desktop-to-inbox newsletter devoted to helping you navigate uncertainty, seek the most interesting challenges, and make better creative decisions in marketing and beyond. Delivery at 6pm ET most Sundays whenever! Your host is Steve Bryant, who is for hire. He’d love to help you develop and deploy creative and bold ideas or staff your newsroom, content, or marketing project. Thanks for reading. Be seeing you.

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