by: Ryan Sargent
Content marketing is having a storytelling moment. It’s the skill AI can’t replicate, the justification for why creatives should earn tech salaries, and the Reason Marketing Works™.
I broadly agree with all that, and I love seeing how content folks make use of their backgrounds in storytelling1 in their marketing work. Ronnie Higgins brings his video and film expertise to every project. Tommy Walker structures every piece of content on a storytelling framework from classic drama.
Here’s my attempt at the same, based on my background in philosophy and music.2
TL;DR: Too many marketers think of narratives or stories as sequences of events, recounting the facts of what happened. That’s a timeline or a news report.
To create a true narrative with meaning and resonance for the reader, we need to focus less on what happened, and more on weaving together particularly relevant cultural symbols the reader can see themselves in.
Paul Ricoeur’s definition of narrative
I spent a lot of time in college reading books about “hermeneutic phenomenology.” That’s fancy philosopher-speak for the idea that:
“meaning and understanding come from lived experience.”
As a musician, this made total sense to me – songwriting often relies on the past experiences of the songwriter, and future experiences might change how you understand the song.3
I extract a different meaning as a performer compared to the composer’s meaning, because my lived experience is different from theirs.
One hermeneutic phenomenologist I read a lot of was Paul Ricoeur. Ricoeur’s most famous contribution to this whole “understanding comes from lived experience” thing was specifically focused on narratives and storytelling.
According to Ricoeur, narratives are meaningful arrangements of culturally-loaded symbols in time.
AKA: narratives are more than chronological lists of events.
“A rich man was robbed. The thief escaped the sheriff. The thief gave away the stolen money. The king came home and punished corruption.” is a chronological list of events that doesn’t even begin to tell the story of Robin Hood.
We have to fill the story with culturally-loaded symbols. Why is Robin Hood an archer? Because longbows were how English peasants defeated French nobility – our hero has a weapon that’s a cultural symbol for class warfare. These are the details that make for good storytelling.
Arranging those symbols and characters into a beginning, middle, and end gives the story structure and common context for meaning.
Songwriters are great storytellers
Because I’m a musician, when I read Ricoeur’s work about narrative and storytelling, I found musical examples everywhere.
Drama and film might have an hour or two to tell their stories. Musicians have three minutes.4 Music happens in real time, as a sequence (unless you play the tape backwards)5 that always progresses from beginning, through a middle, to an end. In this context, listening to the radio amounts to hearing a series of mini-narratives.
Crafting a great story in three minutes means choosing particularly meaningful cultural symbols. If the symbols don’t land, the story gets lost.
Marketers are in the same pickle: we don’t have a lot of time to tell a story and can’t afford to write novels. So what can we learn about storytelling in tight spaces from great songwriters?
Storytelling with Billy Joel
Billy Joel is one of my favorite storytellers. He does a great job choosing symbols, presenting them to the audience in unusual ways, and arranging them in time to tell incredibly effective stories. A couple of examples:
In “Allentown” Joel quickly orients the entire song around the lived experiences of Baby Boomer steelworkers in the Rust Belt.
- The song starts with a steam whistle, a symbol of factory work, but the lyrics immediately reference “closing all the factories down” to drive emotional response
- “Filling out forms / standing in line” references a lived experience of bureaucracy, something we all have emotional reactions to
- “Our fathers fought the second world war” anchors the piece to a specific point in time
- “Graduations hang on the wall … but they never taught us what was real” references both a common teenage experience and subverts the traditional cultural meaning of accomplishment that comes with a diploma
The song is filled with concise references to deeply relatable moments, strung together in a way that register a meaningful experience for the listener.
In “Miami 2017” Joel intentionally frames the entire song with an intro and outro that isolate the rest of the story from the current time. Having the narrator of the song speak from the future, in the past tense, proves that the resonances live in the meaningful arrangement of symbols, not in a chronological sequence of events.
In Joel’s dystopian future for New York City, he implies the end of culture in New York with descriptions of physical destruction:
- Lights going out on Broadway
- Island bridges blowing up
- Churches in Harlem burning
- An aircraft carrier evacuating the Yankees
- Sinking the entire island of Manhattan
The song works as a narrative because it’s filled with cultural symbols of New York easily recognizable in the present, then triggers an emotional reaction by arranging those symbols as parts of a dystopian future. Of course we don’t want Manhattan to sink!
Storytelling lessons for marketers
As a marketer, there are three storytelling takeaways from Ricoeur and Billy Joel.
- Don’t chronicle events
- Choose highly identifiable symbols
- Help your audience be part of the story
Don’t chronicle events
One of the most misused terms in B2B marketing is “customer stories.” These are almost never stories; they’re chronicles of events. So this content represents a huge opportunity for us to tell an actual story.
How can we rearrange case studies to disrupt the basic chronological telling of events and better include cultural symbols that resonate with our audience?
Maybe a MarTech company selling to event marketing teams should start with the next event, instead of a paragraph about “The Problem” and how the last event had the usual hiccups.
In EdTech, that might look like focusing on the teacher struggling to reformulate assessment policy for students using AI instead of carefully mapping the district procurement policy for new assessment tools.
Choose highly identifiable symbols
Songwriters lean on the most highly identifiable symbols to craft great hooks.6 If you’re marketing to a specific niche audience (perhaps you’re building a “who we serve” core page or writing for a specific use case vs. your general audience), choose a particularly relevant symbol. The more you can niche down these symbols, the more relevant your content becomes from the get-go.
In our event marketing example, that might mean referencing the well-known moment where every event marketer has had to last-minute ship swag to the hotel, not the conference venue.
For teachers, it’s about actually reaching the student you saw falling behind when the assessment software missed them. Those symbols not only tell a better story, they make sure your narrative is authentic.
Help your audience be part of the story
This is related to the old marketing adage “show, don’t tell.”
Lists of features aren’t the answer, and lists of benefits aren’t much better. Lists of benefits don’t tell a story. The narrative comes to life when your audience can see themselves as part of the whole – when their lived experience lines up with your carefully chosen symbols.
In our example, event marketers are interested in how your app helps them prep for the conference and set up the booth, but when you specifically call out the intricacies of back-to-back shows or the way that every loading dock is different, they can better picture themselves living those benefits.
Our teachers will surely save time on grading with this new SaaS product, but it’s more about their ability to have a life outside the classroom.
When to break the rules
The exception that proves the rule, at least for Billy Joel, is “We Didn’t Start the Fire.” Having sung his storytelling praises, I now have to begrudgingly admit that one of Joel’s biggest hits is literally a list of events in chronological order.
I’d argue that this proves it’s possible to break the rules and win anyway – and that Joel knows how to choose culturally rich symbols that resonate with his audience and place them in a particular narrative sequence. In other words, he tells a great story. ■
- Every marketer knows a marketer with degrees in liberal or fine arts.
↩︎ - In true ivory tower CV fashion, here’s where I’ll disclose that portions of this post were “presented as a peer-reviewed paper at the inaugural Billy Joel Conference, Colorado College, 2016.”
↩︎ - How do we know it changes over time? Think “Taylor’s version.”
↩︎ - In this context, opera looks more like drama. So does prog rock. ↩︎
- Tapes: old enough to make me date myself, not old enough to be cool again like vinyl.
↩︎ - In “Goodnight Saigon,” Joel uses the sound effect of a helicopter in Vietnam for this purpose
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Ryan Sargent designs, builds, and leads content marketing services of all shapes and sizes. He made the leap from music to marketing more than ten years ago, but still plays trombone all over Colorado when he isn’t leading content teams or puzzling on jobs-to-be-done.
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